CRM Case 4: GlaxoSmithKline’s Committed Quitters

Introduction
Pharmaceutical companies exploit the opportunity that customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) provides in increasing understanding of its patients. If this knowledge is fed into improving the pharma-patient relationship, it has the potential to boost patient support and, therefore, satisfaction. Improved patient satisfaction could ultimately lead to improved compliance, but can also be extended further into developing brand loyalty and maximizing retention. The case will now focus on highlighting pharmaceutical company which exemplify exceptional customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) within their operations.

Case Study
GlaxoSmithKline’s Committed Quitters

The added value that a tailored CRM program offers contributes to the perceived brand value that patients and physicians associate with a product. The following case study looks at an OTC (over-the-counter) brand that was supported effectively by a personalized support program that helped build brand loyalty and improve compliance. Components of this initiative may have applicability to prescription products.
Purchasers of GlaxoSmithKline’s smoking cessation products, such as Nicorette, Commit and NicoDerm, received free enrollment in Committed Quitters. Committed Quitters is a personalized stop smoking behavioral support plan that offers advice and counseling for smokers trying to quit, using GlaxoSmithKline’s nicotine replacement therapy produces. It is designed to help patients break the psychological dependence on cigarettes, while the smoking cessation products help relieve the physical dependence.
When GlaxoSmithKline’s smoking cessation products, particularly Nicorette and NicoDerm, were moving from prescription products to over-the-counter (OTC) status in the US in 1996, the FDA mandated that a support program be made available to consumers. A physician support program had already been provided. MicroMass (a CRM provider) was selected to handle the US program. In Europe, HealthMedia controls a European version of the program. When MicorMass developed the US Committed Quitters Program in 1996 for GlaxoSmithKline’s Nicorette and NicoDerm OTC (over-the-counter) brands, it set an industry standard for personalized smoking cessation and education programs that is now being replicated worldwide.

What does the program involve?
Committed Quitters involved a free, personally tailored quit plan, complete with newsletters, award certificates and other motivational materials, as well as a toll-free help line. Participants enrolled in the program by telephoning the toll-free number found inside the packaging or online at Committed Quitters. Patients were asked a series of questions and submitted a detailed smoking history. They then received a tailored profile and quitting program.
A series of customized self-help materials were sent throughout the 8-12 week course of therapy, to help users successfully cope with their specific triggers and issue in quitting. The program provides customized materials according to the individual’s smoking history and reasons for quitting and therefore, represented a departure, such as an untailored user guide or audiotape for helping smokers quit smoking.

Results
As of June 2000, a total of 575,000 consumers had enrolled in the Committed Quitters program since its launch in 1996. During this period, the program recorded a 350% increase in refills, and according to independent research conducted at the University of Pittsburgh (published in 2000), program participants were 56% more likely to quit smoking for 120 days than non-participants.

When compared to nicotine replacement therapy alone, the Committed Quitters support program had been clinically proven to increase a smoker’s chance of quitting successfully by up to 26% when paired with NicoDerm CQ and by up to 50% when paired with Nicorette, versus using either of these products alone (company press releases, October 2001)
In Europe, a study of 3971 smokers using the NicoDerm CQ 21 mg patch and receiving either HealthMedia’s tailored Committed Quitters Stop Smoking Pan or untailored support was conducted. There was a 28% increase in the number of people stopping smoking with the tailored support programs over the untailored, with 55% able to sustain 10 weeks of continuous abstinence from smoking as opposed to 43%. From the sales point of view, participants with the tailored materials purchased over 1445 more boxes than those with generic materials.

CRM case 3: HSBC DriverQuote

Introduction
The HSBC case study considers how detailed customer research through customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) enabled the HSBE to develop an award-winning product with its DriverQuote service, a vehicle quotation system which enables companies to compare vehicles by different categories that fit in with company policy.

Case Study
HSBC DriverQuote

Winning service
In 2003 HSBC won the Institute of Financial Service Innovation Award for the Most Innovative eDelivery Channel for its DriverQuote service. The service enables fleet managers and company car drivers to get quotes and order vehicles online. This follows the Fleet Innovation Gold Award given to HSBC for DriverQuote by the leading fleet and business car magazine, Fleet Week, Earlier in 2003.
HSBC DriverQuote was designed to be an easy-to-use vehicle quotation system that takes the burden off fleet managers and allow company car drivers to compare vehicles according to different categories such as emissions, price or fuel consumption based on their own organization’s car policy.
HSBC’s innovation for business customers achieved further success at the Awards, with its Business Internet Banking service winning the overall Grand Prix Winner-of-Winners prize and Best Internet Banking Service title.

Big business customers
Since its launch in 2002, over 255 companies have committed to installing HSBC DriverQuote, which equated to a fleet size of nearly 51,000 cars. Some of the UK’s largest fleets, including AT&T, Coca-Cola Enterprises and the Co-operative Wholesale Society are already using the system, following highly successful pilots.

DriverQuote abilities
HSBC DriverQuote differs to most other quotation systems in that it can be configured online to match a company’s tightly defined car policy by: setting the allocation criteria by price, fuel type, CO2 value, whole life costs, or engine size; restricting optional extras; reflecting negotiated manufacturer trading terms; and ensuring drivers only produce quotations appropriate to their grade or allocation.
Drivers can research the latest vehicle information and source instant quotations together with the financial implication for them in terms of contribution or tax. Once drivers have made their final decision and the fleet manager has authorized the order, HSBC has a policy of placing an order within 2 hours.
Lorraine Lea, head of ifs\BT Financial Innovation Awards, said: “The judges decided to award HSBC Vehicle Finance with the Most Innovative eDelivery Channel for 2003 because of its innovative design and clear focus on the need of the customer.”
Tim Holmes, head of HSBC Vehicle Finance, said: “The award for HSBC DriverQuote is a great tribute to our staff – they listened to our customers and understood their needs and then delivered a world class solution that drastically reduces the fleet manager’s workload, empowers driver and brings down the cost of motoring for the business.”

CRM case 2: British Gas case study

Introduction
In recent times, utilities such as British Gas have begun to spend significant amounts of money in order to better understand their customers through customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) tools. In the UK market of the future, customers are expected to start selecting or staying with suppliers on the basis of service rather than product and price. Customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) is providing the means to best understand the customer during this process in order to match expectations with experience. However, utilities thus far have generally failed to analyze their own workforces in relation to the proposition that they are promoting.
On the whole, this has been due to a lack of applicable data being driven by the HR departments. Market research has certainly uncovered the link between variables such as employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, but has done little to define and then influence the chain of causation between them.
British Gas now readily accepts the link between employee morale, perceptions of the business, and the service that it delivers at the front line. It is also beginning to understand what types of employee behavior creates the greatest level of customer satisfaction among customers in particular situations. If this can be understood then efficiencies can be gained with a complementary increase in customer satisfaction. Already companies like Marks & Spencer, Royal Bank of Scotland and Vodafone are applying these kinds of workforce metrics to answer the needs of identified customer segments.
British Gas is to be the focus of this report because of its movements towards innovative new methods within its call centers, designed to improve the overall package it provides to consumers. The company has shunned examples set by other firms, setting up high tech centers in the UK rather than abroad and investing heavily in its operatives in order to facilitate a smoother, more efficient support system.

Case Study
Overview of workforce metrics in the marketplace
Recognizing that value generation is the future of electricity supply, British Gas is now investing in providing the systems to enable call center agents to deliver in the “moments of truth” customer contacts. This has meant a wholesale change to the back office to provide agents with the tools to be able to act in this manner, but also a reappraisal of HR practices for rewarding particular types of behavior. Indeed, old standards of performance measurement and rewards will inhibit nay change towards a new proposition based on targeted service.
From the technology side, British Gas’ systems enable it to identify “know callers” so that agent can view their transaction history and type of customer. This in turn helps the agent to tailor their response according to what and how many products the customer has bought, and whether they pay on time. This can even enable operational metrics such as time of call to be adjusted to better guide the agent for particular caller types.
From the customer’s perspective, the agent is then empowered to handle their particular query without the need to be handed off to other agents with the consequent repetition of their details and concerns.

Attracting mature applicants
The advantage to British Gas is the opportunity to deliver elite service to high-value customers, and a basic service to lower-value ones. The ability to recognize and then act upon this has called for a change in its resourcing model in order to attract more mature applicants with relevant product and service experience. To date, most of the company’s call center applicants tend to be between 20-24 years of age, and cannot necessarily relate to older customers’ generation expectations.
Certainly, as staff are expected to become proactive, involved in market research for products, cross-selling products, and profiling customers, a greater level of knowledge will be required. Unsurprisingly, British gas’ Scottish subsidiary, Scottish Gas, has therefore taken the decision to invest ￡21 million in a call center in Edinburgh instead of following the call factory/low cost option of Powergen in outsourcing certain service functions to India. Higher skill, high levels of commitment, and high morale will be one of the keys to success in delivering the multi-service proposition effectively and profitably.

Application of workforce metrics at British Gas
Call centers, operating on an independent basis, currently serve British Gas’s multi-service proposition, which includes energy, home services and insurance. Each center is organized around particular specialisms and product sets. However, in tangent with the development to computer systems, staff responsibilities are being reappraised. Each service member is being allocated one of three areas:
1) Customer Service
2) Customer Sales
3) Customer Support (Processing)
Within each of these areas, particular skills and competencies are stressed in training, taking a “job family” approach to support them. By aligning skill sets, knowledge and competencies with particular activities, staff can be more confident in their approach, and better empowered to handle customer service queries. By assigning individual role profiles to the three job families, employees understand what skills are required of them, and the performance measures related to their specific functions along with the associated reward framework.
Whilst this approach has been taken in the service centers initially, it is now being developed across British Gas. All employees from front to the back office are now being assigned to particular job families, with their reward packages being redeveloped as a result.

Implementation of job-family approach
The job-family approach has yet to be completed, but British Gas is considering introducing further layers to its front-line segmentation. Just as companies like Vodafone and Orange have gone about matching employee segments to customer segments, British Gas is now assessing these principles in accordance with its own customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) approach. In future this should allow the delivery of particular customer behavior aimed towards retaining and developing the relationship with exiting customers whilst also acquiring new ones.

Incentives and new billing techniques
British Gas now offers a paperless billing service, providing customers with a ￡5 annual discount per fuel for signing away from traditional billing. However, the company’s customers still expect excellent service, since these have been heir leading brand values in advertising.
Customers believe they are doing the utility a favor by providing their own meter readings, feel annoyed about waiting at the call center, and are reluctant to go online to have their queries handled. The difference is that these customers have been raised with high service expectations, potentially higher than those that can be profitably met. At a low cost utility like Atlantic, meter readings are only read once a year, with most customers understanding that this is the consequence of a low price.
With this in mind, British Gas has begun to manage its customer expectations appropriately, and one step at a time. The guarantees are being raised level by level in accordance with investments, but should eventually encompass factors such as call response time, email response time, and numbers of meter readings or visits. By such means, the company, with its service brand promise, can begin to deliver upon its word without necessarily incurring the high costs of meeting unrealistically high current expectations.

Conclusions
British Gas has recognized the crucial value that service staff must play if it is to succeed in offering a multi-service proposition. Its call centers simply cannot become call factories if its staff are to be sufficiently empowered and interested to deliver the “moment of truth” service that can lead to improved customer value.
The job family approach cannot be viewed as a simple HR procedure, but should be examined in relation to the proposition as a whole. Job families have been created as a result of improved customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) capabilities that can identify the “moment of truth”, and then tailor the service response accordingly. This inevitably involves higher training costs, but should enable British Gas to provide a service level that is differentiated by customer type, and therefore differentiated from the level of service provided by other suppliers. For British Gas, call centers are not a “necessary evil”, but are a lead generator and a sales tool.
As the market matures and price diminishes in importance, the role of service should increase in the customer’s decision-making process regarding switching, which could work to the benefit of British Gas. Its ability to influence this through the workforce analytical approach is in turn dependent upon whether appropriate rewards can be introduced to alter existing staff’s approach to service. This will require ongoing review, appraisal, and adjustment if truly customer-centric service behavior is to develop.

CRM case 1: Anytime, Anywhere

Good running of customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) give an insight for firms to understand the market trend so that firms can adapt the changing environment and anticipate the future needs. Here is an article about how Microsoft makes use of customer relationship management (顧客關係管理) for their research and development of Windows Mobile software.

Anytime, Anywhere
By Tim Bajarin

About 10 years ago, I had an interesting discussion with Bill Gates while on a visit to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. At the time, he was touting some new mobile software that Microsoft was about to release, and reiterating that this was part of his vision for “information at your fingertips, anytime and anywhere you happen to be.”
In fact, if you’ve been following Microsoft for any length of time, you already know that this mobile mantra has been one of the company’s major drivers. This is why it has made such an investment in Windows Mobile software, and why today the idea of delivering a more robust mobile operating system for laptops, tablets, and smartphones has become part of the company’s DNA.
As of last year, laptops outsold desktops; by decade’s end, some analysts believe that laptops will account for 65% of all computers sold. Today, smartphones represent only about 7% of the 1.1 billion cell phones sold annually, but by 2010, analysts believe they’ll account for up to 22%
The fact is that we’re becoming, more and more, a mobile society. Businesses and consumers want their information, email, applications-even entertainment-on demand, no matter where they happen to be.
That trend is clearly in the sight of all of the personal computer, consumer electronics, and mobile handset makers, as they and the telephony carriers rush to deliver high-speed wireless networks and mobile devices of all kinds, capable of delivering business in an instant.
New third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) wireless network will soon deliver wireless connection with speeds well over 4MBPS. In the future, WiMax networks will become the wireless workhorse, delivering connections up to 70 MBPS. And WiFi hotspots are popping up everywhere, making it easier to get connected even if you don’t have a cellular modem in your laptop.
As more and more applications get delivered via the internet cloud, the need for high-speed, smart, wireless devices will only increase. It’s time we prepared businesses and consumers alike for a world where business applications, information and even consumer-driven entertainment are delivered - as Bill Gates suggested a decade ago - “anytime and anywhere you happen to be.”

Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, is a leading authority within the Customer Relationship Management industry. He will also be a presenter at the destination CRM 2008 conference, taking place August 18-21 in New York.