SALES FORCE AUTOMATION

PROBLEM

A Fortune 500 financial services company realized that it had a large problem. Its worldwide sales force of 400 reps was taking too long to close deals. The average time that it took to evaluate and provide a quote to a prospective customer was 2 weeks, which was long enough for the prospect to become frustrated and sign with a competitor. The company evaluated several leading sales force automation applications and quickly realized that none of them would fit its unique needs.

SOLUTION

The custom application N-Cycles created for the client allows a sales rep to process a new customer completely using a completely paperless process while still preserving the security of real signatures. Every rep will have the Automated Merchant Application running on his or her notebook computer to capture all of a potential customers information including company information, bank information, credit reference, products desired, etc. and signature electronically. Depending on the situation, the sales rep can also swipe the customer's credit card for particular payment options. Once an application has been entered, the rep can either print a copy of the signed application or email a copy as an Adobe Acrobat file to his customer. The application can work either offline to capture the information and synchronize the next time the rep connects or online and conduct the authorizations real-time. In either case, the results of the application process are emailed back to the rep and customer for immediate confirmation and to close the sale. After authorization, the transaction is automatically routed to the appropriate legacy and other back office systems for proper accounting, system provisioning, product fulfillment, etc.

The management tools in the application include a rule-based reporting engine, a product manager, pricing manager, and commission management tool. The reporting engine delivers real time customized sales reports in either a web browser or on a Pocket PC for just the information allowed for each particular user. While many product catalogs include just pre-defined fields, the application catalog uses a flexible data model to allow you to add new fields or product attributes for both products and services. The flexible pricing manager includes capabilities comparable to the leading SFA tools by providing rule, customer, volume, and price break based pricing capabilities. Finally, the commission management tool allows the client to change commissions on the fly, and conduct "what if" analysis when planning commission changes.

N-Cycles has provided full life cycle services to this financial services client including business process analysis, system architecture, programming, testing, comprehensive documentation, and training services. The systems technical architecture ensures a flexible and scalable system that can adapt as business needs evolve.

RESULTS

N-Cycles custom solution allows sales reps to process an application for service in less than one hour and the total application cost was less expensive than licensing and customizing any of the off the shelf Sales Force Automation applications. The client will also realize significant administrative cost savings once the system is fully deployed to the entire sales force.