CIO — When the CEOs of American Airlines and AlliedSignal met in 1995, American’s Bob Crandall dealt the manufacturer a sobering blow. Fed up with the service his company received from AlliedSignal’s aerospace division, Crandall told AlliedSignal CEO Larry Bossidy that if he could find another supplier of parts for his airplanes, he would switch in a heartbeat.
In fact, American Airlines wasn’t the only customer dissatisfied with AlliedSignal. At air shows and in client meetings, AlliedSignal executives heard the same complaint over and over. "Our customers were telling us, ’You’re too hard to do business with,’" recalls Pruitt Layton, vice president of sales and marketing for Honeywell International’s propulsion systems business and former director of sales support for AlliedSignal Aerospace. (AlliedSignal and Honeywell merged in December 1999 to form Honeywell International.)
The customer complaints were often justified. AlliedSignal Aerospace’s four business units had no way to share information about sales opportunities, the status of maintenance requests or the products customers had on their aircraft. With 40 independent product lines to market, it was not uncommon for several salespeople across the aerospace division to contact the same customers during the same week?or even on the same day?without knowing they were doing so. Large customers sometimes had as many as 50 points of contact with the company. This Keystone Cops routine infuriated AlliedSignal’s customers, some of which began using AlliedSignal’s lower-cost competitors. Layton says those competitors posed a long-term threat to AlliedSignal Aerospace’s business, which also happened to be AlliedSignal’s big revenue generator.
Executives at AlliedSignal knew they had to improve their sales tactics and customer service record if the company was to thrive in the highly competitive post-Cold War aerospace market. So to solve the customer service problem, the company began implementing a CRM system from Siebel Systems in 1998.
Fast-forward to 2002, and much has changed. The merger with Honeywell came in 1999. And now that those uncoordinated sales and service calls are becoming a vestige of the past, Honeywell is even winning supplier of the year awards. But the crusade to improve the company’s customer service reputation hasn’t been easy. It has required some major rethinking of sales and service practices, and a concerted effort to convince employees?many of whom had weathered two previous sales-force automation (SFA) failures?to forsake their siloed, homegrown customer information systems for new, integrated CRM software. The importance of that crusade is becoming increasingly clear now that big customers such as Belgium’s Sabena and Swiss Air are declaring bankruptcy and the aerospace industry is reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks. More than ever, the company is depending on the CRM system to help make it easier for customers to do business with Honeywell?and easier for Honeywell to get the most out of its sales and service teams.
