Treasury Wine Estates uncorks improved CRM

Former Fosters Group division, Treasury Wine Estates (TWE), has managed to cut delivery times from weeks to days and boosted its customer service through the implementation of a new cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Speaking to CIO Australia TWE field sales director, Darren Campbell, said that prior to the implementation of Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud application in late 2011, customers of the global wine company, such as Woolworths, Dan Murphy’s, restaurants and hotels, could be waiting up to two weeks for their wine orders to arrive.

The previous ageing CRM system, which the company’s sales representatives could only use for data capture, was also not connected to the rest of TWE’s business.

Now, with the new system in place, customers can place orders with a contact centre or via a smartphone-enabled TWE sales representative and have their orders turned around, within metropolitan areas, inside 24 hours.

“The sales representatives now go out and input information about our customers into the CRM, we can analyse that information and provide solutions for customers,” Campbell said.

“For example, the customer may have an allocation of 10 cases but they’ve only got three cases in stock. People in the business may use the Chatter function to make an alert for the remaining seven cases which our field sales team will action,” Campbell said.

According to Campbell, company sales reps now spend more time on the road as there has been a reduction in admin duties back at the office.

“The sales rep used to come back to the office, make three phone calls and source the promotional material,” he said. “All that can happen simultaneously because the request for promotional material can be sent while the sales representative is still with the customer.”

“One of the key benefits of us going with Cloud computing is to get more time in front of the customer and make decisions faster.”

TWE has also been able to segment customer information into restaurants, hotels, supermarkets and bottle stores — or, ‘on-premise’ as it is known in the liquor trade. According to Campbell, this has made it easier to search for information and background details such as what the restaurant or supermarket has ordered in the past.

TWE staff are also using Salesforce.com’s social networking application, Chatter, to share wine order alerts and interact with direct customers who have access to the Chatter system. TWE is using the Chatter system to push out information about wine releases such as the Penfolds Bin vintage range.

“The on-premise trade in Australia is in the vicinity of 18,000 licensed restaurants,” he said. “To get that information out to them used to be very fragmented but we were able to communicate that Penfolds information to our customers using Chatter,” Campbell said.

In the future, TWE will look to share videos on Chatter about the work it is doing with customers.

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