Campari Australia ditches HP tablets for Surface Pros

Campari Australia has rolled out 60 Microsoft Surface Pro 3 i5 tablets in a move that the beverage supplier says has revolutionised its sales cycle.

The organisation has replaced an existing fleet of HP ElitePad 900 tablets with the Microsoft devices for sales staff, and will soon roll out a further 50 over the coming months across the rest of its Australian workforce.

Area managers are using the tablets to fill orders directly through the CRM system, and share product information, presentations, and videos with customers in real time.

The company’s head office also has more visibility into the sales team’s activity in the market. Key performance indicators can be measured and tracked in real-time and reporting at weekly and quarterly intervals becomes less of a burden, the company said.

Loic Herbin, IT director at Campari Asia-Pacific, said during the company’s first foray with the previous devices, his IT team wrongly assumed that sales staff would be using the devices to simply show presentations they had created at their desks.

“However, we soon learned they wanted to use the devices as they would a desktop computer. We weren’t happy with the performance [of the previous tablets] even though the portability was what we were after,” he said.

Campari’s sales managers spend 80 per cent of their workday on the road and only 20 per cent in their regional office, and were previously quite disconnected from the organisation’s headquarters, said Herbin.

“They [sales managers] had email but most of the time due to the weight of the laptops, they were leaving them in the car. Now they are taking the device with them during the [customer] call,” he said.

Herbin said the IT group has also reported a 20 per cent drop in help desk incidents since the rollout of the new devices.

Campari’s national sales director, Brad Madigan, said the organisation needs to use technology to meet changing customer demands.

“The single biggest expectation of our customers is access to real-time information,” Madigan said.

“We can’t sell product based on a print-out of information; our customers want to see videos, sales forecasts, category drivers and detailed product specifications and they want to interact with this information in real time during our face-to-face sales meetings.”

All Campari Australia staff are also using Microsoft Lync and will soon be moving to Skype for Business.