Case Study – QIAGEN

QIAGEN launched their CRM initiative as the platform from which to achieve organizational change, process enhancement, and technology augmentation necessary to support their growth and development while maintaining high customer satisfaction.  QIAGEN territory sales reps were inefficiently spending between 8 to 18.5 hours per week on manual administrative tasks such as producing contact lists and preparing for customer visits, technical service department personnel were spending up to 19.5 hours per week performing manual data management tasks, the marketing resources department was spending up to 34.3 hours/week (or 4.3 days/week) retrieving customer information from various disparate information systems which resulted in less than effective fulfillment and targeting of promotions.  For marketing related processes alone, QIAGEN was incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary costs.  A QIAGEN management team, which involved senior executives at QIAGEN headquarters in Europe as well as the U.S., strongly believed that CRM would significantly improve the ability of QIAGEN personnel to sell additional product and provide enhanced technical and customer service to QIAGEN customers.

QIAGEN’s high-level objectives for the CRM project included:

• Improve productivity
• Generate additional revenues
• Decrease costs
• Enhance employee morale
• Improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention

With ISM’s guidance, QIAGEN was able to achieve a clear understanding of their people, process and technological needs.  By employing ISM’s “Top-Down, Bottom-Up Approach” to their needs analysis and software selection phases, QIAGEN was able to establish a plan of action to address the most pressing business issues and to obtain global support for their CRM initiative. After determining QIAGEN’s CRM requirements, ISM provided QIAGEN with a structured methodology for selecting a CRM software vendor and implementation partner which included a detailed RFP, demonstrations of capability and thorough due diligence work.  Upon selection of the preferred vendors, ISM negotiated contracts with these vendors.  Because QIAGEN had a clear understanding of what CRM functionality they needed and when they needed it, ISM was able to leverage this knowledge to help QIAGEN negotiate a 64% percent savings off the vendor’s quoted prices for software licenses and fees.  This savings alone paid for a significant portion of the cost of ISM’s consulting services to QIAGEN.  ISM was also engaged at the highest of executive levels to mediate conflicts between executives involved in the CRM project management.  ISM facilitated business process improvement sessions which resulted in enhanced lead and opportunity management processes.

Some specific results associated with the CRM initiative included:

• Increased service levels for calls answered by customer service personnel
• Initiated programs to better gauge customer satisfaction
• Improved turnaround of Sales Blitz day results to Product Managers