Strategy | polymer distribution
US resin distributor M Holland has invested two years of work into its MH2GO custom CRM, which it believes will prove a key differentiator for the fi rm in the highly competitive North American distribution marketplace
Investing in customer service
To be successful in polymer distribution you must provide your customers with top quality service. For most companies today, that includes implementation and effective use of a Customer Relationship Manage- ment (CRM) system. US-based M Holland is no exception, but senior managers at the 65-year old company decided they wanted a system that went beyond standard implementations and would give them – and their customers – real and measurable benefi ts. “We recognised we needed a CRM system,” says M Holland Company President Ed Holland. “But we wanted something more. We wanted to do something that would signifi cantly enhance the customer experi- ence. We wanted to create a differentiator, something that would remove the obstacles and frustrations customers often experience when sourcing materials.” Work on developing a system that met the company’s
specifi c needs began back in 2013 and was driven by the fi rm’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing Marc Fern and then newly appointed Manager of Information Services Neil Goodrich. It was a challenging project, coming close on the heels of the implementation of a new ERP system that Fern described as “somewhat painful” and that had left many in the organisation feeling a little “IT fatigued.” At the outset of the CRM project, Goodrich set out to
learn the company’s business processes and to identify those that were working and, more importantly, those
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that were not. He worked alongside account managers and product managers to fi nd out precisely what they needed to make their jobs easier and visited M Holland customers and suppliers to establish their needs and frustrations. He also worked closely with functional departments internally to understand the cross-func- tional hand-offs that occurred and the causes of occasional problems. “Neil was refreshing,” says Holland. “Other
corporate IT managers want to remake the company to fi t into a computer system. Neil took the opposite approach – ‘tell me what you need, and I’ll fi nd the right IT solution.’” The company had only recently installed a new ERP
system, but Goodrich established early on that access- ing the database was cumbersome. “The only way for most users to access data was by human proxy – through a phone call or email. We went past ‘Let’s get a CRM’ to ‘let’s give account managers what they need to create a great customer experience.’ Mobile access to CRM was only a piece of that puzzle.” The result of Goodrich’s work was the MH2GO
system, which was fi rst demonstrated to M Holland’s 90-strong commercial team in June of this year. Fern says he was aware that there was a certain amount of wariness on the part of the commercial team – there was some concern that data entry might displace direct interfacing with customers – but following the fi rst
December 2015 | COMPOUNDING WORLD 71
Main image: M Holland’s MH2GO CRM
system aims to enhance
customer expe- rience through the use of mobile IT
platforms and
real-time data integration
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