A-lehdet sought a more comprehensive view of its customers by combining resale and new sales in the same environment. With the help of the solution, the magazine company will be able to improve customer contacts via different channels and automate it even further.
While A-lehdet handled both resale and new sales with SAS Institute’s marketing solution, both had their own operating environments. Loihdes’ customer contact solution combined resale and new sales applications so that in the future all operations will take place in the same environment and all data will be available for both resale and new sales.
According to Oili Kalm-Parantainen, Account Manager of A-lehdet, the aim was to get a more comprehensive view of each customer’s situation in order to have better grounds for deciding what should be offered to the customer at any given time. “Overall management is the only way forward. Competition in the industry is becoming increasingly fierce, so we are forced to improve the efficiency of our customer contacts,” he says.
Resale traditionally means the continuation of a fixed-term magazine subscription. In the future, resale will cover selecting customers who meet certain conditions and whose magazine subscription is about to end according to specified criteria. According to Kalm-Parantainen, this allows better customer management, because other factors related to the customer can also be taken into account in connection with the selection, besides the fact that their subscription is about to expire. “For example, we can see the channel through which the customer is most likely to continue the subscription. In the current model, it is much more complicated in terms of logic, because the starting point is the order and not the customer.”
A-lehdet gave the main responsibility for the project planning and project management to Loihde, which already supported the company’s data and customer information management unit in the use and maintenance of separate environments for resale and new sales. According to Kalm-Parantainen, A-lehdet is very satisfied with Loihdes’ expertise.