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Case Study: Page (1) of 1 - 10/21/09

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CCS Printing: Maximizing Customer Relationships in a Slow Economy

By Avidian Technologies

Challenges
CCS Printing is a print-on-demand and full-service commercial printing provider that serves small, medium and large enterprises in a variety of industries. Since the company's development in 1987 CCS Printing has grown to a company with 87 full-time employees in eight locations and six on-site print centers at large businesses around the Bellevue, Washington, area.

For CCS Printing everything centers on the customer. From sales to service, interaction with the client makes the company flow. That may be the case for many companies, but it is especially true for a custom printing business. Each client has unique needs and specific ideas about what they want. A printing company must be able to cater to those needs, wants and ideas if they hope to expand their business.

With a dedicated team of sales representatives, CCS Printing was able to help its customers effectively, as long as the same representatives stayed with the same clients. The customer information existed, but it was not organized, and the only place it was stored was in people's heads.

"Our team had a good handle on their individual clients, but there were some huge drawbacks," said Kevin Sullivan, president of CCS Printing. "Our system left no room to share information easily and report accurately."

When an employee left the company, a long, tedious debriefing process took place to prevent CCS Printing from losing all the information that individual had about his or her clients. The whole process was done by word of mouth.

Customer information was not the only thing employees stored individually either. They were typically the only ones who had an accurate idea of the work they were doing.

"Even though work was getting done, there was no real system in place for tracking the productivity of our employees," Sullivan said. "Not only was it hard for management to see exactly what was going on, it was hard for the employees to manage their work systematically and effectively."

CCS Printing needed to implement some form of organization for employees and management to keep track of everything they were doing.

Solution
"We knew we needed a system to manage our customer relationships," Sullivan said. "But we wanted something that would be simple to use and wouldn't be difficult to adopt."

The choice ultimately came down to either Microsoft's "Dynamics" or Avidian's "Prophet."

"We chose Avidian because they were willing to work with us," Sullivan said. "They had flexible payment options so we didn't have to put out all the capital at once."

Avidian works with small businesses with a program called EasyPay that allows companies to purchase their products on a payment plan. That way companies can immediately start reaping the benefits of CRM without having to provide the entire cost up front.

"We also felt we were less likely to get lost in customer support, since Avidian is a smaller, more aggressive company," Sullivan said. "We know we aren't the largest company, and we worried how responsive Microsoft would be to our needs since we would have been such a small piece of their revenue."

Implementation
The implementation took time. CCS Printing had large amounts of data that had to be transferred and set up. Due to the fragmentation and lack of standardization, getting the data into the correct formats and sections took some work.

"There was a four to six week period where we had to keep sending the data back to Avidian for tweaks and adjustments," Sullivan said. "We expected some initial bugs, and Avidian was completely responsive to our needs. They kept reworking the data until it was exactly what we needed to function efficiently."

"Everyone I have dealt with in your company [Avidian] has been very professional and pleasant to work with," said Bert Waldrop, IT manager at CCS Printing. "He [your tech support man] was very polite and I could sense a smile over the phone. He provided timely information and also offered to log in remotely to do the work for me.  With his information my issue was resolved quickly on the first attempt."

Since Prophet runs within Microsoft Outlook, CCS Printing employees did not need to be trained on a new database with a unique setup. The information was all within their standard e-mail program making it intuitive and easy to access. Using Prophet to share that information made business much more organized and secure.

"Having that information in one place made us feel a lot safer," Sullivan said. "Finally, we were all on the same page and had access to what we needed. We no longer had to worry about data losses and information degradation whenever an employee left the company."

Not only did Avidian provide a central database that could be maintained in-house, but management suddenly had a much better understanding of the work being done.

"Every week our employees report their goals, objectives and progress," Sullivan said. "Prophet provides simple reporting features that make it easy for them to update the sales pipeline. This also allows management to get accurate up to the minute reports making it easier to judge how the business is doing."

Through Prophet, the management team at CCS Printing can view customer and employee information and can access detailed reports of all their employees' sales activities ensuring things are running smoothly. This has improved communication between management and employees and has made business more stable and cohesive, particularly in a time of economic uncertainty.

"We feel better knowing that our sales people are staying consistent in a poor economy," Sullivan said. "Pre-Avidian, we weren't really able to hold our employees as accountable. While they did have to adjust to this kind of visibility they love being more organized."