GoldMine Premium Edition and The Tile Warehouse CRM Case Study

With a key focus on customer service, The Tile Warehouse implemented GoldMine Premium Edition to drive their business from strength to strength. This case study describes the aims, objectives and results achieved by the company's CRM project and FrontRange's GoldMine CRM software.

Summary

Concentrix implemented GoldMine CRM software which helped The Tile Warehouse to:

  • Reduce lost sales
  • Improve communications and distribution of critical information throughout the business
  • Streamline internal processes
  • Increase the effectiveness of customer account management
  • Identify new sales opportunities
  • Improve marketing, particularly targeting and lead management
  • Continue to provide outstanding customer service
  • Increase competitive advantage

Introduction

The Tile Warehouse provides an extensive range of wall and floor tiles to both the retail and contract market. It's a fast-moving, fashion-led industry. The Tile Warehouse maintains its competitive edge by keeping ahead of developments and trends, providing the highest levels of service, and offering the best possible choice of products.

The Tile Warehouse's Business

Founded in 1980, The Tile Warehouse provides ceramic and stone tiling to the retail market, as well as wholesale to the construction industry. It has a popular retail outlet in Stapleford, on the outskirts of Nottingham.

The company supports its extensive range of products with a full range of services. With 15 employees, The Tile Warehouse puts the success of the business down to sourcing the right products, high levels of technical expertise, excellent design skills and outstanding quality of service. The most important factor, however, is a close relationship with customers.

The strategy of excellent customer service has provided The Tile Warehouse with a high-profile locally. The company is also recognised nationally, and has achieved numerous awards. These include twice winner of The Tile Association Excellence in Retail, twice winner of The Tile Association Excellence in Marketing, and being chosen as Best Independent Retailer in the UK by Tile and Stone Journal.

CRM Project Objectives

Despite its strengths, The Tile Warehouse needed a CRM system to increase its advantage in the market. Joe Lockwood, the company's Marketing Director, states, “The key objectives of the CRM system were achieving competitive advantage through streamlined processes and operational effectiveness, ultimately leading to improved service and sales.”

Identified during a company-wide problem solving project, The Tile Warehouse had specific issues they realised a CRM system would overcome. Primarily, it would replace a paper-based system, where information management was somewhat ad-hoc and relied on people's memories. What's more, because information was difficult to share, people were working in silos.

Joe continues, “Customer expectations and information needs to be easy to access. Using a paper-based system was costly, impractical and sometimes getting the details you needed was just not possible and resulted in lost sales opportunities.”

There were also many other benefits The Tile Warehouse wanted CRM to bring to the business. As well as improved decision-making and service provision, the company wanted better customer account management. It also needed to develop its marketing by managing leads more efficiently, while targeting campaigns more accurately and selectively. The company also wanted to improve on the way it identified sales opportunities.

GoldMine CRM software

The Tile Warehouse looked into a variety of CRM systems. They liked GoldMine, and approached FrontRange Solutions, the manufacturers of the GoldMine suite of CRM software.

FrontRange recommended Concentrix as a preferred supplier. Asked why they specifically chose Concentrix, Joe Lockwood comments, “Quite simply, we liked the approach of Concentrix staff.”

After discussing their requirements in detail with Concentrix, The Tile Warehouse chose GoldMine Standard Edition for their CRM solution.

Right from the beginning of the project, Concentrix worked closely with The Tile Warehouse to identify its business requirements.

One of the first stages for Concentrix was to produce detailed pre-scoping documentation. From this, Concentrix developed business process workflow and installed and configured the software over two days. After thoroughly testing the system, Concentrix took just one day to fully train The Tile Warehouse staff.

Concentrix implemented the new CRM system quickly and efficiently, with minimal disruption to The Tile Warehouse's business. In fact, they had the system fully up and running, with staff trained and using the system, within a week.

GoldMine Premium Edition

In 2007, FrontRange Solutions released a brand new version of GoldMine: GoldMine Premium Edition. Not long after its release, The Tile Warehouse decided to take advantage of the enhanced features and extra functionality of this leading CRM package.

GoldMine Standard Edition had served The Tile Warehouse well. It had significantly improved their internal processes, and brought benefits to their suppliers as well as customers. In particular they found having a centralised source of data and transactional database were key advantages. However, upgrading to GoldMine Premium Edition would help the company build even further on this success.

The Benefits of CRM

The Tile Warehouse's CRM project has ensured the company continues to deliver and improve the excellent customer service the business relies on.

Describing the numerous advantages CRM and GoldMine Premium Edition has brought to the company, Joe Lockwood comments, “We are capturing an increasing amount of customer data into the CRM system, allowing easier management of marketing campaigns and customer account management. We're also beginning to report and forecast from the system.”

Although the company gained many benefits from their new CRM system almost immediately, some have taken longer to achieve. As Joe explains, “It's been an up-hill struggle at times, but the organisation is realising that memories are not as reliable as CRM systems!”

Asked if CRM has changed the way The Tile Warehouse works, Joe summarises, “It's brought about cultural changes to how we approach service delivery.”

Like many other forward-thinking companies, CRM has transformed the way The Tile Warehouse does business.

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