The IOF sells insurance and investment products to about one million members worldwide, but mostly in Canada and the United States.
Chris Dingman, the IOF's senior vice-president of member delivery services, said the association investigated CRM to retain and better satisfy members.
Until recently, IOF was not an organization with a sophisticated IT infrastructure. Service requests were relayed to the field sales team by phone or fax until e-mail was rolled out about a year ago, and its sales force was equipped with laptops.
When a member phones into the IOF's service centre, for example, the centre creates a service request that goes to the field-based agent. The request could involve anything from increased coverage, change of address or that the member is expecting a child.
Dingman said the Siebel solution has enabled the society to pull all the membership information into a single place.
"Everyone has the same information all the time," she said.
Jeffrey Wright, CTP's regional sales director, said the company has worked with customers in similar situations.
"They were unique in the sense that they had a membership," he said. "That would have been the only difference. Think of any other client: they want a better understanding of their customer segmentation, they have an ideal of the data that they would like to see."
Dingman said that difference makes the results of a CRM project all the more important. As a member-based organization, it is important the IOF demonstrates its familiarity with each member, she said.
The learning curve was steep in this case, Dingman said, given the magnitude of technology entering the IOF's workforce. "They were hit basically all at once with e-mail, point-of-sale and CRM," she said. "Siebel is a Windows-like system; most of the folks there were only familiar with mainframes. We tried to put some functionality, but not too much, so they could get familiar with the system."
Dingman is aware that many organizations are finding it difficult to get business units working together to make CRM projects consistent across the enterprise.
"Statistically, we should fail," she said. "There were lots of bumps along the way."
IOF's service centre was being built from scratch, so at least parts of the organization were ready for change. "There wasn't enormous amounts of attitude to overcome," Dingman said.
The marketing department and sales managers are universally using the platform as a key measurement tool, Dingman said, while the agents continue to grow in their understanding and acceptance of the tools.
"It's a real challenge for anybody to learn new productivity tools and therefore get the productivity out of them."
