Promoting SA gets new impetus with CRM

“CRM has addressed SA Tourism's business objective of providing a platform for establishing and maintaining a reliable contact management database consisting of accounts and contacts for its various departments,” says Fiona Buchner, manager: e-Business at SA Tourism

“It will also ensure a more streamlined sales process for new business acquisition in the Business Tourism division as well as provide a joint marketing capability to the Travel Trade division,” she adds.

Specified market segments

Detailed customer segmentation reports can also easily be extracted from the system, giving SA Tourism the ability to view customers located within specific market segments, and apply this understanding to future campaign initiatives.

The CRM solution had to ensure consolidation of all contact-based information previously spread across several different databases, and filed in various spreadsheets. Systems were implemented across all three areas of SA Tourism's business, namely, Business Tourism, Travel Trade and Media and Communication.

As e-mail lists were managed and distributed by a third party, the solution also had to provide functionality for opportunity management to the different areas of the organisation.

“This will ensure that users and other stakeholders in the organisation have full access to contact and relationship information as well as insight into sales initiatives,” explains Heath Turner, CRM Director at IS Partners, the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner company responsible for the implementation, customisation and configuration of the solution.