VERBUND x gorelate

User benefits

„For me, the configuration of the products has turned out particularly well. Each product undergoes a certain process which is then stored in combination with the product or product family. Based on their product selection, users are immediately shown the correct business process flow that guides them through the sales process," explains Zwischenberger. She also highlights the document allocation feature: Different templates such as offers or contracts are allocated to a product – a model contract can be created as early as at the offer stage of the process.

„The challenge was to find the precise sweet spot between: What does our key account manager want in the system? And: What can the system even do? In other words, we had to find a middle ground so that everyone could work well, the key account manager as a user and the system. And then there is also a third party – the operational departments that want to use the data, and of course they also have requirements. Bringing these three parties to the table required a lot of preparation and a lot of coordination.“

Thomas Winkler, Product Management VERBUND Energy4Business

Outcome & successes

The big outcome of the project was automation and digitalisation: "Before the CRM was introduced, in particular our offer and contract process was very manual. There were few to no digitalised processes. The CRM has made this 100% better," says Thomas Winkler. Document creation and pricing requests now run automatically – the data is fed into the pricing tool and the price information can then be applied again to the offer and contract. This saves the staff an enormous amount of time. In addition, documentation has become more efficient, for instance you can see at a glance whether tasks have been completed or not. "Another technical highlight I would like to mention are the interfaces," says Marie-Luise Zwischenberger: "The interface to the pricing tool as well as to other internal systems, where the data now flows directly back into the CRM." For Tobias Haberler the main benefit is the better overview of sales activities: "I now have a system in which it only takes a few clicks to see what happened in the last few weeks and which customers want more services from us."

„The work on the CRM will never end, but the users who are using it at the moment are for the most part highly satisfied and very pleased to work with this system.“

Tobias Haberler, System and Applications Manager VERBUND Energy4Business

Way of working

With the exception of a few personal meetings, the entire project was implemented remotely. "But that didn't harm our cooperation – quite on the contrary! Everything worked extremely smoothly – in particular because we had weekly coordination meetings and were flexible enough to organise additional meetings if necessary," says Marie-Luise Zwischenberger: "That's what makes a project fun!" For Thomas Winkler, too, it was the regular coordination meetings and, above all, the personal support that made the difference: "Our requirements were always implemented quickly and to our satisfaction. Luise has almost become like an employee of our group – this close cooperation is very special.”