THE BUSINESS
Arvato is part of the Bertelsmann Group, one of the world’s largest media corporations. It has 50 years of expertise in digital content delivery solutions for the music, film & video, publishing, games and computer software industries.
THE OBJECTIVE
Arvato has 300 highly skilled and enthusiastic employees in its Irish manufacturing facilities, and has a daily production capacity of 180,000 CDs and 65,000 DVDs. However, Alan Crean, Arvato Ireland’s sales and marketing director, was concerned that the company might have an issue with some of its customers.
Alan describes the challenge: “At Arvato Ireland, we had no dependable way of measuring the future buying intentions of our clients. We decided to analyse the quality of our customer relationships, following a painful SAP implementation and disruptions due to a fire in one of our manufacturing plants.”
THE SOLUTION
Alan Crean explains how Deep-Insight helped Arvato: “Deep-Insight confirmed what we had already assumed – that we were in a precarious position and we might lose a significant number of strategic clients. In particular our largest client was identified as the most vulnerable in our portfolio.
“Deep-Insight also identified the reasons why we were suffering from quality and reliability issues. More importantly, they could pinpoint accurately the issues relevant to each client.
“In short, Deep-Insight showed us that our customers perceived Arvato as far more ‘product’ than ‘customer’ oriented and that we needed to do something about it. Quickly.”
THE RESULTS
Under Alan Crean’s direction, Arvato Ireland adopted a new strategy based on Deep-Insight’s recommendations. This new strategy was based around a Total Quality Management (TQM) programme that comprised three main elements:
- Complete and on-time delivery
- Total quality
- Change of mindset in the way Arvato dealt with its customers
The first two elements were linked to continuous internal and external measurements, and the measurement results were linked to performance bonuses for employees. The third element was based on a total customer focus, specifically aimed at improving customer retention rates and reducing churn.