Centrál Médiacsoport, Hungary’s leading media company. On the market of magazines, the publishing company has a 42% share.
It has more than 600 employees and an annual revenue of HUF 20 billion. The publishing company owns 35 magazines and 7 portals, and its conference organizing section called Figyelő Fórum organizes an average of 45 business conferences and seminars per year. In 2002 the company launched its book publishing, event organizing and product sales activity - related to publications - and set up a division responsible for making brand publications.
The Challenge
Following an extremely rapid expansion, Centrál Médiacsoport became one of the most important participants on the Hungarian media market. The increasing number of subscribers made it necessary to replace the publishing company’s old and obsolete systems with a modern and integrated customer relations CRM system, which is suitable for the comprehensive processing of subscribers data, can be integrated with the publishing company’s subscriber portal and financial system, is able to serve the increased number of internal users, and makes it possible to carry out OLAP-based analyses.
The Approach
In order to solve the problems, IBCnet used its own development, the HyperBrain system, which can be flexibly customized to suit customer demands. This IT system set up to suit individual demands serves the entire subscription process and the related processes (call-center, activity of the subscriptions department, planning marketing activities, automatic and aggregate recording of sales notes in the accounting system), within one single system. For the staff of the call-center it offers a uniform interface for identifying the calling client, provides an overview of the status and history of customer orders and complaints. All detailed information and all operations needed for call-center administrators (order processing, sending invoices repeatedly, recording complaints, etc.) can be accessed with maximum two clicks. Duplicities that unavoidably occur in the customer register are monitored by a refined de-duplication algorithm, and they are automatically or manually compressed.
Achievements
Due to the new HyperBrain-based system: Depending on the type of the given marketing activity, orders and the issue of invoices are handled automatically. The structured recording of a large amount of detailed data relating to orders makes it possible to realize activities focusing, for example, on gender/age/interests, etc., and to analyze customer behaviors. The flexible handling of extensions suiting different marketing principles, extension offers based on a single request or multiple requests enable the further analysis of customer behaviors. The efficiency of the individual marketing activities can be measured on the basis of recording information in the register about where customers heard about the possibility of placing orders.
The system offers flexible tools for product categorization, and for creating and handling product packages. Prices can be planned easily depending on customer category, marketing activity, season, and on selling items individually or in a package. The register of marketing activities controls the pricing of orders placed during the activities or relating to the products that belong to the activities, and the granting of free gifts on the basis of the type and parameters of the activity (first x number of payers, fixed, drawn gifts, etc.). Accepting orders placed on the web or telephone, by e-mail or by post, or announced in person at an event, with the possibility of individual or bundled import. All events that take place during the process of placing order > invoicing > payment > delivery can be monitored, and they can be realized individually or in groups.
It includes issuing different invoices, printing invoices or exporting for external printing, the bundled processing of payments and direct debit payments, the handling of data files sent to the distributor in charge of delivery or received from the distributor. The system has been in operation since 2003, and it handles thousands of products, hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of orders, a register of invoices and subscriptions.