The NZ Marine Industry, World leaders in Technology

John Fredrickson, 16 March 2012

Now that my local Marine service provider have made the commitment to implement a new VRM (Vessel Relationship Management) system I now need to take a deep look at where we need to cast our initial focus. In our meetings the enthusiasm and ideas just kept flying. I found myself having to slow things down a little and pay extra attention to their current issues and how we might be able to solve them as this was just as important as to how the VRM was going to help grow their business. I will now show some of my questions followed by the answers given to me by the two directors.

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Q: What is the single most important thing you are hoping to get from a VRM?

A: We want to know our clients and their Vessels better than they know themselves.

Q: Is there anything in particular where you would like to see improvements?

A: Many areas such as reducing down time. The more information we have on a Vessel will mean less time will be spent gathering information before we commence a job. For example for a simple oil change we regularly have to get on board the Vessel first to get the required information to complete the job. This ends up being two call outs. The first visit is to get the specifications oil filter, oil type etc. If we had this information on hand it would save an enormous amount of time.

Q: What about marketing to your clients?

A: We have never marketed to our clients. We would like to be able to do selective marketing. For example we may have a special on a particular type of water filter. It would be great if we could market only to those customers that use that particular filter.

Q: What about the information on who owns or manages the Vessel?

A: This is another problem for us as some Vessels have multiple owners and some are under management. Depending on the nature of our enquiry it is always a struggle to talk to the correct person. Not to mention having a system that holds correct contact details.

Q: Would it be advantageous if you could advise your customers when a service is due?

A: Wow this would make a huge difference to our working year. We find that most of our clients leave things to the last minute. Our business is flat out from the start of summer but we experience slow times during the winter as customers almost forget they own a Vessel. If we could prompt them to do maintenance during the winter it would help smooth over the peak times. Reduce the roller-coaster effect.

Q: What if you could invoice directly from your CRM?

A: Awesome….. Currently our Engineers write up a job card. This job card is handed to administration and they action it from here. This is a duplicate process and is very inefficient. If our engineers could do their own invoicing with a checking system in-between them and the customer receiving the invoice it would take some work away from an already pressured admin team.

There were of course many more qualifying questions. I chose these to highlight areas that would increase the profitability and efficiency of the company.

I will continue the pathway to implementing a VRM system for Marine applications in future blogs.

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