Stevie Awards

Search past winners/finalists

Learn about the other Stevie Awards Competitions
  1. Home
  2. IBM - IVR or Web Service Solution
Arrow

  • MESA logo

IBM - IVR or Web Service Solution

 

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2019, Click to Enter The 2020 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service

Company:IBM, Armonk, NY
Company Description:IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category:New Product & Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category:IVR or Web Service Solution – New

Nomination Title:Client Sales Resource Locator (Web & Mobile)

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and sales to date:

IBM Business Challenge

IBM is a large and complex organization with more than 350,000 employees and a sales force of nearly 30,000. Questions like “Who is the seller from business unit X covering client Y?” are very common across different departments and most of all - sales. However, it was very difficult to find real time information about the correct sales person responsible for a given client within a specific business unit, management layer, geography or department. This took days, which led to productivity loss, inefficient communication, lack of teaming and frustration which potentially negatively impacted the bottom line of the company.

Global Sales Incentives Solution

IBM’s Global Sales Incentives team tackled this challenge by creating a Web and Mobile application – The Client Sales Resource Locator.

In November 2017 the Global Client Resource Locator Web and Mobile was launched using IBM’s PDA (Pure Data analytics), Cloud and Mobile technologies (Bluemix, MobileFirst) internally and at scale. With these applications, the time to find the correct contact from a given geography, business unit, role on a given client was reduced from days to ~10 seconds. This immensely improved collaboration and discoverability within IBM between organizations.

The two applications are an easily accessible, self-serve solution to all IBMers providing them with real time client coverage information and thus enhancing their productivity and effective collaboration. Users of all levels, from senior executives to geography leaders, operational support staff to sales representatives can use these applications to obtain seller coverage information 24/7 – no longer requiring ad-hoc requests or having urgent questions not being answered quickly.

Since deployment, the application has received wide adoption and usage globally, averaging 12,000 searches per month. With an overall productivity savings of one hour per search, IBM will save $2.8M annually with this application.

To develop the mobile and web application, the team successfully tackled numerous architecture, development and performance challenges: data was sourced from different internal systems; datasets were not standard across business units; overall the solutions had to crunch 25m+ rows of data and provide the ability to output search results with multiple filters displayed within seconds as well as to dynamically add or remove filters. The team also created a criteria to sort the sellers in the app, in a way that the first names that appear would be the Client Leaders / Executives for a given client.

Benefits and Results

Users of the web and mobile app can quickly obtain information and insights related to the coverage of a given client from sellers all over the world.

The key benefits are:

  • Collaboration: seamless and quick identification of the different teams responsible for a given client, enabling and encouraging sellers across the company to act together as one IBM.
  • Mobility: ability for users to make quick queries and use application anywhere at any time on their mobile device.
  • Productivity: 72,000 man hours saved annually for users in e-mails, phone calls and conversations with various people related to finding who is the correct seller to contact for a given client
  • Company Wide Application: tool availability across all IBM makes in universal not only for the sales force but also for procurement, to contact seller for a given contract or customer issue, HR, to understand who is due a commission for a given client, Finance, to calculate seller productivity for a given client. The examples go on and on.
  • User satisfaction: the application allows users to get immediate answers, allowing for proactive actions and decisions. At the time of writing the NPS score of the app was above 30. The tool also has the ability to log enhancements, issues and questions via the NPS survey form which are monitored and quickly addressed by our team.

.