Basement Systems is not your garden-variety, "We've used CRM for two weeks and we love it!" type of customer profile. Under the flag of its Connecticut Basement Systems brand, which provides retail and scheduled maintenance to customers in the Connecticut/Massachusetts/New York area, the company refined a GoldMine implementation that was originally implemented in back in 1996, only years later getting it to really create strong value for the business process.

"We got all of our customers into a database, because the idea was that we needed something that could keep better customer information, but we didn't know what we wanted to do with it at the time," says Mark Daconto, vice president of Basement Systems. GoldMine did some record-keeping, but didn't make many changes for the better. After about five years, the company engaged a new integrator to come in and turn the raw materials of its CRM system into a business productivity tool.

"The question was, how to get them away from the phone-book mentality to help them run their business [better]," says Steven Jacobowitz, president and CEO of GoldMine integrator SagaSolutions.com. He observed that although Basement Systems had all of its call center agents using the system, there was no consistency of process, and the potential of the software was woefully under-exploited, with scheduling still handled in paper books and most customer records still living in file cabinets.

"There were eight salespeople, so they had a schedule book for each one of those salespeople, and in order to figure out who was going into what area on any given day, a number of books had to be moved around," says Jacobowitz. Once Jacobowitz and Basement Systems mapped out an ideal interaction process and put it to work, a unified electronic calendar was deployed, improving the visibility of the field force.

"We had everything systematized within our company, but it wasn't systematized to automate or flow really well. [SagaSolutions.com] saved us man-hours of typing, setting appointments, scheduling, following up, and so on. It took many months to get through all the departments, but by the time we were done, we had streamlined the whole process," says Daconto.

In addition to handling incoming calls and scheduled appointments better, Basement Systems overhauled its marketing programs, using GoldMine to automate the creation of annual service reminder cards, allowing hundreds of mailings per day instead of a few dozen. "We're able to make sure we contact more people quick, and we've increased probably about 25 percent the number of annual maintenances we perform each year," he says.

"For the customer's benefit, they are being taken care of in a much more efficient manner than they were, and their calls are not being dropped anymore," says Jacobowitz. "[Basement Systems'] next step is to look at more concerted marketing campaigns that will help them figure out where their leads are coming from, and which sources are bringing the most leads to the table and providing the most efficient rates of investment."

"Dollars per employee has gone up every year in the past five to six years. That can relate to a lot of things, not just GoldMine, but it certainly makes up part of it," says Daconto. He also credits low turnover with keeping the business running smoothly.

Perhaps the greatest compliment Daconto pays to the CRM awakening is that he is rolling out the new processes as a template for other basement maintenance partners the company sells to. "Because Steve made the flowcharts and maps of what we were doing and how it was changed, I now use that as a training tool for my dealers—here are the steps we use in our call center, here are the steps for completing a service call. People want to know, and it's been a very helpful tool."

None of the companies mentioned in this article have been clients of CRMuse LLC or Jason Compton for at least the past six months.