The Challenge

The Deutsche Bahn with its ca. 295.000 employees is the largest railway company in Europe and interacting worldwide. Different divisions provide services in mobility, logistics and infrastructure.

The DB Netz AG is a subsidiary of the Deutschen Bahn AG (DB AG) and its responsibility inside the Deutsche Bahn group is the track system. In 1994 it’s been 40 companies that were having a business relation with the DB Netz AG. Nowadays it’s 380 companies that are a customer of the DB Netz AG and using the railway for their businesses.

The increasing number of customers caused an increasing need for services. That‘s why it was clear, that an appropriate system was needed. The already existing internal solution of the company was only practicable for basic claims data and did not really fit here. A CRM solution for the business field was needed. This CRM solution was supposed to support the customer management, because the yearly customer satisfaction survey showed that this department was having deficits according to the field of complaint handling. A CRM solution was supposed to support and to bring the changes, like shorter reaction times when working on a complaint, the DB Netz AG was looking for.

The Solution

The first contact with SuperOffice took place in 2007 at a trade fair.

After having a first overview on the several vendors an official buying process was initiated. In the end of the selection process there have been three providers left. Among them was SuperOffice. The reason why SuperOffice was finally picked was -besides the fulfillment of all the functional requirements and the good pricing- especially the user friendliness. The intuitive operable surface allows the user to start with SuperOffice after a very short period of vocational adjustment.

The Results

Today more than 2000 employees of the company use SuperOffice CRM.

Besides some employees in the order procession department, the central office and the marketing it’s especially the employees in the customer management department that use SuperOffice CRM. Most of them use SuperOffice in a web browser. It enables them to be extremely flexible as they can work completely locationindependent.

The IT also receives many benefits through the use of the browser variant as there is less effort in case of an update needed and this is saving important resources. The result of the yearly customer survey according to the handling of complaints has increased significant from 3,4 to 2,3 (in school marks). Having important master data centrally in one place facilitates many of the internal operations and saves time. No employee hast to call any other employee in the company anymore when he’s e.g. looking for a phone number. This and more is now all available by having a look into SuperOffice CRM.

Using SuperOffice has also caused a change of mind according to the explosiveness of complaints and made them even more present in the heads of the employees. Many of the processes at DB Netz AG grew historically which means that still not all the data can be found centrally. But Ralph Grassel mentions additionally that he is wishing that this change will be taking place through the changes that happen inside the IT. The good SuperOffice architecture and the existing interface openness of SuperOffice CRM could be part of building a center for all the systems that follow.

• Improvement of customer service; faster handling of complaints, more presence in the heads of the employees
• Measurable improvement of the customer happiness
• Saving time on internal operations through transparence and central availability of data
• More flexibility through location independent working with the web version