Customer case
Fortop monitors everything in Archie CRM
Fortop Automation & Energycontrol is an importer of industrial automation and energy monitoring products. No e-mail is sent to a customer or phone call made without being recorded in Archie. "We monitor everything in Archie: turnover, margin, development of customer groups, responses to e-mail newsletters. It's more or less the foundation under our business."
The benefits of working with Archie
More control over margins
More relevant emailings
Increased insight into customer base
About Fortop
Fortop is a specialist in the field of industrial automation and energy control. Fortop realizes that safety and reliability of machines and installations as well as insight into energy quality are critical to customers' business processes. Those customer processes are central to the solutions Fortop provides and the way the company does business. Want to know more about the personal and solution-oriented approach? Check out fortop.nl
Importer of industrial automation and energy monitoring
Industry
11 - 50 FTE
Company size
Netherlands
Location
Purchasing, Sales, Relationship Management, Marketing & Dashboards & Analytics
Use cases
Archie CRM
Product
Quest for growth
Sixteen years ago, Harmen Sikkema and Ton Kanters founded Fortop, a wholesaler and importer of a handful of brands in the field of industrial automation. Customer by customer, they built their business. For the first few years, they used Act as their customer relationship management package, until it soon offered too little functionality. Harmen: "The details make all the difference for the customer. The more you capture about a customer and the better you respond to their individual needs, the more successful you can be."
Archie was one of the parties Fortop talked to in their search for what Harmen calls "functional tools for effective relationship management. "We had a list of ten requirements and had sent it to all suppliers. Archie was the only one that had prepared a demo that specifically addressed our needs. The software met all our needs and more."
More relevant emailings
That lake was initially parked for a while. "We have slowly grown in the use of functionality. Currently, we use just about everything," says Harmen. A few things stand out. "We had been sending e-mailings for some time, but with Archie we just got the hang of that. We are now going further and further with segmenting customer groups and creating specific mailings tailored to those target groups. After all, the more relevant the articles are to a reader, the higher the response rate and the fewer unsubscribes you get."
Another frequently used functionality is the Attention Monitor. Harmen: "Of course I look at the Sales Monitor every day, but I get real opportunities for improvement mainly from the Attention Monitor. It helps us map out how much contact there is with which customers. It reveals things that would otherwise remain invisible, such as customers with whom we call and e-mail a lot, while they generate very little turnover with us. Or, even worse, very large customers with whom we hardly communicate at all." Archie is a functional tool for effective relationship management.
"Archie is functional tool for effective relationship management."
Understanding customer base
Harmen also uses the Customer Value Optimizer (CVO) a lot. With it, you create a customer pyramid at the push of a button. "Well, pyramid. In most cases it has a completely different shape with us. I create CVOs per industry, per country and per article group or brand. I can easily compare segments with each other and over time. How do segments evolve? What is the effect of a marketing campaign in a particular industry? Why is it that I achieve a much higher turnover per customer in one country than in another? Without Archie, it would take a lot of energy to gain this insight."
Harmen & Elisabeth Sikkema
Because Fortop gets marketing budgets from suppliers, this far-reaching insight also just makes him money. "For example, I can show that one campaign works well to turn prospects into customers and another actually causes existing customers to order more. You notice that suppliers are really impressed by so much insight. They want to do business with us for that reason."
Grip on margins
Even Elisabeth Sikkema, who manages Fortop's inside administrative department, wouldn't know what to do without Archie. "Everything comes together in Archie: purchasing, sales, returns, repairs, emails, phone calls, you name it. For example, if I want to know if someone has ever bought something from us before, I look in Archie, not in our ERP system. What is very nice is that in Archie when we make a quotation we also see the purchase prices of the items. I see immediately if, for example, we have received a volume discount from a supplier. That way we keep a very good grip on our margins."
"Archie helps us increase our efficiency."
Elisabeth and Harmen praise the user-friendliness of the software. "Employees like working with it, we never have to convince anyone. If we already have discussions about Archie, it's about: how shall we record this? Because it is a flexible package, there are several roads that lead to Rome."
"It feels like the package was designed entirely to our liking. It just fits our needs exactly."
Finally, they are also very pleased with the cooperation with the company Archie. Harmen: "We regularly sit down with them to discuss possible improvements in the software. They hold our ideas up to the light and if they think our improvement proposal is relevant to more customers, it becomes part of the standard package. As a result, we have very little customization, really only links to other packages. The rest is standard software. Yet it feels like the package was designed entirely to our liking. It just fits our needs exactly."
Just take a seat behind the wheel!
Are you curious to see what Archie looks like when it's set up for your business? Do you want to know what is unique about the most user-friendly CRM for SMEs? Sign up for a 10-minute demo.
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