How the small business kitchen company enhanced business processes during a time of rapid growth using MS technology.

Left hand, meet right hand

Ramsbottom Kitchens sells and installs kitchens from its showroom in Ramsbottom, just north of Manchester. Two full-time sales people visit customers in their homes to measure and plan kitchens. Then there is a team of people in the showroom.

The challenge facing the company was how to coordinate everyone’s work and make sure that the left hand knew what the right hand was doing. With nine kitchen installations a week, keeping everyone in the picture is a challenge.

"We did the customer service side of things manually,” says Tracey Peace, the company’s managing director. “The problem I had was that if a customer rang into the showroom and the person dealing with the customer was away or on holiday, the rest of the team couldn’t answer the question."

Nobody likes to hear “I don’t know; I’ll have to call you back". Equally, staff would rather answer questions immediately than have to chase a colleague and then call someone back. Tracey asked Glideslope Software, a Microsoft Small Business Specialist, to solve the problem.

Customer information in one place

John Miller, from Glideslope Software, recommended Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 to provide a central store for information, as well as Microsoft Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager.

Business Contact Manager is a customer relationship management (CRM) program similar to the kinds of software large companies use to keep track of their interactions with customers. It works hand in glove with Outlook, so it is very easy to use. Miller installed the new software in November 2006.

Every Friday, Tracey and her colleagues enter all the new kitchen orders in the system, including customer contact details and a description of what the kitchen fitters will be doing. They get a printer report as a job specification. The sales people and the rest of the company use the system whenever they talk to a customer so that it has a constantly updated contact history.

Better customer service, less work

Although the main objective was to streamline the way Ramsbottom Kitchens deals with customers, the new software had other benefits.

Small Business Server let the company set up shared calendars to replace the printed and bound paper diaries they used before. When a customer calls the showroom to book or change an appointment, the office staff can update the diary. The sales people’s diaries are stored on their laptops and they get updated automatically when they come back to the showroom.

The server also lets Tracey access her email and diary when she’s away from the office. It means she can work from home and keep on top of her emails when she’s on holiday. For any entrepreneur, time away from the business can be worrying. Now she can be in touch wherever and whenever she wants.

However, the biggest benefit is better customer service. “Now whenever a customer rings in, we can see exactly what’s going on,” says Tracey.

The staff can answer more customer questions on the first call. Tracey comments that the person who looks after customer services used to work for an airline. Compared to airline systems, she says, Ramsbottom Kitchen’s system is really straightforward.

“She can’t believe it. It just works. It’s fantastic. The information is readily available without having to go into this screen and that screen.”