Telewest

Telewest is a leading broadband communications and media group in the UK. local access broadcasting network covers approximately 4.7 million homes in the UK, The consumer sales division provides consumer television, telephony and internet access services to residential customers.

The business sales division focuses on a wide range of voice, data, and managed solutions services for businesses. their content segment supplies basic television channels and related services to the UK pay-television broadcasting market. They have a ‘‘national network’’ and an internet protocol, or IP, services platform, which allow them to handle the voice, video and data needs of their customers. their broadband, local access network and architecture provide them with high-speed interconnection and two-way interactivity with directly connected residential and business customers.

They have approximately 1.8 million residential customer comprised of consumer television, telephony and internet services customers. A growing and strategically significant part of the business is ‘‘blueyonder broadband, currently they have approximately 698,000 blueyonder subscribers, approximately 71% of whom also subscribed to both TV and Broadband. They also own Flextech, together with UKTV, Flextech is the largest provider of basic (i.e.non-premium) thematic channels to the UK multi-channel television broadcasting market, reaching approximately 10.7 million pay multi-channel television subscriber homes.

Ramwave Engagement

Ramwave were commissioned to develop a revolutionary database management system, to enable the efficient recording and analysis of daily sales transaction carried out by reps. Telewest’s main requirement included recording of daily sales transaction details, customer contact management tracking and monthly sales forecasting by per rep, team, manager and per branch. Unlike most other database systems in use within sales organisations today, the proposed system would incorporate a database on the web server with Internet front end, allowing users and administrators of the system to input data quickly, efficiently and at remote locations. The system also had to enable managers to analyse, sort and present the data in a large variety of formats – thus allowing tailored reporting. A key component of this new system is that it shall fully integrated with Telewest’s existing SAS system – forming an invaluable compliment to the existing infrastructure.

Benefit:

The information collated in the new system helped to make monthly management forecast more accurately with less paperwork and administration.

A sample of the functionalities of the Telewest contact management system includes:

• The use of a Web based template for inputting data
• A user-friendly template, with a clear layout of fields and an appropriate corporate image
• Data fields which are most relevant to generate appropriate and useful reports.

The system allows significant flexibility to Telewest, it has met all expectation and helped further with sales processes:

• KCAPS, number of knocks, contacts, appointments, presentations and sales
• Time started and finished knocking
• Total number of doors allocated
• Demographic area of knocking, including postcode
• Name and address of appointments made
• A record of the success or failure of each appointment/presentation, with reasons for failure
• Existing competitors at particular location, e.g. Telecom, Broadband, satellite supplier, etc.

One key area of value added to management is the system’s ability to provide information on how Reps are actually performing (including length of time on the field, demographics, etc). This has enabled closer and more accurate monitoring of staff performance, thereby highlighting any weaknesses and enabling greater quality staff appraisals