Knowledge Management to improve Sales effectiveness 

It was imperative for IGT, which was approaching the market with an “inside-out” strategy, that the customer facing team in the markets is fully informed of these developments. The marketing team at IGT came up with the idea of an S&M InfoNet, a knowledge management system deployed using an extranet to keep its global sales team up to date. 

About the company

InterGlobe Technologies (IGT) provides IT solutions and BPO services to the travel industry. IGT, in our view, is one of the few truly domain focused players in India. In the sense that the company’s foray into the IT domain was to leverage its three-decade long experience and focus on the travel industry.

IGT’s value proposition in the market is centered around its rich domain understanding backed by the knowledge and experience of successfully applying the relevant technologies to solve business issues. IGT has created several solution frameworks for key travel applications like loyalty programs, revenue accounting, computerized reservation and internet booking. The company is continually adding to its portfolio of solutions, and is also fine tuning its breadth and depth of offerings based on market feedback.

The challenge

It was imperative for IGT, which was approaching the market with an "inside-out" strategy, that the customer facing team in the markets is fully informed of these developments. And also be completely aware of the goings-on, in terms of business development initiatives, in the various markets. Real-time updates are extremely critical as the travel industry is truly global in nature, and a prospecting situation in say Australia, may have a positive spin-off on the European market, for instance. Also, being a young organization with a new team in the market, it was felt necessary to empower the team with as much information as possible that would allow them to present their company more effectively to prospects.

The solution

Given that the BD effort was spread across four continents, the obvious way to stay in touch was by leveraging technology. The marketing team at IGT came up with the idea of an S&M InfoNet, a knowledge management system deployed using an extranet to keep its global sales team up to date.

The S&M InfoNet would be the one-stop web-based repository of the latest marketing collateral, training material, proposal copies, domain related articles, market information, white papers, and so on.

This gave the new marketing team a way to continuously feed collateral to the sales team, and ensure that the latest versions were being used by them. For the sales team, it was a "help-desk" which gave them access to useful information, any-time, any-where.

The marketing team did not stop with creating and updating. They realized the importance of communicating updates and "marketing" the tool well. Gautam Sarkar, the owner and administrator of the S&M InfoNet sends weekly updates to the team on what’s new on the InfoNet. And that was not all. A lot of impetus for this initiative came from the VP, S&M, Raja Natesan, who strongly encouraged his team to use the InfoNet.

With security features like authorization-based user-defined access, the InfoNet today has over 300 documents that have been divided into sub-sections for easy access. Each new upload on the InfoNet is marked for easy location of users. If for a moment you feel lost while searching any document in this "world of information", there is a user-friendly search functionality that is handy all the time. As a common platform for exchanging views within the S&M team members, the InfoNet also provides a news ticker and a message board with a feature for an automatic email update for every new topic or a follow-up message posted.

As a part of the regular update of the website, all user feedback is collated and reviewed periodically. The suggestions are classified as minor and major changes. Any reported minor changes (eg. movement of documents from one section another, user-access problems, hosting related, non-functioning links, etc.) are taken care of on a daily basis. The desired major changes (as and when required) are implemented on a weekly basis and would cover modifications to the website look & feel, modification/addition of sections, addition of new web pages, etc.

The results

The Admin module allows the administrator to manage user profiles and generate reports on usage patterns, including reports for date-wise last few usages for each user, by pages viewed. The reports are very encouraging, with users often visiting the website more than once everyday. This clearly indicates the usefulness of the InfoNet to the IGT S&M team members. The statistics also reveal that the most viewed sections of the S&M InfoNet. An important aside- the least used functionality is the search option; thanks to the well conceptualized architecture and design of the website users can find the desired information easily, while saving on the cost of communication and time.