Case Studies

Link Telecom Limited

Technical solution

Computer desktop, server, backup and infrastructure support utilising Microsoft Windows Server 2000-2003, office 2000-2003, Double-take disaster recovery for email / Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange and Blackberry enterprise email services.

About Link Telecom Limited

Established in 1987, Link Telecom now has over 18 years experience in finding the ideal telecommunications solutions for our customers. With an annual turnover of over £10m and are one of the largest and longest established company's in the UK market operating within this sector.

The Need

With business departments in retail and corporate sales, Link Telecom had disparate systems handling their store / EPOS related sales / stock management (at an individual store level only) and corporate handling a different set of customers on an in house sales tracking / projects system.

Link Telecom had a requirement to have one central data base of stock control, customers, prospects, sales pipeline, business sales performance and a slick retail process to maximise customer throughput.

The Solution

3SLive was implemented at Link Telecom in 2003, at both its head office in Keighley, West Yorkshire and throughout its retail outlets in the UK. The primary purpose of the system was to enable head-office to monitor performance of each of its stores, including full EPOS with real-time stock control. The capturing of customer data was taken at POS, thus ensuring if a customer visited a variety of Link Telecom's stores, their entire sales history could be viewed and reported upon.

From a head-office perspective, implementing this centralised system provided far more accurate customer information, which in turn enabled Link Telecom to deliver extremely targeted marketing campaigns, including dealing with mobile phone contract renewals to up-selling relevant, related products. A complete customer relationship was developed by gathering intelligent, relevant data to Link's marketing needs.

At a store level, stock levels were also viewable, thus enabling them to deal with stock shortfalls/surpluses at that level, which while moderated from head-office, gave the local stores freedom to "trade" directly with each other.

From an EPOS perspective, all stock was sold via barcode scanning, and mobile phone stock was individually identified by its unique IMEI number, thus enabling Link Telecom to also build a profile of the "lifetime" of every phone sold.

Therefore, despite Link Telecom selling to a mass market, the implementation of 3SLive enabled them to perform extremely customised targeted marketing to its customer base, thus ensuring the customer experience felt like an extremely personalised one.

The strap line that has been commonly used at Link Telecom is one of them being able to offer a boutique service with supermarket volumes of customers. This is due to the intelligence of the data collected via 3SLive.

3SIXTY Systems managed the entire lifecycle of the Link Telecom project, working with the Link Telecom management team in all aspects of the project lifecycle, from discovery phase, design, development, change management, training, implementation and of course operational support.

The Benefits

• Centralised database for customers, stock control, project planning (for installations), sales pipeline and sales commissions.
• EPOS functionality supplied and developed by 3SIXTY that was fully customised to integrate with 3SLive CRM.
• Sales commissions calculations to incentivise sales teams / individuals. Centralised and controlled by head office.
• Stock movement / management control to minimise losses, returns and low stock level control.
• Increased sales turnover due to a more productive retail sales operation via the customised EPOS units.

www.linktelecom.co.uk