Weather may be inconsistent, but service delivery shouldn't be. Unfortunately, for Weather Services International (WSI), its customer interaction strategy was far less precise than predicting the weather. Staying competitive called for a new forecast.

WSI couldn't monitor its service organization for sales opportunities, and salespeople couldn't directly access information about whether their customers had open service issues because the sales and service teams had separate databases. "The sales team would have to call in to the service team to find out if there were any issues and vice versa," says Karen Brooks, WSI's vice president of customer care. "And putting a customer on hold or calling them back so each team could catch up cost us valuable time."

All customer information now resides in WSI's Sage CRM SalesLogix Support database. The SalesLogix system displays a precise view of all of a customer's information to both the sales and service teams, so no one has to scurry around to find the data they need. As a result, they can respond to customers' sales and service needs in a more timely manner. For example, during the severe weather events of 2005, WSI employees were able to monitor customers in locations including Florida and Louisiana in real time to immediately determine if they were having problems with their weather forecasting systems. If they found problems with them, the SalesLogix system enabled WSI employees to communicate with the customers instantly.

"We are now able to provide better tracking and people spend less time looking for information," Brooks says. "With the information at our fingertips…we are able to be more responsive to customers, and the organization as a whole is more productive."