Artnature increases sales and improves customer satisfaction with unified CRM

Artnature Inc. of Japan specializes in wigs and hairpieces services. The company had a goal to reach ¥30 billion in annual sales by fiscal year 2008, but its lack of a standardized workflow for accepting, processing and manufacturing customer orders was impeding its business growth. Because all of its products are made to order, it was essential for Artnature to enhance its workflow by improving its sales processes and internal communications to ensure that customers receive the best service possible.

Artnature turned to IBM Business Consulting Services for help in improving its sales and service processes. The IBM Global Business Services team implemented a new sales process based on IBM's Signature Selling Method (SSM). SSM unifies sales identification criteria for all personnel and enables Artnature's management to track the progress of all sales activity in real time. IBM Japan and IBM Business Solutions then defined the system requirements and developed the back-end customer relationship management (CRM) system, which stores all customer-related data in a central repository.

As a result of the IBM consulting engagement, Artnature achieved the following benefits:

· Increase of its customer base by 9 percent in 2005 and projections to achieve a 5.6 percent increase in annual sales

· A new system which provides significant increases in customer satisfaction, better insight into sales and improved internal communications

“New sales processes and a unified CRM system allow Artnature to respond quickly to our customers' needs, and to the changing needs of the marketplace.” Mr. Igarashi, President, Artnature Inc.