Providing good, quality customer service was increasingly becoming a challenge for Phoenix-based Honeywell Aeropace. More customers were citing problems just trying to do business with the company, a sure sign that efficiency and customer satisfaction levels were less than stellar.

The problem was that the company had no single view of its customers. In fact, customer data was stored in more than 160 disparate systems spread across 16 lines of business and 11 business units. Honeywell also had a variety of customer-facing units, none of which could pool the resources of the others or find a way to present a single view of Honeywell to its various customers.

"With 40 independent product lines to market, it was not uncommon for several salespeople across the aerospace division to contact the same customers during the same week or even the same day without knowing it,” said Darryl Carroll, senior director of defense and space business operations at Honeywell. “Large customers sometimes had as many as 50 points of contact with the company."

The company decided to adopt a Six Sigma approach aimed at improving the way it handles customer service. Six Sigma, a disciplined, data-driven methodology for fostering quality, can be used to improve a variety of processes, from manufacturing to customer service.

Honeywell’s Six Sigma Customer Excellence initiative identified four key customer-facing business processes across all of its business units. These processes included the tracking of customer service requests and issues, sales and opportunity management, campaign marketing management, and the measurement of customer satisfaction through an internal program called Voice of the Customer (VOC).

All of those functions were supported by a Honeywell-built system called ATLAS, for Aerospace Total Account System. ATLAS consists of a central database for customer information and real-time mechanisms for making sure the right people are notified and can access the right customer information in a timely manner. ATLAS also includes several Siebel CRM applications: Siebel Sales, Siebel Call Center, Siebel Field Service, Siebel Campaigns and Siebel Analytics.

With ATLAS and the CRM applications in place, service requests are handled quicker and more efficiently. Now when service requests are raised by customers or field service, they are logged within ATLAS by product and severity and then routed to the right service engineer within the customer support center. Service engineers can then access a knowledge base and documentation, also part of ATLAS, that lets them respond with better, quicker answers. Since implementing ATLAS, Honeywell Aerospace has increased on-time closure rate of service issues from 45% to 83% and reduced customer response time by 27%, leading to a 38% increase in customer satisfaction, Carroll said.

"Today, one common customer information system is used by sales reps, field service engineers, product line personnel and response center agents across [the company&singlequot;s] main business units,” Carrol said. “As a result, everyone using the system can see which Honeywell products a client owns, as well as the status of parts being serviced, and can identify additional sales opportunities.”

With those synergies in place, Honeywell Aerospace also saw a marked increase in after-market sales of spare parts. The first year the aftermarket special programs group began using the system, aftermarket revenues increased from $45 million to more than $100 million, the company said.

For campaign marketing management, Honeywell Aerospace is leveraging Siebel Campaigns with Siebel Call Center to support both its own telemarketing campaigns and the loading of external campaigns. Honeywell estimates that the combo has helped it identify 40% more new sales opportunities.

Overall, the system “helps us spot systemic issues so we can proactively address them,” Carroll said. “It&singlequot;s also improving opportunity management by helping us uncover opportunities that represent new trends or needs in the market, so we can beat the competition in putting together a solution to meet that need."