Founded in 1960, ACME Truck Line Inc. is a flatbed trucking service with a fleet of 1,300 trucks. It handles 4,000 loads weekly, each weighing 50-50,000 pounds. Specializing in short hauls of 100-180 miles within the Gulf Coast states, the company maintains 70 offices throughout the South and wanted to link these offices with Webbased applications and streamline its entire business infrastructure.

“We had been relying on separate LANs in each of our offices to facilitate local operations,” explains Mike Coatney, president of ACME Truck Line, “but were unable to leverage information across offices. As the price of broadband links decreased, however, we realized that we could create a Web-based WAN between all of our offices so that every individual in our company could leverage common data to improve internal operations as well as the customer experience.”

To facilitate the company’s operational improvements, Coatney searched for a Webbased CRM solution capable of delivering a consolidated view of customer activities to every staff member involved with clients, including sales staff, dispatchers, and the credit/collections department. In addition, the solution had to support sales force automation tasks; for example, delivering— through a wireless PDA device—critical information used by field sales staff to convert prospects to customers and ensure customer satisfaction.

Coatney also wanted management tools to allow regional sales managers the ability to track and analyze each phase of the field sales effort and share data with national account management staff. In order to accommodate such broad utilization of customer and sales account data, the system needed a robust security capability that would limit “read” and/or “write” access features to specific individuals. Finally, the entire solution had to be easy to use.

“This is a trucking business: we pick up something at point A and bring it to point B,” Coatney says. “There is virtually no consultative selling or complex technical customer support. Our processes are simple and straightforward and we needed a solution that was equally simple.”

After a lengthy market search and detailed proposals from five vendors, ACME Truck Line turned to the only solution that met each of its requirements—SageCRM. “The solution was easy to implement,” Coatney says. “With the help of the Sage Software Professional Services Group, we were up and running and fully integrated with our existing IBM AS /400 back-office applications over the course of a few months.”

ACME Truck Line’s SageCRM solution enhances the all-important client-customer relationship by providing an integrated framework for applying value-added services and support to new and existing customers. Using its new system, the company was able to simplify many of its procedures.,/p>

Once a sales rep meets with a new customer, he completes electronic forms provided by SageCRM on his wireless PDA. In addition to standardized fields such as name, address, and industry, the rep is prompted for information about the potential business opportunity and competing trucking services being used by the prospect. If this form is not completed within a pre-specified interval, the system automatically alerts the sales rep for further action.

All of this data, along with information about subsequent customer activities, is centrally stored in the SageCRM database where it can be leveraged by authorized users. Before a national accounts manager visits a customer, for example, he can obtain up-to-the-minute information about issues that may have occurred at any of the customer’s multiple sites serviced by ACME Truck Line, and can address them directly with the customer.

“We have built our business for more than 40 years by offering the best possible customer service consistent with available technologies,” Coatney says, “and SageCRM is empowering us to continue that commitment. By giving our managers, sales staff, and dispatchers the information they need to address all customer issues, this solution is letting us streamline operational overhead and strengthen customer relationships with outstanding service.”