3M is a company founded in 1902 that employs over 91,000 people and produces over 50,000 products. It implemented a CRM and KM system to address issues with customer queries, including repetition of questions, transfers to R&D experts, and lack of a centralized knowledge base. The system included a Remedy Action Request System, Primus eCrm software for knowledge sharing and search capabilities, and a customer data warehouse. This implementation led to benefits like a 13% increase in agent productivity, a 11% increase in first call resolutions, and a 55% reduction in transfers to experts.

1. CRM/KM Initiaves
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2. History of 3M
Formerly Called Minnesota Minning and
Manufacturing Company
Trade Public
Founded June 13,1902
Employs 91,584
Products 50,000+
Founders •John Dwan
•Hermon Cable
•Henry Bryan
•William A McGonagle
•Danley Budd

3. Customer Loyalty
• Strong Focus on R&D to foster experimentation and innovation.
• Focus on offering customer better service
• Providing super Quality, Value and Service
• Six independent call centre- manned by dedicated team of agents.
• Improving solution accuracy and problem resolution speed.

4. Major Issues
• Sophisticated and complex products – nature of customer queries became
diverse and complex (1400 questions a day).
• Eventually began keeping : (i) Technical Bulletins (ii) Product Brochures
(iii) Notes containing product information
• Training was involved which incurred cost and time.
• Unsolved queries to be transferred to R&D experts -18% calls transferred-
consumption of time of R&D experts could not focus on innovation.
• Repetition of Customer Queries –Flow of incomplete and unsatisfactory
answers- Taking days to resolve,
• No mechanism to know whether the problem is solved or not.

5. Implementation of CRM & KM
• Creation of 14 member task force- 3M’s customer service manager, call centre
agents, IT analysts and documentation developers.
• Remedy Action Request System (RARS): easily integrated with many leading
knowledge management solution products.
• Primus eCrm Solution –flexible workflow that supported individual approaches
to problem solving-immediate sharing of newly developed solutions.
• Primus eServer and Primus eSupport- Desktop client software
• Primus associative search engine – powerful search retrieval and authoring
capabilities implemented in its IT customer service centre.
• Agents manning centre – handled technical queries from 3M employees.

6. • Data warehouse- details of customer problems were fed software gave
solutions.
• eCrm software stored data of the customers and in case the calls are
transferred- repetition was avoided. Software gave access to critical language
using natural language.
• New solution were synthesized and made a part of knowledge base .
• Primus Software provided new training opportunity also revised CSR job
descriptions and reward systems.
• Company Intranet- availability of information to employees- answering
questions via emails.
• Self Service Extranet – online trouble shooting allowing customers to access
eCrm Software and solve their problems through internet.
• Information available to Resellers and Distribution Networks.
• Continous Updating of Knowledge base.

7. Benefits of the System
• Speeding up problem solving, real time knowledge sharing useful for support
representatives.
• 13% increase in productivity of the agents with improved solution accuracy.
• First call resolution increased from 84% to 95%
• Referrals to experts decreased by 55%
• Reduce support training time and cost by 35%
• Employee satisfaction level increased
• 3M to monitor quality of its customer service efforts- imputs helped in developing new
products.

8. CRM Subsystems at 3M
• The Front Office
Salesforce Automation or the Sales information system: face to face sale sand
relationship management activities.
Partner Management system: geared to provide support to intermediaries
Call or contact centre: telephone, emails, extranet
Website
• The Middleware
Data warehouse or data mart compilation of data
• The Back Office
Legacy System: management of transactions or products

10. KM at 3M
• Process through which the organisation generate value from intellectual
and knowledge based assets.
• IT tools such as off the shelf email packages and sophisticated
collaboration tools.
• Knowledge repositories, expertise access tools, e-learning applications,
discussion and chat technologies, synchronous interaction tools and
search and data mining tools