Touchstone Lighting

The Director of Touchstone Lighting told OGL that “my family has always been involved in the electrical sector and that makes us good at what we do.” The company pride themselves on the quality of customer service they provide to their customers, which is why they needed to invest in a system that had a sophisticated CRM system which is essential for the day to day running of the company.

Before prof.ITplus, Touchstone Lighting was using Sage 500 which “was really difficult to use, it was not as user-friendly as prof.ITplus. The search facilities certainly weren’t as good, you couldn’t search for anything like stock codes, product names or postcodes, which you can in prof.ITplus, and as a telephone-oriented company, we needed the information then and there, else it becomes difficult.”

“Growth comes from efficiency and we can see improved efficiency in our telesales offices."

It was key that Touchstone Lighting’s business software provided them with all the data and information in an instant to make telesales easy and effective for providing high quality customer service. The Director explains, “We never want to say, ‘we need to call you back’ as we’re at risk of losing sales. Especially in the replacement market, our customers often have their customers on their trade counter, and they need to fulfil their needs without making them wait around. If we have to call them back, they could simply call another supplier and we could have potentially lost business.”

The CRM allows the telesales staff to provide excellent customer service. They can quickly and effectively create quotes, input orders and find customer information, such as past orders or special pricing, which ensures their customers return. “You gain customers because you have fantastic customer service. Absolutely price is important, but for me customer service is more important.”

“We use the prof.ITplus CRM all the time. It is the first thing everyone opens when they come in of a morning and it stays open all the time.”

“The Sage CRM was an extra bolt-on and one of the reasons for choosing prof.ITplus was the module was fully integrated. In prof.ITplus, you can go into the stock module, purchase order screen, check delivery dates, go from the quote screen to the sales order screen and back to where you were very easily.” The Director explained how the CRM is the first thing everyone opens when they arrive. They use it for record keeping, noting all telephone orders and creating quotes. It means that everyone in the company can easily view past interactions with customers, which makes future communications simple.  

As a distributor of lighting components, Touchstone Lighting find the system very easy to use - “it does 99% of the things we need it to do” - but the Director believes that, “you could be a distributor of anything, from fixings to car parts or lighting components, the system will do it. It’s a product that’s perfect across the whole distribution and stockist industry.”

When asked if they have any advice for companies looking to invest in a new ERP system, the Director said, “be sure to get a good demo, view the system and speak to people who already use the system. We absolutely recommend prof.ITplus and would be happy for people to come and see how we use the system.”