Chronopost – Centralizing customer management in the cloud

"Through using cloud-based services, it is helping us achieve our goals to get even closer to our customers."

Georges Sawaya, CIO, Chronopost

The express delivery industry is extremely competitive. To stay ahead of its competition, Chronopost had to increase its market share and improve customer loyalty. But this required complete visibility of its customers' changing needs and the ability to get sales, marketing and support working together to meet them. This meant measuring business performance and profitability to make sure the company moved in line with changing market conditions.

The Challenge

Keeping its customers close is essential for Chronopost. Knowing its customers better provides greater insight into exactly what customers want. Meeting customer expectations prevents customers from taking their business to the competition. With that in mind, Chronopost wanted to merge all of its customer management processes into one central, cloud-based system—a system that could be shared easily between marketing, sales and support.

The Solution

CGI worked with Chronopost to set up a sales and service cloud system from Salesforce.com. We then helped the company figure out the best way to migrate to the new system and roll it out across the company. Leveraging the Salesforce.com platform meant the cloud-based system could be customized to precisely fit Chronopost's requirements.

To keep costs down and complete the project as quickly as possible, we used an agile methodology and the use of cloud technology meant that users could start working with the new services faster than usual. Using our skills and experience with service-oriented architecture (SOA) technologies, we were able to smoothly integrate these new services within Chronopost's existing IT landscape and ensure they aligned with the company's performance, security and governance policies.

The Results

Cloud-based services provide our clients with powerful benefits. Getting the services "ready-to-use" is much faster. The total cost of ownership (TCO) is also significantly lower than running systems onsite. No upfront investment is needed because the services run on a pay-as-you-use model.

Other benefits include the following:

• Better information sharing
• Increased efficiencies
• Lower information system costs

This project was the first step in delivering a complete IT transformation for Chronopost. CGI is continuing to collaborate with the company to define a global strategy—one that will result in a truly agile information system environment that supports increased growth by providing customers with quick, innovative and cost-effective services.

Why CGI?

We can use the right mix of cloud-based services to help our clients transform their business, so that they can get their products and services to market faster and improve their customers' experience. And, they can achieve this for less cost through effective systems and service integration, creating a unified service. We use our know-how in security, complex integration, business transformation, and service management.

But it's not just about cloud. We help clients shape their future IT environment and create the right processes and technology, with the right partners.

With future IT and cloud services, the sky's the limit.

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Note: The project referenced in this case study was delivered by Logica, which CGI acquired in August 2012.