Before: With a merchandising field force of over 20,000 reps, American Greetings found it difficult, slow and expensive to try and get communications out in a timely manner. To keep up with ever-changing requirements at the retail store level, American Greetings needed a communications tool for its work force that was faster and cheaper than mailing documents. To improve upon the efficiency of their field force, American Greetings also needed better documentation of store visits & tasks, not just for their company but for their retail partners as well.

After: CRC created an entirely customized telephone bulletin-board solution for American Greetings. Going beyond a beefed-up voicemail system, CRCs bulletin board tool allowed merchandising managers to communicate to reps and get survey data from field reps back in the same day. This allowed management to have much higher visibility at the store level, eliminated the cost of paper mailings, and drastically reduced the length of time it took to get store level data from- from days or weeks down to same-day. The bulletin board system has proven so useful that American Greetings has expanded its use to other departments, to share and utilize the critical store level data that CRC's bulletin board tool produces. (less info)