Pivotal CRM has helped Ssavills achieve dynamic growth through the delivery of highly personalized services and become one of the world’s major providers of global property services. Pivotal CRM solutions touch every aspect of Savills' business, including marketing, sales, service, HR and finance across its residential, commercial and private finance divisions.

1. Pivotal CRM | Case Study
Casestudy
Pivotal CRM has helped Savills achieve dynamic growth through the
delivery of highly personalized services and become one of the world’s
major providers of global property services.
From Victorian to Virtual
Savills
Pivotal CRM solutions touch every aspect of
Savills' business, including marketing, sales,
service, HR and finance across its residential,
commercial and private finance divisions. Since
1998, the company has pursued a strategy to
centralize its IT systems, including all contact
management and CRM systems. As a result,
Savills has achieved dynamic growth by placing
themselves in a strong position to offer a highly
personalized service to both its residential and
commercial clients around the world.
Much of this success can be attributed to the
successful development and deployment of
Pivotal CRM solutions. As well as achieving
increases in customer attainment and
service levels, the company has also realized
significant increases in employee satisfaction
leading to reduced employee turnover.
Furthermore, operating costs have been
significantly reduced and revenues increased
by gaining a unified view of all clients across
their entire business, enabling stronger up-sell
and cross-sell opportunities to be identified.
Having achieved success with the use of Pivotal
CRM solutions in the UK and Europe, the
company is now entering a new phase aimed
at centralizing their core business systems to
include the Asia-Pacific regions. As part of this
new phase, the company has adopted Pivotal
5.7, which offers tighter integration between
functional modules as well as improved user
interface and customization capabilities.
Future plans for the continued development
of Pivotal CRM solutions also include the use
of CDC MarketFirst for the company’s client
communications, as a means to sustain brand
integrity by implementing fully co-ordinated,
consistent and cost-effective electronic
communications across the group.
The Business Decision
In the late ‘90s, the Savills plc board took the
strategic decision to centralize all IT systems
as a means to not only reduce IT operating and
management costs but, more importantly, to
drive improved customer service at a time when
both the commercial and residential property
markets were experiencing considerable
growth. The board recognized that offering a
highly personalized and responsive service to
their clients would place the company in a very
strong position to capitalize upon this market
growth across all aspects of the business.
Such a business objective could not be
achieved using the company’s existing IT
infrastructures, which differed from division
to division. The aim was to transition from
diverse and disparate systems across
multiple locations to a suite of consistent,
single applications from which all employees
could quickly derive benefit, to be controlled
and managed by a Group IT function. The
approach was therefore one of consolidation
and centralization and, most importantly, rapid
development of new systems and applications
in order to meet aggressive timescales.
During the same timeframe, Savills Private
Finance was searching the IT market for a
specialist property contact management and
mortgage quoting system driven by the need
to become both PIA (Personal Investment
Authority) and Y2K compliant.
Within six months, SPF was required to prove
that they could show a full audit trail on all
mortgage services provided to their clients.
This, coupled with the drive to achieve Y2K
compliance, meant that speed and flexibility
were of the essence.
SPF assessed the benefits of both specialist
industry solutions as well as CRM solutions,
including Siebel. Neither route was pursued.
Either the applications were too focused on the
residential side of property management and
therefore would not be of use to the company’s
commercial division, or, as was the case for
the CRM solutions, were considered to be
too inflexible, cumbersome, expensive and
Customer Details
Savills
http://www.savills.co.uk/
Country or Region
International
Industry
Property and real estate services
Customer Profile
Savills is the trading name for the principal
property services subsidiaries of Savills
plc, a UK company with a full listing on the
London Stock Exchange. Founded in 1855,
the business is one of the leading firms of
international property consultants and real
estate agents in the world.
With offices and associates throughout the
UK, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, the USA, and
Canada, Savills plc holds a powerful global
position employing 14,500 people worldwide,
of which 2,500 are based in the UK. In 2004,
the company reported revenues of £327.97
million.

2. time-consuming to deploy. Confidence in meeting regulatory
standards and Y2K deadlines could not be assured.
The Introduction to Pivotal CRM
Introduced by an external consultant, SPF made the decision
to develop a customized contact management and mortgage
solution based upon Pivotal CRM. Directly as a result of
the success, in terms of speed of deployment and flexibility
to develop customized applications, Savills plc made the
strategic decision to standardize on the Pivotal CRM platform
to meet the business needs of all divisions of the company.
As part of this centralized approach, Savills plc now
standardizes on the Microsoft platform using Citrix and MS
Windows Terminal Server connecting over WANs to virtual
desktops. As a key element of this infrastructure, Pivotal
CRM delivers the single database and related business
applications for users across marketing, sales, service,
finance and HR. More than 2,000 users currently use the
Pivotal CRM system across the UK and Europe with future
plans to increase the user base across both geographic
locations and business divisions.
Running the Business Day-to-Day
The first priority was to develop a fully integrated suite of
applications to underpin the needs of the residential property
sales and management division. The resulting system called
SpiKE (Savills Property Information & Knowledge Exchange)
has been developed entirely using Pivotal CRM technologies.
The primary focus for the new system was to establish
a single contact management system for the division.
Previously, client information existed in multiple formats,
systems and locations, including MS Access databases,
spreadsheets, manual systems, and legacy systems.
Due to the speed and flexibility with which Savills has been
able to use Pivotal CRM to develop and implement new
business modules, the company has not only been able to
centralize its core client information, but has now been able
to automate its business processes and more effectively
manage all aspects of property sale and management.
As a result, the company has witnessed improved sales
closure rates, reduced sales cycles, increased new client
acquisitions, a growth in up-selling and cross-selling and
improved customer service through highly responsive,
personalized communications.
Integration is Key
Historically, the estate agency and property management
industry has been slow to realize the value of the Internet as
a significant sales and marketing channel. Savills recognized
the importance of being able to integrate the traditional estate
agency business with their online business.
Digital assets such as floor plans, photographs, and
unstructured text are stored in Alchemy Gold, which integrates
seamlessly with Pivotal CRM. This approach enables users
to select standard templates within Pivotal CRM applications,
and use a single system to create property details once and
directly publish these across multiple channels in multiple
formats, including printed brochures, web and e-mail.
Pivotal CRM is also used to populate the company’s web site
with relevant structured text and images, as well as associate
property portal sites, including www.primelocation.com. In
addition, Pivotal CRM directly feeds printers online with text
and high-resolution graphics for next-day delivery of printed
brochures.
By leveraging the power of the Pivotal CRM system,
Savills can now automatically match new property details
with potential buyers contained within the Pivotal CRM
contact management system and more effectively market
the properties via the buyer’s preferred communication
channel—e-mail, phone, or regular mail.
Throughout the entire selling process, the Pivotal CRM
system is used to manage all costs and disbursements
associated with each individual transaction and, once the
sale is completed, Pivotal CRM is used to feed the company’s
financial systems to invoice vendors. As part of this process,
Pivotal CRM produces documents with Crystal Reports
and automates the workflow behind the entire approval
process from front to back-office. Equally, final payment and
settlement transactions are also automatically recorded within
Pivotal CRM.
More Effective Communications through
CDC MarketFirst
Having acquired FPD in the Asia-Pacific region and formed
a strategic alliance with Trammell Crow Company, one of
the USA’s top full service real estate advisory companies,
it was extremely important for the company to uphold its
brand name and identity and deliver consistent, co-ordinated
communications to its clients across each of its divisions.
Driven by these business reasons, in January 2003, Savills
bought CDC MarketFirst as a communications solution for its
marketing function, which would not only help its marketers to
more effectively plan and manage their marketing campaigns,
but would also ensure brand and messaging consistency.
Having undergone a two-week period of training and
implementation, CDC MarketFirst was up and running seven
days later. As an integral module within the standard Pivotal
“Our Pivotal CRM applications have become the
metaphorical dashboard and engine for our entire
business. We are now in a far stronger position to
drive our business forward into the next phase of
growth. Pivotal CRM has taken Savills from Victorian
to virtual!
” Richard Coleman
Group IT Director
Savills plc

3. CRM suite of applications, Savills has used CDC MarketFirst
for a number of initiatives including:
Personalized customer news service, including content•
directly in line with buyers’ property specifications to which
over 9,000 clients subscribe
Distribution of research information by the valuation•
department, which has led to increased sales
Conversion of printed documents to e-mail content by•
research department
Control, monitoring, and tracking of all e-mail marketing,•
including the creation of banners and content by the web
services department
With an initial focus on the UK, it is planned to rollout CDC
MarketFirst across further Savills geographies in line with the
overall consolidation of systems and applications.
The Future Goes Mobile
In order to meet the business requirements of the company’s
commercial division, Savills is drawing on the power of the
Pivotal CRM platform to support mobile and wireless devices,
including PDAs and smartphones. Accessing the commercial
division’s property management and contact management
system on the move will enable the company’s property
managers to respond to their clients’ needs instantly. In this
way, the company will be providing superior levels of service
to their commercial clients.
The Value of a Flexible, Highly Customizable,
Modular System
During the six-year relationship with Pivotal CRM, Savills has
made extensive use of the Pivotal Toolkit to develop more
than 80 different business modules using their in-house
development teams. Having received initial administration and
customization training on the Pivotal CRM system from Pivotal
Professional Services, Savills now develops and maintains
all of its applications in-house. The company’s Pivotal CRM
development team maintains a direct communication with
Pivotal CRM’s research & development team in Vancouver,
B.C., Canada, on an as-needed basis.
In the words of Richard Coleman, Group IT Director, “We
rarely get an error message relating to a Pivotal CRM
application itself. In effect, the system is self-managing.”
Savills has now established a mature end-user training
program for their Pivotal CRM-based applications. Training
on Pivotal CRM is an integral element of the company’s
employee induction program, where only after employees
have successfully completed their training programe are they
given full access to the system.
By adopting this approach, Savills has ensured 100% user
acceptance as well as maintaining the correct standards
of system usage. As one new employee commented, “The
systems are fantastic in comparison to our competitors.”
In effect, Pivotal CRM is used to make the lives of the
company’s negotiators, property managers, and estate agents
easier such that they are able to focus on the business of
selling and managing properties rather than be burdened by
administrative paperwork and procedures.
Conclusion
Since 1998, Savills has made extensive use of the Pivotal
CRM system, taking it far beyond the functionality of pure
CRM. The secret of their success lies in the unique application
of sound business knowledge to the development of
applications using a highly flexible, customizable and open
system that has enabled the company to quickly develop
applications that directly meet their business needs.
According to Coleman, “Our Pivotal CRM applications have
become the metaphorical dashboard and engine for our entire
business. We are now in a far stronger position to drive our
business forward into the next phase of growth. Pivotal CRM
has taken Savills from Victorian to virtual!”
“ Using Pivotal CRM, we are now able to manage the
complete process of selling properties through a
single system. From attracting vendors, marketing
properties and matching to prospective buyers,
managing expense claims and invoicing vendors,
Pivotal CRM underpins our entire business on a day-
to-day basis.
” Richard Coleman
Group IT Director
Savills plc

4. Learn More About Pivotal CRM
To learn more about how Pivotal CRM can help your organization’s unique needs, call us today at +1 877-PIVOTAL (+1 877-748-6825) or visit us at
http://www.pivotal.com.
Copyright © CDC Software 2007. All rights reserved. The CDC Software logo and Pivotal CRM logo are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of CDC Software.
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