Carlsberg. Probably the most informed sales team in the world...

Carlsberg is one of the world’s largest brewery groups, with a beer for every occasion and for every palate and lifestyle. The Group’s broad portfolio of beer brands includes Carlsberg Pilsner, known as 'Probably the best beer in the world', and strong regional brands such as Tuborg, Baltika, San Miguel and Holsten, plus a wide range of leading brands in the company’s local markets.

Over the last five years, the Carlsberg Group has become increasingly market-oriented and efficient. A number of projects have been launched with a view to taking Carlsberg Group closer to the company’s vision of being ‘Probably the best beer company in the world'.

The driving force behind these projects is the aim of making the Group more dynamic and flexible, and ensuring a constant focus on both market and customers in all processes.

One of the keys to success in the UK market has been its customer-focused projects for the Carlsberg UK sales force. They rely on an information service powered by WIN that leverages mobile communications to ensure key data is always available. This gives the Carlsberg UK team a real competitive edge by enabling them to communicate new offers and prices immediately to their customer base.

Carlsberg UK’s sales secret is the WIN Enterprise Communicator, a web-based service that enables businesses to build and manage in-house delivery of SMS and MMS communications services to multiple destinations and manage all responses quickly and efficiently.

The service is under the control of Carlsberg UK Customer Operations and Service Manager Tony Richman. “Obviously, our sales teams are out of the office and on the road visiting customers for the vast majority of their working day. They need instant alerts in terms of sales figures, new prices, new deals they can offer to their customers and so on. To call each sales professional independently would place huge pressure on our telesales teams, and people on the road can’t always pick up either phone calls or voicemails easily.

“The WIN service is simplicity itself - we simply upload the message to the web interface and select the dispatch time – everything then happens automatically. The only initial preparation we have to do is to merge our sales team mobile numbers with the WIN Enterprise Communicator database.”

Carlsberg UK is now looking at using the WIN Enterprise Communicator as an opt-in service for its customers so the company can maintain a simple and immediate communications channel to keep customers up to date with company initiatives.

The WIN Enterprise Communicator offers a simple and intuitive graphical user interface, allowing non-technical staff to create communications, with separate administrator and user level access for security and traceability of actions. Fixed message templates can improve both brand consistency and speed of set up, and variable content fields allow messages to be deleted if the phone is switched off or there is network latency in delivery, ensuring messages are never out of date.

“We also use the system to communicate with all Carlsberg UK employees with a corporate mobile, to keep them informed of major campaigns,” said Tony.

“WIN is very easy to work with – our Account Manager is always available and more than helpful with any query or issue we have, and new user requests are actioned immediately. This is particularly important as the entire sales team needs to be fully up to date at all times. They hugely appreciate the service – even if they do tend to refer to it as ‘that texting thing!”

About Carlsberg

Carlsberg Breweries A/S: Carlsberg is one of the leading brewing groups in the world, with a large portfolio of beer and soft drinks brands. Its flagship brand - Carlsberg - is one of the fastest-growing and best-known beer brands in the world. 45.000 people work for Carlsberg at 84 breweries in 32 countries, and our products are sold in more than 150 markets. In 2008 Carlsberg sold 127 million hectolitres of beer, which is 105 million bottles of beer a day.

For more information visit www.carlsberg.com