Case Study

Fine Pianos

Company Name
Steinway & Sons

Industry
Fine Pianos

Web site
www.steinway.com

Solutions Partner
Business Development Solutions www.bdsdatabase.com

Solution
HEAT 6.4 ^®,
GoldMine ^® Sales & Marketing ™

Business Benefits

• Exceptional customizability to fit Steinway’s service model
• More efficient, organized service with all history records in one location
• Quick, simple piano lookup by serial number
• Serves as repository of data on 150 years of piano history

Quick Stats
Customers supported: 5,000+
Call tickets per month: 200-300 Operating Environment: Windows 2000 & SQL 2000
Features used: Call Logging

Steinway & Sons Hits a
High Note With HEAT^® Software

CUSTOMER PROFILE
Steinway & Sons, the world’s most renowned maker of pianos, was established in 1853 in Manhattan by German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway. Henry and his sons went on to develop the modern piano, logging more than 120 patents. With revolutionary designs and superior workmanship, Steinway pianos began receiving worldwide recognition and quickly became the piano of choice for the world's great pianists. Today, Steinway & Sons remains a testament to individual craftsmanship, each year producing approximately 5,000 handmade Steinway pianos worldwide. Thousands of concert artists and ensembles have been “Steinway Artists” over the years, from legends like Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vladimir Horowitz, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin to contemporary performers like Billy Joel and Diana Krall.

BUSINESS NEED
The Steinway name is synonymous with quality. Owners of the company’s pianos, which include most of the world’s most accomplished concert pianists, expect no less than extraordinary service from the piano maker. Additionally, with approximately 560,000 pianos made over the past 150 years, many are now more than a century old. Pianists and collectors look to Steinway & Sons for historical information on their pianos and to keep them playing harmoniously.

Steinway’s service administration department manages piano service, warranty administration, the parts department and restoration for individual owners and dealers. Consequently, the company needs a call center solution that enables it to manage calls and service requests efficiently. Previously, Steinway operated its service department with an internally developed system. The limitations were numerous: slow speeds, insufficient reporting capabilities, not enough fields for logging details on customer issues, lack of a continuing history on customers, and, because it was created internally, no product support when the need arose. The technical services department was continuously struggling with bugs and network interface issues in the high-maintenance program. Steinway needed a more reliable, robust system.

HEAT^® SOLUTION
When Steinway considered a new call center solution, HEAT software was the clear choice for several reasons. Other departments were already using GoldMine^® Sales & Marketing ™ customer management software, also from FrontRange Solutions Inc. The key selling points were the strong internal satisfaction with GoldMine^® and the off-the-shelf flexibility for HEAT^® to be customized to Steinway's needs.

Steinway & Sons worked with Business Development Solutions (BDS), a FrontRange Solutions ™ partner in Mount Laurel, N.J., to implement and customize HEAT to fit its business needs. BDS helped the company with the monumental task of migrating the legacy data from the old system into the HEAT system. BDS arranged the system to store the thousands of piano serial numbers and their accompanying historical data. Plus, they created a method of importing billing information from Steinway’s dealer network into the HEAT system on a regular basis.

“There was a sophisticated level of work to be done and BDS was very competent in solving the issues,” explained John Patton, director of technical services at Steinway.

From the start, the HEAT product lived up to its promise of customizability. Upfront, Steinway had talked with employees who would be using the system to learn how they wanted it organized. As it turned out, users liked the interface of the old system, just not the functionality. BDS worked with Steinway to customize the screens to match those of the previous system, which saved the team considerable time in learning the new system. “HEAT software was flexible enough to allow us to create the fields and screens we wanted to see,” said Kent Webb, manager of service administration at Steinway & Sons.

Because Steinway repairs and restorations can typically involve multiple calls over time, historical information is critical. For the 200 to 300 calls that come in a month, the entire service department must know what has been promised to the customer and what work has been accomplished. HEAT Call Logging has provided that valuable customer/piano history — and enabled technicians to serve customers more quickly and effectively.

“The HEAT system keeps us all on the same page literally and gives us very quick access to the continuing history of a service record,” Webb said. “We’re able to resolve calls more quickly because we have the total information on hand as we’re talking with someone.”

In one particular case, Steinway tried to deliver a serviced piano, but the owner was inaccessible for months due to travel. With constant logging of every action in the HEAT system, the whole team was able to stay on top of the issue, keep confusion to a minimum and resolve it smoothly. Having one location for the history of that issue made the difference.

With piano serial numbers in the system, technicians simply look up pianos by number. The corresponding manufacturing and service history, as well as warranty information, come up.

“With our visibility and market stance, we have to deliver exemplary service to each one of our customers because they expect a very high standard of excellence. HEAT software allows us to approach a customer service call with the confidence that we have the best knowledge at hand in front of us to make a decision and serve customers quickly.” — Kent Webb, Manager of Service Administration, Steinway & Sons

Additionally, because Steinway pianos have a long-term history of investment appreciation, they are highly sought after in the pre-owned aftermarket of piano buyers. Accordingly, another key benefit is being able to serve the several owners who call weekly asking for history about their pianos, such as when a piano was originally manufactured and shipped. Steinway is proud it can provide such important information.

“The easier it is to look that up and provide whatever data we have, the faster and more efficient we are,” Patton said.

Patton added that achieving Steinway’s effective new call center solution was truly a team effort, with the piano maker doing its homework upfront to define its ideal system, BDS offering a deep base of knowledge and expertise, and the customizability and functionality of HEAT software.

The result has been a finely tuned call center that gives technicians the tools they need to offer customer service that matches the quality of the company’s legendary pianos.

“With our visibility and market stance, we have to deliver exemplary service to each one of our customers because they expect a very high standard of excellence,” explained Webb. “HEAT software allows us to approach a customer service call with the confidence that we have the best knowledge at hand in front of us to make a decision and serve customers quickly.”

THE FUTURE
With nearly 150 years of historical piano data, Steinway continues to enter information, some of it from old, handwritten journals. Once all data has been entered, the system will truly be the single location for piano data. Steinway also looks forward to making use of built-in and customized reporting capabilities in HEAT to create reports on factors such as quality analysis, dealer warranty issues compared to sales volume, and amount of time for restorations and repairs.

For more information please contact us.