Interviewee: Haim Zaguri, iStore CEO and owner.

ISTORE

In a nutshell

iStore is the official distributor of Apple products in Israel and provides laboratory services. The company has 5 branches, an online sales site, a sales call center, and a B2B sales and service operation.

The company has a workforce of approximately 100.

 

Tell me about a special project that you implemented with COMAX and how the system contributed to your business operations

We have been working with the COMAX system since 2015. As part of our joint activities, we built a unique CRM system for ourselves that incorporates numerous, extensive and comprehensive integrations with the COMAX system. This has been made possible, among others, by COMAX’s web interface. Thereby, we are streamlining whole processes in procurement and supply management, creating a customer purchasing experience, and implementing continuous improvements in customer service at all our branches. The COMAX system is at the core of our management-technological activity.

The great success of the processes in our work with COMAX is due to the system’s flexibility and COMAX’s conceptual flexibility as a company that seeks to develop capabilities and customizations in order to optimize processes for all organizations as a rule, and for my organization, specifically.

As a company that is constantly developing and operating in a competitive market, the integrations and the availability of the various reports and analytics give us a competitive edge thanks to accessibility to the data, and cross-referencing of it, as one system.

Which operations do you manage in the system?

We manage all the business’s operations in the COMAX system, including the finance system, the POS terminals, procurement, inventory, etc.

In effect, the only management software that we use is the COMAX system and our internal CRM system. In this way, the COMAX system saves us using another 6 systems!

 

What challenge did the system and/or the special project solve for you?

Our main challenge is to avoid having to use a number of software packages and to create consistency and share information in one location. As I mentioned, the use of the COMAX system, in and of itself, resolved the duplication in the various software packages, and all that remained was the need to sync our internal CRM system with the COMAX system. In this instance, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; and so we got to create a whole range of reports and amazing capabilities as a result of the integrations.

Examples?

We produce reports from the COMAX system, presenting what each employee sold daily, a calculation of the bonus owing to an employee, and how much still remains in order for the employee to meet the target. In the case of contests, we present where the employee is in relation to the other employees.

In fact, the full synchronization between the sales data and the employee data creates a sales support function. We can produce individual data for an employee and incentivize that employee to achieve more.

Another example: we are improving our customer experience and preventing heavy workloads on Customer Service by integrating sales, remuneration, promotions and other data from the COMAX system with the Customer Service data. This enables the customer enter their personal zone on the website, to perform a range of operations that eliminate the need for them to contact Customer Service, such as to view their place in the waiting list for a product, view an order’s status, and have an automatic SMS sent to the them (the customer) with the status.

Another development that we are working on now is to have the customer make up their own order, which will be written directly to the COMAX system.

Can you state, in percentage terms, the contribution made to the efficiency of the solution or of the system?

Thanks to the savings achieved by eliminating the need for additional systems and to the savings in personnel, the organization is now free to invest in growth. We are achieving savings of 30% as result of using the system.

Despite the huge savings, the big story in my view, is the increase in outputs achieved thanks to the greater efficiencies. We are growing all the time thanks to the streamlining of processes and improvements in the customer experience.

In an organization operating in a competitive market such as ours, the differentiation is in the customer experience and not in this or that product. With the COMAX system, we can create that differentiation and a significant competitive edge.

 

Can you state the added value that you got from the COMAX system that made you choose us?

Certainly. COMAX is, first and foremost, a people’s organization. The CEO, VP Service, Ayelet, and the service managers, are all in the contacts list on my phone. All of them, without exception, are always attentive, and always have the good of the client in mind. All this, combined with uncompromising professionalism and a winning system, creates an unequivocal recipe for success.