Practices
Customer Interaction Management
Good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. Connections with customers are the moments that define your business. As customer interaction evolves toward more individualized attention, your customers expect more personalized service, faster delivery, more sophisticated after-sales support, and additional services bundled into the original offer.
CRM - Customer Relationship Management - is a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. CRM is both technology and strategic process that will help you better understand your customers and how you can meet their needs and enhance your bottom line at the same time.
Did you know that:
Fewer than 30 percent of Fortune 1000 companies can identify their most profitable customers.
Acquiring new customers is 4 to 10 times more expensive than retaining existing ones.
Companies that retain 5 percent more customers typically increase profitability by 25 percent or more.
Investments in enabling mobile workers with customer information have been found to increase customer satisfaction by 17 percent and profitability by 19 percent.
With an effective CRM strategy, a business can:
Increase revenues
Increase customer retention
Cross-sell or up-sell existing customers
Meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for customer record retention
Perform more advanced analytics on customers
Infassure delivers projects on-time and on-budget. Infassure’s proven delivery methodology assures our clients minimize risk and maximize return on their investment in technology.
Following are examples of how Infassure helps our clients.
SALES
The Need: Regional sales representatives each manage a large customer base. Microsoft Outlook® is regularly used to communicate with customers. The company has invested in a system to track sales and customer data. However, sales reps must toggle between the customer data system and Outlook® to get both basic and extended information about their customers. To make matters worse, important customer information was scattered across the company’s regional sales offices.
The SOLUTION: Using the Microsoft® Sales for Outlook® client powered by Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM, sales reps can manage sales data from inside Microsoft Outlook®. Contacts and opportunities can be viewed and updated. In addition, current product information, new leads and other aspects of the sales process can be viewed and updated by sales and customer service. This can all be done from a single application that the sales reps already uses every day—without the need to log into a different system. The Microsoft® Sales for Outlook® client provides a single integrated application for sales reps to manage all sales data and customer information.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
The Need: A customer service representative routinely gets calls from product dealers concerning the process for performing product repairs and upgrades. The customer service rep must walk the dealers through a series of steps on the phone for both repairs and upgrades. The product dealer takes notes and attempts to complete the task. It is often challenging for the dealer to visualize the tasks based solely on verbal cues from the customer service rep. Often the dealer will have to call the customer service rep multiple times before problems are resolved. Customer service reps need a process to examine the steps for product repairs or upgrades, allowing them to easily walk through the process with dealers.
The Solution: Using Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and Microsoft Live Meeting, a system was built where a customer service rep provides real-time information and guided demonstrations of the steps required to resolve problems and complete product upgrades. While on the call with the product dealer, the customer service rep searches the Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM knowledge base for a Microsoft PowerPoint® slide deck that contains the steps the client needs to take in order to make the repair or perform the upgrade. Once the slide deck has been located, the customer service rep invites the customer to an online meeting via Live Meeting. The product dealer can see the various components and steps via Live Meeting simply by launching their Web browser, and the customer service rep helps by using pictures and annotations. Using Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM, Live Meeting PowerPoint®, a system was developed that allows a more hands-on approach to customer support. Customers now complete repairs or upgrades with only one call to the customer service department, significantly reducing customer service costs.
CONSULTING
The Need: A managing consultant at a professional services firm manages the creation of proposals for opportunities that are initiated by sales representatives within his organization. The managing consultant must work with the sales representative, as well as product architects, database architects, programmers, and others in order to complete the proposal. The proposal process is complex and time-consuming because of the number of people who need to collaborate to complete a final proposal. The managing consultant needs a way to easily collaborate electronically with all of the members of the proposal creation team. Everyone must be able to see all of the information about the opportunity and the client. And the team needs to quickly see changes.
The Solution: Using Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services, a Web page portal can be created to allow collaboration within the company on documents and information related to a specific opportunity or client. From within Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM, team members can connect to the portal, gaining quick access to all documents that support the proposal process, as well as the proposal itself. The collaborative power of Windows SharePoint® Services combined with Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM enable an environment that supports efficient and effective proposal creation.
MARKETING
The Need: A company wants to create a marketing campaigns that targets a specific customer segment whose term on their current service contracts will expire in the next month. The marketing assistant creates this a list by scanning the customer list for support contract expiration date information. This task usually takes one to two days to complete. The marketing assistant needs a quick and easy way to gather a list of customers that meet a specific set of criteria and then send each of those customers a direct mail letter.
The Solution: Using Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and Microsoft Word®, the marketing assistant easily created all of the items needed to automatically execute these campaigns. A list of customers whose service contracts are expiring is retrieved from Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and exported to a Word letter that will be sent to each individual customer. A similar process was used with Microsoft Publisher to create personalized flyers and greetings. Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM, Word® and Publisher® provided a quick and simple method to complete a customized marketing campaigns.
REVENUE ANALYSIS
The Need: A research analyst routinely tests the effects of changes to product costs, shipping dates, and transportation costs on revenue. These changes are applied to revenue figures from the prior year to project the effect on upcoming quarters. Currently, the analyst must gather data from multiple resources and create a separate spreadsheet to estimate how changes will impact revenue. This task is lengthy and subject to error due to the many manual steps in the process. The analyst is very comfortable using Excel® to slice and dice the data and to test various “what if” scenarios. The research analyst needs a method to quickly and easily gather prior year sales data, apply changes to it, and make projections for upcoming quarters.
The Solution: From Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM, sales data is easily exported and Excel®. Once the data has been imported to Excel, the research analyst can easily test changes to the sales data just as they normally would within Excel®. Because of the powerful exporting capabilities of Microsoft® CRM, it is easy to create a system to allow analysis of data in many different ways using Excel®.
SALES & SERVICE SCORECARD
The Need: A VP, Sales needs a complete picture of his company’s sales information at all times. Currently, many different reports must be checked daily to manually pull together the data that creates this picture. Data must then be aggregated to slice and dice for decision making. This daily task is performed by managers using precious time that might be applied to other pressing tasks. A system is needed that allows the VP, Sales to view all the required information in an interactive and intuitive way. The data from Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and other systems needs to be aggregated in one place so that executives can run scenarios and view trends.
The Solution: Using the SQL Analysis Services functionality in Microsoft SQL Server®, data is aggregated from Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and other sources. It is then presented in a scorecard format using the Microsoft Office® Solution Accelerator for Business Scorecards. This allows color-coded views of the data and analyzes past performance, reviews current trends, and predicts future scenarios. This decision support system allows executives to make better decisions and take timely actions by putting key metrics in front of all executives via a Web browser. The Solution Accelerator for Business Scorecards graphically summarizes data from Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and other sources to allow faster, better decision-making.