Alcumus had been making use of the Microsoft Dynamics for a number of years. It had become clear that the tool was not delivering the value required to support the business.
In order to remedy this, a project was initiated to review and refresh the way that CRM was configured and used. Since then, the Santia acquisition has put a completely different focus in play, and with the disparate and inconsistent use of CRM systems in that newly acquired business, it was clear that a broader project was required to incorporate a group-wide (Alcumus + Santia) CRM system.
The Challenge
Alcumus Outcomes
- Provide an intelligent and personalised funnel that learns about the prospect
- Deliver this funnel efficiently, removing manual overhead wherever possible
- Consolidate sales processes across internal business units in a sensible manner, allowing efficient cross-sell and up-sell
- Gain full return on investment and value from content and services
- Drive the “gain, retain and engage” customer cycle.
Customer Outcomes
- Gain a sales advisory service that feels personal to my business
- Experience an end to end service that can move seamlessly between marketing, support, sales and my personal account manager
The Tomia Solution
In order to deliver a business-driven (rather than a system-driven) change exercise, we took the following steps:
- A review of the Alcumus + Santia sales business process
- Emerging from this, we gained a view of the “pain points” associated with CRM as it was currently configured and with the processes in the newly acquired Santia business.
- Production of a BRD Document
- Production of a costed Functional Specification/li>
- Delivery and implementation of the activity.
Outcome
- Alcumus outcomes based on the current issues
- The Dynamics setup was via GCC, Alcumus’ technology support partner. GCC, in turn, was using a 3rd party to host the CRM service. GCC was not sufficiently knowledgeable of MS Dynamics CRM to support this project. The 3rd party hosting provider was small and potentially at risk due to Microsoft’s direction to invest in their own hosted service.In addition to these points, Alcumus as an organisation operated an old version of Dynamics CRM which limited functionality and upgrades to the latest advances. The current CRM was not available to handheld devices.
Objectives were:- To move to a setup that was not exposed to 3rd party risk
- To move to an environment where the Alcumus CRM was always on the latest version
- To make the CRM seamlessly available to handheld devices to speed up the response to enquiry times
- To tighten up the associated record-keeping in CRM
- To work with a company who were expert in MS Dynamics CRM deployments and who can expertly guide them through to a successful deployment
- Alcumus faced a significant challenge in coordinating within account management and crossed selling activities due to not having the visibility of what an account is doing with Alcumus across the multiple service line offers, thus missing out on opportunities.This had also become evident from the management team that the team were not communicating effectively to provide the optimum service to their customers – this lead to a risk of damaging Alcumus’ credibility with their customers, which would affect the organisation’s ability to move up to higher-level decision-makers.
Objective was:- To configure the CRM to make it easy and transparent to users Alcumus services a customer took, how they progressed, who the relevant contacts were from both an Alcumus and customer view and what general activities were in progress (particularly the sales opportunities).
- Measuring the pipeline in a useful way for up the line and down the line reporting is currently time-consuming and manual. Relevant reports for investors will be different from those required for sales teams.
Objective was:- To provide intelligent and personalised reporting automatically without the need for manual intervention.
- Measuring the performance of the numerous and varied marketing/lead/prospect generating campaigns is currently manual and difficult to maintain in the enlarged Alcumus Group.
Objective was:- To provide reporting that made it easy to measure the performance of campaigns
- To make it easy to identify relevant customer groups for well-targeted marketing and sales campaigns
- To improve the continuous cycle of data accuracy.
- The Dynamics setup was via GCC, Alcumus’ technology support partner. GCC, in turn, was using a 3rd party to host the CRM service. GCC was not sufficiently knowledgeable of MS Dynamics CRM to support this project. The 3rd party hosting provider was small and potentially at risk due to Microsoft’s direction to invest in their own hosted service.In addition to these points, Alcumus as an organisation operated an old version of Dynamics CRM which limited functionality and upgrades to the latest advances. The current CRM was not available to handheld devices.
- Customer Outcomes
- Gain a sales advisory service that feels personal to the business
- Experience an end to end service that can move seamlessly between marketing, support, sales and account manager.Tomia consultants ran a consultancy workshop with all locations, including HQ, to understand and outline the process and pain points. This resulted in a solution whereby we streamlined their entire process by deploying a central CRM platform (cloud version), enabling all individual locations to connect. This architecture had scalability, where an additional location can be connected to the central CRM platform relatively easily. Furthermore, this new solution enabled the senior management team board members to gain access to reports organisation-wide (as opposed to location-based) with a click of a button. The CRM system was integrated with click-dimension (which is a marketing 3rd party marketing system) AX (the accounting system) and Sharepoint (the document management system) to intelligently automate and seamlessly enable flow, minimising administration efforts. [Platforms integrated: Microsoft Dynamics CRM, AX, Click-Dimension, Sharepoint]