Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Enable Omnichannel Customer Experience

Client

The Client is a US-based group of companies present in the variety of industries including luxury retail, hospitality, and ecommerce. An utmost experience and a tailor-made approach to customers are the cornerstones of the Client’s business philosophy.

Challenge

The Client approached ScienceSoft for a comprehensive solution encompassing efficient customer and operations management.

The Client used to rely solely on the professionalism and communicative skills of their team to maintain excellent customer service at each company separately. However, they matured to enter the next level of a highly personalized approach to customers within their whole ecosystem. This called for a unified customer base that gives access to all-embracing customer information. As companies managed by the Client exist separately, the main challenge has been to centralize real-time data flows.

As a part of a targeted top-of-the-line customer service, the Client needed a loyalty program to award customers by purchase volume and frequency.

Along with improving the quality of customer communication, the Client sought to automate some daily activities. For example, they needed a smart solution for case management to avoid the risk of overlooking issues due to human error.

Also, the Client needed a handy tool for efficient operations management to gain greater visibility into daily operations.

Solution

To meet all the business needs, ScienceSoft proposed Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation. The project team focused on two key tasks – to customize the platform in line with all the Client’s requirements and solve the challenge of centralizing data from multiple sources.

Striving to make the service personalized for customers, convenient for the staff, and transparent for managers, ScienceSoft came up with the following functionality:

• A comprehensive CRM profile houses available customer information delivered by enterprise systems (like contact details, wish lists, orders) and entered by the Client’s team members (like customer’s character traits, behavioral characteristics, personal style).
• Automated case management is achieved by creating customer service teams in the CRM and adding assignment and escalation rules for case flows.
• ScienceSoft created experience surveys sent to customers automatically after their interaction with companies. To let the Client get direct feedback on their service while remaining non-intrusive for customers, ScienceSoft provided for a convenient way of conducting surveys by email and the possibility for the staff to turn off surveys in a CRM profile.
• A two-step loyalty program was implemented to maintain an appropriate level of exclusivity for luxury retail. The CRM system automatically assigns scoring levels based on the predefined criteria, then sales teams check the levels in customer profiles and reward them accordingly.
• Referrals serve as an internal communication channel for the Client’s businesses. When needed, they inform one another about customer needs and interests, book services and ensure that customers are welcomed as long-awaited guests.

Operations management benefits from CRM implementation due to the following functionality:

• A set of calendars (business facility, personal, working hours and business).
• Goal setting and management functionality.
• Personal dashboards for sales activity monitoring.
• Facility management for storing comprehensive information about the infrastructure.

To enable data centralization from multiple sources into one CRM system, ScienceSoft offered to implement a data warehouse (DWH). There, the data gets integrated, cleaned, and unified to be further transferred to the CRM.

There are two scenarios of how different data types get to the DWH:

• The data from a customer profile (full name, gender, contact details, etc.) arrives immediately in the DWH. Some third-party systems deliver the data using the push method. With others, the DWH pulls the data at a predefined schedule.
• Meanwhile, there are separate staging databases for electronic systems of each company that collect raw transactional data on an hourly basis. After the data gets unified and deduplicated in staging databases, it is exported to the DWH.

ScienceSoft has also created OLAP cubes to provide the Client with advanced analytics capabilities. Once a day, the data gets exported from the DWH for further analysis. The Client gets it visualized in dashboards, pre-defined and ad-hoc reports.

Results

With the CRM, the Client brings their companies under one umbrella. Having their customer data centralized and daily processes automated, the Client upgrades customer service within their whole business to a new quality level – team members serve repeat customers and cross-sell more effectively while the risk of human negligence regarding customer service is minimized. The Client builds trust with customers and contributes to their loyalty with bonuses. Business managers get real-time analytics concerning customer management activities and are always up-to-date with current cases, goals, and scheduled activities of their team.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Dynamics CRM, MS SQL Server including Microsoft SQL Analysis Services and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.