Customer Solution Case Study
Opal Enterprises Uses CRM Technologies to Turn Contacts Into Profitable Business Relationships
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Management Consulting
Customer Profile
Opal Enterprises, a small, Bellevue, Washington-based professional services/ consulting company, specializes in helping clients gain better access to business decision makers.
Business Situation
With a growing customer base, Opal needed a CRM solution to help manage, organize, share, and leverage a list of about 7,000 customer and partner contacts.
Solution
Opal chose Microsoft® CRM, an easy-to-use, customizable, and scalable front office solution from Microsoft Business Solutions.
Benefits
n Better knowledge transfer
n Improved business insight
n Enhanced customer service
n Integration with Microsoft Outlook®
n Easy to use / "It's important that we understand our customer contact relationships, where they fit in their organizations, and track our history with them so we can build stronger relationships..."
Astrid Klopsch, Client Relations Manager, Opal Enterprises
For Opal Enterprises, a small firm that specializes in helping clients reach key decision makers through event- and sponsorship-related activities, customer relations is big business.
But when Opal realized it could be more efficient at tracking and targeting its own client base, the Bellevue, Washington-based firm turned to Microsoft CRM (now part of Microsoft Dynamics™). Working with its Microsoft Gold Certified partner, Quilogy, Opal deployed Microsoft CRM in less than 120 hours.
Opal quickly began realizing the benefits of its Microsoft CRM investment. Easy to use and customize, Microsoft CRM is helping Opal seamlessly manage customer information and provide higher levels of customer service. In addition, Microsoft CRM allows Opal to use its existing investment in Microsoft technologies, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership.
Situation
Opal Enterprises, based in Bellevue, Washington, provides joint-marketing and executive relations programs that help its clients increase exposure to their products and reach key executives and decision makers at client firms. A sampling of the services Opal provides includes executive-level activities such as golf, professional sporting events, exclusive entertainment, and other event-planning and sponsorship activities. Opal's client base is made up of a wide range of companies, including many Fortune 500 firms.
With budgets tight, it is crucial that Opal help ensure clients' marketing dollars reach the right people with the right message—and through the right vehicle.
To develop the necessary relationships and tailor programs to meet client needs, Opal relies heavily upon information it has accumulated about the executives its clients are targeting. Opal gathers these contact names from many places, including program registrations and partners.
The trouble was, compiling these contacts was a time-consuming, manual process in which Opal employees captured information and then stored it in their personal Microsoft® Outlook® contact files or on various Microsoft Excel spreadsheets on their hard drives. But with no company-wide system for sharing customer information, Opal found that it didn't have a unified view of its customer base and lacked the ability to proactively target new sales opportunities.
Because customer relations is Opal's business and because its customer base is rapidly growing, the company realized it needed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution to help manage, share, and protect the company's list of approximately 7,000 customer and partner contacts.
Randy Broad, Opal's President, CEO and company founder, says that because Opal assists large customers in executing their campaigns, it is essential that Opal tracks such specific information as which campaigns an individual has been involved in, which Opal employees have worked with each contact, what Opal has sold the client in the past, and potential future sales opportunities. Opal even needed to track such details as where the contacts have worked in the past, their individual history, and the kinds of gifts Opal has sent so they don't receive the same gift twice.
"It's important that we understand our customer contact relationships, where they fit in their organizations, and track our history with them so we can build stronger relationships and more proactively support them in the future," says Astrid Klopsch, Operations & Client Relations Manager at Opal.
"Overall, we realized that to cross-sell and proactively forecast sales, we needed more history about each customer," Broad says. "Any large corporation has several contacts in different departments. Knowing who to go to and how to go to them is critical."
Earlier, Opal had gone it alone, deploying a leading CRM system. However, on just the first day of training it became evident this solution simply would not be able to meet the company's information needs.
Solution
Like many of today's growing companies, Opal has chosen to standardize on Microsoft technologies. Over time, Opal's business platform has grown to include Microsoft Windows Server System™ with Windows® 2000 Server operating system, Active Directory® service, Exchange Server 2000, and SQL Server™ 2000. And recently, Opal upgraded all desktops to run on Windows XP and Office XP.
Determined not to repeat its previous CRM difficulties, Opal partnered Quilogy, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to choose and implement a new CRM solution. "Hiring a partner like Quilogy, who had experience with Microsoft CRM, took out all of the guesswork," says Klopsch. "Working with Quilogy just made sense and was a win-win for everyone."
Opal and Quilogy embarked on a four-step process to select and implement a new CRM solution:
Planning—Opal spent nearly a year searching for the ideal CRM solution—one that integrated well with Microsoft Office, allowed Opal to host its own data, and was easy enough for anyone to manage and use. In researching other solutions, Opal found that some of the most widely recognized CRM solutions were too complex and expensive for their needs, while others didn't integrate well with Microsoft Outlook, weren't user friendly, or didn't allow for Opal to own and host customer data on site.
After an exhaustive review process, Opal selected Microsoft CRM because it fit virtually every selection criteria the company had established.
Microsoft CRM allowed Opal to use the company's existing Microsoft technology investment and have one integrated, technology platform. It also provided the ability to have data from online event registrations feed directly into the Microsoft CRM database.
After developing an understanding of Opal's needs, Quilogy performed a technical audit of Opal's resources to determine the scope of the deployment. Because Opal only had two servers and six users for Microsoft CRM to support, the physical deployment was minimal. Nonetheless, the company's approximately 7,000 contacts needed to be migrated from Microsoft Outlook and Excel files, and a new server to support Microsoft CRM had to be installed for optimal performance.
Deployment of Microsoft CRM went quickly, with Opal up and using the solution in just four weeks. In fact, the Quilogy team performed the entire implementation in less than 120 hours.
"The whole installation went very smoothly," says Justin Mehta, Strategy Consultant at Quilogy. "Microsoft CRM is very easy to deploy compared to other CRM solutions."
Microsoft CRM's interface is similar to that of Microsoft Outlook, which helps employees quickly get up to speed on the system and allows Opal to use its investment in Microsoft technologies.
Migration—The majority of the installation time took place in the data-migration phase. "It was challenging to migrate the data from the various Outlook contact files because everyone had their contacts in slightly different formats," says Jason Ketteman, Quilogy Microsoft CRM Technical Lead, who worked with Opal on the project. "However, it went smoothly and no information was lost in the process."
Customization—After Microsoft CRM was installed and the data migrated, Opal and Quilogy worked together to determine where they needed to add custom fields to match their business workflow. They determined that they needed to add about 20 new fields. Quilogy was able to do this in less than a day. And, because the solution is designed to be easily customized by even non-technical users, Opal employees are also able to add and delete fields on their own.
Training—Because of Microsoft CRM's integration with Microsoft Outlook and familiar user interface, Opal's six users quickly got up to speed on the new system. In fact, Quilogy needed to spend only three hours training Opal's employees on the ins and outs of using Microsoft CRM.
Benefits
Broad says he is looking forward to realizing all the business benefits of Microsoft CRM. One of his plans is to follow up on leads from some of Opal's big events, such as the Fusion Golf Tournament, in which many attendees expressed an interest in having Opal present similar tournaments for them. Before deploying Microsoft CRM, however, Opal didn't have the tools to easily follow up with these leads.
Better Knowledge Transfer and Data Sharing
Because Opal employees now place contact information in one central location and can view, update, and share sales and customer information across teams and departments. Plus, if an employee is out of the office or leaves the company, their customer information is still accessible.
"The problem with running a sales company with customer information scattered in different places is that when a person leaves the company, their sales information leaves with them," Broad says. "Microsoft CRM safeguards customer information from going out the door."
Improved Business Insights
With Microsoft CRM, Opal can quickly address customer needs by bringing up a customer's history right away when a customer calls in. Opal employees can then capture feedback real-time and are able to turn that information into better customer relations or new business as a result. They can use the reporting capabilities of Microsoft CRM for more complete and accurate forecasting, sales tracking, competitive information, and overall business intelligence.
"Microsoft CRM helps us to manage customer information seamlessly. It provides the ability to retrieve and use the information to make hard decisions real time." Broad says. "One of our competitive advantages is that we know who the right contacts are at different companies. This helps our partners and customers access the right information to better reach business decision makers. We can now put contacts into productive use."
Integration with Other Microsoft Technologies Results in Lower Total Cost of Ownership
With Microsoft CRM, Opal now has a tool that uses the company's existing investments in Microsoft technology. This results in a lower total cost of ownership than if Opal were to implement a CRM solution that wasn't readily compatible with the other Microsoft technologies Opal uses every day. The use of familiar tools allows for quick, easy training so that even non-technical users can manage the system. In addition, customizing the solution to match the company's business process workflow allows for quick, easy training.
"We look forward to working more with Microsoft CRM and using its features to obtain new sales and improve our customer relationships," says Broad. "We expect to get a quick ROI due to the benefits and competitive edge it provides our business."
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems that your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship
and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
www.microsoft.com/dynamics