B2B ISV Ensures Long-Term Success with Customer Relationship Management Integration

Situation

Founded in 1996 and based in Bedford, New Hampshire, Scribe Software provides customer relationship management (CRM) data migration and integration software solutions that put CRM to work for its customers. Scribe's products make it possible for companies to sell more and provide better customer service by creating one complete view of the customer in CRM.

Each day, thousands of CRM adopters use Scribe's solutions to perform initial data migrations, recurring list loads, data enhancement and standardization, and to eliminate redundancy throughout their information systems.

Scribe designs its products to aid in the migration and integration of customer information across business processes, third-party applications, and external selling partners. Leveraging this philosophy, Scribe provides companies and their partners with the ability to create clear and comprehensive profiles of their valuable customer information. Scribe's products include:

 Scribe Insight, the company's flagship product incorporating all migration and integration functionality, which pulls critical data from other systems and applications and ties it into a company's CRM applications, creating one complete view of customer accounts.

 Scribe Adapters, which provide the Migrate and Insight products with high-performance connections to packaged CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

According to Lynn Harrington, Scribe's Director of Channel Sales, the company prides itself on solving many of the data migration, integration, and management issues that have typically bogged down the implementation and use of CRM applications.

"A CRM system is only as good as the data it contains," Harrington says. "There have been significant issues around migrating legacy data as well as the ongoing management of information once a company's database is populated. By focusing on rapid deployment and overall CRM adoption, we've solved those data issues for the end user."

And although Scribe felt confident in its product offerings, the company knew that significant, long-term growth could come from aligning with a CRM vendor ready to take a different approach and offer companies a cost-effective CRM solution easy to implement, use, customize, and maintain.

"We position ourselves as being in the business of making CRM solutions better," Harrington says. "Aligning with a CRM solution that businesses find easy to adopt helps us increase revenue, add resellers to our channels, and leverage a variety of marketing capabilities and opportunities."

Solution

When Microsoft announced its intentions to release a customer relationship management solution designed for integration and extensibility, Scribe decided to optimize its Insight product for use with Microsoft® Business Solutions CRM.

"It was a natural fit to join our integration application with a CRM product that together could be implemented quickly by small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers yet offer scalability and complexity required by larger organizations," says Peter Chase, Scribe's Executive Vice President.

According to Chase, Scribe made this decision based on its confidence in Microsoft to develop a customer relationship management application that companies will find cost effective and easy to adopt.

"Instead of thinking of CRM as a monolithic new application, Microsoft added functionality to the technology that companies already use to manage business," Chase says. "Microsoft Outlook® and Exchange are about relationships and communicating. Microsoft provides a great platform for CRM capabilities."

Microsoft CRM is a scalable front-office solution. And as Chase points out, Microsoft CRM incorporates many of the technologies that companies already use to operate and build relationships with customers, partners, and employees:

 Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 serves as the transactional data store and metadata layer of the Microsoft CRM application. Use of SQL Server, which is part of the Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, provides a scalable and reliable platform for managing vital customer information.

 Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or Exchange 2000 Server, also part of Windows Server System, receives, sends, and tracks incoming and outgoing e-mail.

 Active Directory® directory service, a central component of the Windows® operating system, helps to provide tight security and reduced administration costs. Active Directory improves the management and support of user profiles, roles, and privileges.

Connecting the Two Solutions Enhances Customer Relationships

Scribe Insight for Microsoft CRM pulls critical data from third-party systems (including ERP, legacy, and Web applications), brings it into Microsoft CRM, and creates a single snapshot view of a company's customers.

To do this, Scribe Insight uses templates developed with ASP.NET and ADO.NET—technologies in the Microsoft .NET Framework. The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows® component that supports building and running the next generation of applications and Web services.

The Scribe Insight templates are used to automatically import general account data, customer contact information, order history, product/price lists, and employee information into Microsoft CRM. As Scribe creates new templates or updates existing ones, it posts them to the Scribe Web Community for download. Scribe Insight also includes monitors, alerts and notifications, and a dashboard for viewing key customer data and business activity in real time.

For example, when potential customers download white papers or product brochures from a company's Web site, Scribe Insight automatically transfers that information to Microsoft CRM as a potential activity. Alerts and notifications then are sent to sales personnel so they can follow up with a call or take some other action regarding the revenue opportunity.

Other capabilities include:

 Automatically feed leads into Microsoft CRM, with financial and order history data from ERP.

 Proactively monitor customer activity through automated alerts sent to e-mail, cell phone, or Microsoft CRM.

 Enhance and validate information with third-party data using Web services, XML, or data feeds.

 Synchronize customer data in real time between Microsoft CRM and other applications.

 Eliminate redundant information within Microsoft CRM and connected applications.

Installing Scribe Insight for Microsoft CRM

"Installing Scribe Insight for Microsoft CRM typically takes less than one hour," says Mark Walker, Scribe's Director of Product Management. "Fast installation will be a good selling point for our partners to use as they talk to potential customers."

Scribe Insight can be installed on any available server within a domain that connects to the Microsoft CRM server. Insight does not require installation on a dedicated server. The installation script installs and registers the program files and creates several Windows services. It also creates the Insight server database as a Microsoft SQL Server or MSDE database.

After the installation, users are added to a Windows group called Scribe Console Users, which controls access to the Insight server. Software is then registered through the Internet or by telephone. Next, several initial configuration settings for the server are made using the Insight Console.

An unlimited number of consoles and workstations can be installed on other computers, once the server has been installed and configured. There is also an optional Web server components installation that enables remote access to the Insight server over the Internet and enables XML documents to be received by HTTP.

"Microsoft CRM can also be up and running within a few hours and fully customized in a matter of days or weeks," Walker says. "So again, the combined solution is easy to install, use, maintain, and customize."

Open Architecture Ensures Rapid Development and Ease of Integration

To develop Scribe Insight for Microsoft CRM, Scribe worked closely with developers at Microsoft and took advantage of a variety of Microsoft .NET Framework technologies. The software development kit (SDK) that ships with Microsoft CRM also was also used to develop the connection between the two solutions.

"The Microsoft technology stack enables us to develop all of our products, and this connection was no exception," Walker says. "The open architecture of the Microsoft .NET Framework allows us to develop rapidly, and it benefits our resellers and end users because they know they're getting proven technology that works."

Scribe's developers used the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET development system to write the necessary code for integrating Scribe Insight with Microsoft CRM. Scribe Insight typically is installed on Microsoft Windows NT®-class servers and uses SQL Server as the product's internal database. To control and manage the server environment, Scribe uses the Microsoft Management Console snap-in, which ships with Scribe Insight and its other products.

According to Walker, it took Scribe only two months to develop the connection between Scribe Insight and Microsoft CRM—a record unsurpassed in connecting to other CRM applications. The speedy development, Walker explains, resulted from Scribe's use of the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided with Microsoft CRM.

The APIs provided by Microsoft are based on a metadata-driven data storage model and include a declarative workflow engine, an integrated setup process, and configuration and management tools that greatly reduce the cost and time associated with configuration, customization, deployment, and upgrade.

"It is such a well-formed and thought-out API that connecting our product with the Microsoft CRM object model was really a cinch," Walker says. "The learning curve wasn't as steep as it has been with other vendors so we were able to develop our connection easily and quickly and get this product to market."

Benefits

With Scribe Insight for Microsoft CRM, Scribe and its partners offer existing and potential CRM adopters a cost-effective and easy way to transfer legacy data from disparate systems into Microsoft CRM and keep that information fresh and up to date. And because Microsoft CRM offers companies a cost-effective solution that's easy to implement, use, customize, and maintain, Scribe expects CRM adoption rates to soar.

"Many of Microsoft's products have lower total cost of ownership than the competition, and the CRM application is definitely not an exception," Harrington says. "In addition, our competitors often take months to migrate and integrate data between disparate systems whereas we can have them up and running in a week or two. Cost effective and quick to deploy—Microsoft and Scribe have really removed all the objections that companies have typically had to CRM solutions."

Customer Success

Harrington says Scribe's customers are reporting impressive ROI and implementation times, increased sales, and productivity gains.

For example, Infinity Info Systems, a Scribe partner, recently sold Scribe Insight to Ambrose Employer Group, LLC, a New York City-based professional employer organization (PEO) providing outsourced human resources, payroll, and employee benefits administration services. According to Greg Slamowitz, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Ambrose, the company wanted to improve its customer service, provide a more user-friendly system for its human resources specialists, avoid expensive duplicate data entry, and avoid data entry errors.

The company's existing Lawson© HR system contained the information its human resources specialists needed, but the system isn't overly user-friendly, Slamowitz explains. For example, viewing employee information and sending employee communications and notices required a series of time-consuming manual processes.

According to Slamowitz, Ambrose had implemented Microsoft CRM, but because the company lacked a way to properly populate Microsoft CRM with the appropriate data, few of its human resources specialists used it.

However within four weeks of selecting Scribe Insight for Microsoft CRM, Ambrose completed training and built a solution that allows the company to automate the flow of information quickly and accurately into Microsoft CRM.

"Once Scribe was implemented, usage of Microsoft CRM, which is very user-friendly, went through the roof," Slamowitz says. "Rolling out Microsoft CRM with Scribe Insight has had a significant and positive impact on our business."

Scribe Insight captures any changes and additions made within the Lawson HR system and sends that data to Microsoft CRM, giving all of Ambrose's human resources specialists real-time access to the updated files of their customers. When a new employee is entered into the Lawson© HR system, Scribe Insight and Microsoft CRM immediately update all related databases and entries. The solution also generates an automated welcome e-mail message to the new employee.

"In using Scribe Insight, we took an easy-to-use product—Microsoft CRM—and were able to create workflow rules within Microsoft CRM," says Andy Riell, an Ambrose Systems Administrator. "Now, Ambrose's human resources specialists are able to easily view and integrate data from Microsoft CRM with only one or two buttons to click in their Web browsers."

Microsoft CRM Channel Fast Becoming Scribe's Most Profitable

As Scribe looks into the not-so-distant future, Chase says, the company sees its strategic relationship with Microsoft becoming one of its most successful to date.

Already, the number of Scribe's CRM partners has increased from just a handful to 180 since March 2003, and Chase attributes this growth directly to its relationship with Microsoft. As a Microsoft Business Solutions Independent Software Vendor (ISV), Scribe participates in events such as Convergence and the Worldwide Partner Conference as well as in cofunded direct mail campaigns, e-mail blitzes, and newsletters. Scribe expects this partner base to grow to over 350 in 2004.

"Our relationship with Microsoft is a successful commercial and strategic endeavor for us," Chase says. "We wanted to work with Microsoft to affect a significant change in the CRM market, and we already see that happening. Our partners are taking orders daily, and this is quickly becoming one of our largest revenue-generating channels."

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