Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Top Staffing Firm Empowers Sales Force, Enhances Productivity
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Business Services
Customer Profile
A premier staffing business, Volt supports 4,500 in-house employees in more than 350 offices worldwide. Volt prides itself in providing solutions that strengthen a company’s position in the market.
Business Situation
Volt’s sales force grapples with a variety of client information daily. A combination of disconnected and redundant data stores lowered productivity and contributed to lost opportunities.
Solution
Teaming with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner ePartners, Volt deployed Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 3.0. The integration and innate flexibility of Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 made Microsoft Dynamics CRM a perfect fit.
Benefits
n Staff embraces Outlook integration
n Productivity increases, redundant data entry reduced 60%
n Synchronization facilitates a mobile workforce
n Solution enables enterprise-level visibility / “The Outlook-like navigation of CRM is extremely intuitive … It’s almost as if we didn’t start using a new system at all and instead enhanced a tool our employees already used on a daily basis.”
Steve Acterman, Director of Corporate IT, Volt Information Sciences, Inc.
A global staffing leader, Volt Information Sciences, Inc. encompasses more than 350 offices worldwide. The company’s customer-centric focus allows it to deliver workforce solutions that strengthen a client’s position in the marketplace. Specialized divisions within Volt help representatives forge close relationships with clients—but access to strategic information within the company was suffering. The lack of standardized processes made sharing information difficult and data was dispersed. Because of this, different offices within Volt would contact the same company, resulting in lost opportunities. With the help of Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner ePartners, Volt implemented Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 3.0. Offering tight integration with Outlook, the tool was quickly adopted by employees. Centralized data depositories—which are available on and off line—led to an increase in productivity.
Situation
Largely known for its unique staffing solutions, Volt Information Sciences, Inc. is headquartered in New York City, but has more than 350 offices throughout the United States and internationally. Its number of in-house employees tops 4,500. Since 1950, Volt employees have prided themselves on a customer-centric focus that drives success and continued growth.
Volt generates annual revenues exceeding U.S.$2.2 billion by providing workforce solutions that strengthen and drive a client’s competitive advantage. And, thanks to its persistent technological advancement, Volt also delivers highly-respected IT services. Often, when clients engage Volt in one arena, they then request the company’s help in another.
Specialized business units within Volt allow account representatives to forge close, one-on-one relationships with more than 10,000 customer companies. But, communication within Volt was becoming increasingly difficult. On a daily basis, employees wrestled with a jumble of e-mail messages, spreadsheets, databases, and rolodexes to keep track of prospective client information and exchanges.
By unintentionally isolating this information, Volt employees or offices often pursued the same lead. The redundant communication was not only inefficient; it often led to lost cross-sell opportunities. In addition, management had no visibility into the sales process.
“We didn’t have efficient internal communication between our different sales organizations and geographic locations and divisions. We were duplicating our efforts and missing out on clients. We needed a more efficient system to funnel the correct information to the right people,” states Steve Acterman, Director of Corporate IT at Volt.
The need for a standardized information and communication management process was apparent. Volt needed to quickly adopt a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that would create a centralized data repository as well as a seamless sales lifecycle.
Solution
With the assistance of Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner ePartners, Volt selected and deployed Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 3.0. The company then integrated the solution with Microsoft Biztalk® Server 2004 to reduce data-entry replication and, together with ePartners, configured the user interface to reflect its sales methodology. Today, more than 230 Volt employees use Microsoft CRM, with an enterprise goal of 465 users.
Before implementing Microsoft CRM, Volt evaluated multiple solutions, including ACT, Goldmine, Onyx, and Siebel. The company even considered creating a proprietary relationship management tool. Basing its decision on customization capabilities and the advantages of a familiar user interface, Volt quickly settled upon Microsoft CRM.
Volt had a strong technology team already in place and, rather than making the partner solely responsible for the implementation, the staffing organization wanted to draw on its own in-house capabilities.
“ePartners provided the Microsoft CRM subject matter expertise and extensive user training experience to augment Volt’s existing technology team,” says Eric Boocock, CRM Practice Manager at ePartners.
Agrees Acterman, “We wanted our in-house technology team to stay 110 percent engaged with Microsoft CRM, without being slowed down by issues they were not able to resolve. The result was a very smooth deployment.”
The innate flexibility of Microsoft CRM allowed Volt to configure forms, data fields, and information relationships to fit the stages of its sales methodology. Robust customization capabilities enabled
Microsoft CRM to be easily altered with no code changes or programming.
Benefits
“Microsoft CRM helped Volt achieve its number-one goal—to create a solution that enhances the sales cycle, not just another hoop for the sales staff to jump through,” states Acterman.
The extensive account management system provided by Microsoft CRM supplies Volt employees with much-needed workflow tools as well as a centralized—and well organized—data depository.
As Robin Kibota, the CRM Project Manager at Volt, notes, “The solution encourages better coordination between account managers, even if they’re located in different regions, for improved sales-opportunity management.”
Employee enthusiasm and adoption has been heartening. Says Acterman, “We haven’t experienced any significant ‘growing pains.’ In fact, throughout the rolling release of Microsoft CRM, employees often contacted the project team, asking to have it installed on their computers sooner.”
Staff Embraces Outlook Integration
Increased integration with Microsoft Office Outlook® was the top design priority of Microsoft CRM—and Volt employees embraced the familiar user interface and navigation. In an internal survey, 83 percent of people who responded to the survey saw Microsoft CRM as “a significant improvement and easier to manage” than the method they were using previously.
Says Acterman, “The Outlook-like navigation of CRM is extremely intuitive. We’re big Outlook users, so we liked the concept of having people stay within a tool they’re already familiar with. It’s almost as if we didn’t start using a new system at all and instead enhanced a tool our employees already used on a daily basis.”
Tight integration turns Outlook into the single resource where Volt employees can manage all customer data, including lead information, marketing communications, and sales call results, and make it available to everyone in the organization.
The connection between Microsoft CRM and Outlook empowers the entire Volt sales team to see client histories and respond effectively to client leads, questions, and requests.
Productivity Increases, Redundant Data Entry Reduced 60%
By matching the sales methodology Volt uses to pursue new leads, Microsoft CRM quickly became a part of the business process, reducing redundancies and increasing individual productivity. Volt configured Microsoft CRM with its own naming conventions and workflow. Reports, fields, and relationships within Microsoft CRM match the methodologies and processes that Volt employees use when pursuing a lead or opportunity.
Microsoft CRM replaced the hodgepodge of systems that the Volt sales force had been using. “Previously, when sales team members pursued new opportunities, they had to enter customer data into three separate systems. Now there’s just one: Microsoft CRM. We actually reduced redundant data entry by 60 percent,” says Kibota.
Eliminating unnecessary tasks isn’t the only productivity boost Volt received. Microsoft CRM contains a host of productivity tools for analytical, operational, and collaborative processes. Employees apply these tools to drive increased sales productivity and expanded revenues.
Synchronization Facilitates a Mobile Workforce
A highly mobile and widespread workforce like the one at Volt calls for impeccable mobile support. Microsoft CRM supplies Volt employees with instant access to customer data from mobile devices and laptops—even if they aren’t connected to the network.
By synchronizing with the corporate office, information is kept up-to-date. If Volt workers are offline and working remotely, they’re still able to add or change information in the database. And, when they’re able to reconnect with the company’s main servers, that data is synchronized and added to the company’s Microsoft CRM database.
“The sophisticated synchronization of Microsoft CRM was absolutely critical. If employees hadn’t been able to use the system on the road or at home, it wouldn’t have been such a success,” says Acterman.
Solution Enables Enterprise-Level Visibility
The reporting capabilities and workflow rules Volt implemented within Microsoft CRM provide executives and management with a 360-degree view into the sales channel. They can examine the leads Volt employees are pursuing as well as the status of each opportunity.
Previously, to keep executives informed, multiple layers of employees were involved. Volt employees would write a status report and then send it to other employees to be consolidated and edited. Microsoft CRM makes such efforts unnecessary, and the team is phasing the process out.
Says Acterman, “After implementing Microsoft CRM, we’re starting to see a change in culture where executives run reports and have better insight into our customers and sales trends with a lot less work.”
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 systemsthat 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