Internal Solution Case Study
/ Microsoft Improves Access to Customer Data with New Smart Client Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Information Technology
Profile
Microsoft is the world’s largest software company, with 60,000 employees, subsidiaries in 94 countries and regions, and more than U.S.$36 billion in annual revenues.
Business Situation
Microsoft needed to make customer relationship management (CRM) data more accessible to its enterprise sales force.
Solution
Using Microsoft® Office Professional Edition 2003 for solution development, thecompany built a smart client applicationthat provides access to data in Siebel and other back-end systems through Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003.
Benefits
Rapid return on investment
Improved user productivity
More efficient collaboration
Better data quality and reporting
Rapid time-to-market
Reduced support and training costs / “Customer Explorer helps overcome the ‘last mile’ challenge of traditional CRM solutions by putting customer data at the fingertips of our sales force through the tools that they use most frequently.”
Jon Elliott, Senior Director, Microsoft
Microsoft needed to make the customer data in its Siebel solution more accessible and actionable to the company’s 8,000-member sales force. As part of its Project Elixir effort, MicrosoftdevelopedCustomer Explorer, a smart client applicationthat uses Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 to provide access to customer data in several back-end systems. Field sales personnel now can manage customer data with the same tool that they use to communicate with customers—a capability that lets them spend less time in the office and more time with customers, facilitates collaboration, and improves the quality and quantity of data in Siebel. And that helps Microsoft get a better picture of its sales pipeline. The companydeveloped the pilot version of Customer Explorer in nine months at a cost of U.S.$500,000—a small price to maximize the return on its multimillion-dollar investment in Siebel.
Situation
At Microsoft, the efforts of individual employees are the driving force behind thecompany’s business performance. This isespecially true for the company’s salespeople, whomust be able to access and act on customer information regardless of whether they are at their desks or in the field.
Sales personnel at Microsoft rely on sales force automation (SFA) software from Siebel Systems to support many customer-related business processes, including account management, customer care, and sales pipeline reporting. Some 17,000 Microsoft employees and contractors use the solution on a regular basis, making it one of the largest global Siebel deployments. About half of those users reside in the company’s enterprise sales group. Other users are distributed across the company’s small and medium business, customer support, marketing, and service organizations.
In early 2002, Microsoft embarked on a major overhaul of its Siebel infrastructure. The 32-month project included an upgrade from version 6.01 to version 7.5.3, along with the consolidation of five regional Siebel implementations to a single global instance running at the corporate data center. Business drivers for the project—a U.S.$40 million investment—included the need for a consolidated view of worldwide sales activity and a reduction in the Siebel solution’s total cost of ownership through the centralization of system management and support.
Although rolling out the new Siebel infrastructure was a large undertaking, it was only part of the challenge faced by the solution’s project leadership. The other half of the puzzle was finding a way to make the data in Siebel more accurate and complete—and to make it more accessible to the company’s enterprise sales force. Field sales personnel saw the entry of data into Siebel as extra work, their main motivation for doing so being that management required it.
“To maximize our investment in Siebel, we had to make the solution more accessible and useful for our field sales force,” says JonElliott, Senior Directorat Microsoft. “Sales personnel traditionally have input only the bare minimum of data into Siebel, driven by the need to do so if they want their commission checks. Siebel offers a wealth of rich functionality, but it does us little good if people on the front lines won’t use it.”
The project team held formal focus groups and informal discussions with field sales personnel. In both venues, the same issue came up over and over again—that the Siebel user interface (UI) did not integrate well with daily workflows. “When people in the field are not in meetings, they communicate and collaborate with customers through Microsoft® Outlook®,” says Elliott. “Entering the same data into Siebel is seen as extra work—a cut-and-paste exercise to be done after the fact.”
Field sales personnel faced similar inefficiency when accessing customer data in systems other than Siebel. For example, in preparing for a customer meeting, account executives had to use one application to view the status of open support incidents for the customer, another application to view sales and licensing history, and so on. Most applications could be accessed only when the user was online.
Solution
To make the data in Siebel more easily accessible and actionable, the Microsoft Sales and Marketing Information Technology (SMIT) groupbuilt Customer Explorer, a smart client applicationthat takes advantage of Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 as a solution foundation. Developed as part of the company’s Project Elixir effort, Customer Explorer works as an add-in to the Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 messaging and collaboration client, giving field sales personnel easy access to Siebel and other sources of customer data through the same tool that they use to interact with customers and colleagues.
Streamlined Access to Customer Data
The Customer Explorer smart client extends the Outlook 2003 user interface as shown in Figure 1, allowing users to work with Siebel data using the same familiar three-pane UI asthey do when working with the Outlook Inbox, Calendar, and Tasks. The new Siebel items—accounts, activities, contacts, and opportunities—are stored on the user’s local disk drive, alongside default Outlook items in the application’s local data store. Behind the scenes, Customer Explorer uses Web services to keep its local data store synchronized with the master Siebel databaseat the Microsoft data center.
Customer Explorer adds several new types of objects to Outlook, taking advantage of its rich UI to facilitate the management of Siebel data. Under the top-level Customer Explorer folder (which appears in the Outlook folder view alongside the user’s Inbox, Tasks, and Calendar), subfolders for My Accounts, My Activities, My Opportunities, and My Siebel Contactsenable users to intuitively navigate, view, and update Siebel data.
When a user clicks the My Accounts folder, Outlook displays the Siebel accounts with which that user is associated. Whenthe user selectsan account, the Outlook detail pane (bottom right pane in Figure 1) displays the Siebel account profile. The Outlook list view (top right pane) provides options for accessing detailed account profile data, Microsoft Premier Support Services (PSS) incidents, and account sales history—the latter two options displaying data that Customer Explorer pulls from business systems other than Siebel. Clicking the Account Profile option in the list view pane displays a form inwhich the user can view or edit Siebel data for the account.
Under each customer folder, subfolders contain the Siebel activities, contacts, and opportunities associated with that customer. Double-clicking one of those items displays a form in which users can view or edit the data associated with that item, including the association of that item to other Siebel items—for example, associating an opportunity to an account or a task to an opportunity. The additional subfolders under the Customer Explorer folder—My Activities, My Opportunities, and My Siebel Contacts—provide an aggregated view of those items across all the user’s accounts, as well as items that are not associated with a specific account.
Users can create a new activity, contact, or opportunity by selecting the corresponding option from the Customer Explorer menu, which the smart client adds to the Outlook menu bar. To help streamline workflows, Customer Explorer enables users to convert Outlook items—e-mail, calendar, task, or contact—to new Siebel items (see Figure 2). Data fields are prepopulated to reduce the time spent entering data manually. Similarly, Siebel activities, contacts, and opportunities can be converted to Outlook items with just a few mouse clicks.
When a user is working online, changes to Siebel accounts, activities, contacts, and opportunities are saved in real time to two locations: the local Outlook data store and the main Siebel database server located atthe Microsoft data center. In addition, Customer Explorer synchronizes its local data store with the Siebel database server at predetermined intervals, ensuring that changes that other users have made are copied to theuser’s local system. Users alsocan work when offline, in which case Customer Explorer relies on its local data store, with anychanges to that data marked for synchronization the next time the user connects to the Microsoft corporate network.
Pragmatic Approach: 80/20 Rule
In developing the Customer Explorer smart client, Microsoft SMIT did not attempt to replicate the entire Siebel UI within the Outlook add-in. Instead, the group implemented only that functionality required to streamline common user workflows. When viewing or editing Siebel data from within Customer Explorer, a “View in Siebel” button allows the user to launch the Web-based Siebel UI with the current item in Customer Explorer as the active Siebel record—so that the user can perform additional tasks or edit data fields that are not available through Customer Explorer. User authentication is handled automatically, eliminating the need for the user to log on separately to Siebel.
“We reconstructed only that 20 percent of the Siebel UI that users work in 80 percent of the time,” says Elliott. “Providing access to all Siebel features through Customer Explorer would have been like trying to boil the ocean. Instead, we stayed focused on what really mattered, leaving the rest to the native Siebel UI. The approach we took leverages the strengths of both solutions—Siebel and Outlook—keeping development times to a minimum while providing the capabilities that benefit users the most.”
In addition to linking directly to the Siebel UI, Customer Explorer provides quick links to more than a dozen other business systems, including those for account planning, training, volume licensing, and sales reporting.
How It Works
Customer Explorer uses a service-oriented architecture that consists of two components:
Enterprisewide service layer called Alchemy, which exposes the functionality ofSiebel and other systems that contain customer data through a set of reusable Web services
Smart client application—in this case, the Customer Explorer add-in running within Outlook 2003—that moves data in and out of those systems by connecting to the service layer
Both components were initially developed using theMicrosoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system and run on the Microsoft .NET Framework—an integral component of the Windows® operating system that provides a common programming model and runtime for developing Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications. Version 2.5 of Customer Explorer was developed using Visual Studio 2005.
Service Layer
As shown in Figure 3, the Customer Explorer smart client and more than 50 other user solutions access the Alchemy service layer, which Microsoft began building a few years ago to make customer data more easily accessible to solution development groupsacross the company. Alchemy reduces development times for solutions like Customer Explorer by allowing developers todescribe only what data they need when calling the service layer, without having to know the specifics of where that data is located or how it is stored and accessed. The service layer handles the details of fulfilling the request—for example, retrieving data from one or more systems—and delivers the desired results while hiding the underlying complexity of servicing that request.
Alchemy exposes data in eight back-end systems, including the three that are used by Customer Explorer:
Siebel. Siebel, the primary customer relationship management (CRM) solution for Microsoft, is used heavily by the company’s sales force to manage and report on account-related information and activities.
Clarify. Clarify is used by Microsoft Product Support Services to manage support and service requests. It is also used to manage support contracts and serves as a knowledge base for support-related information across all Microsoft products.
MS Sales. MS Sales, a 350-gigabyte (GB) data warehouse, is used for revenue reporting. It contains data on direct sales and sales generated through channel partners.
The service layer resides on six HP DL380G2 two-processor server computers that run the Enterprise Edition of the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, the foundation of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. Two of those servers also run Microsoft SQL Server™2005, which is part of Windows Server System.
Smart Client
Customer Explorer is a smart client, an easily deployed and managed application that runs locally on a user’s device and intelligently connects to distributed data sources. Taking advantage of the rich feature set and open architecture of Outlook 2003 helpedMicrosoft SMIT rapidly deliver a solution thatprovides all the benefits of a smart client application: a rich user interface, features that take advantage of the processing power of the user’s local device, the ability to connect intelligently with other systems, and an ability for users to access and act on information when not connected to the Internet. Updates to the smart client are automatically handled by the service layer.
By building on the capabilities of Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, the Customer Explorer smart client can easilytake advantage of local computing resources—such as processing power, memory, disk storage, and peripherals—todeliver a richer, more responsive, more adaptive, and ultimately more productive user experience than possible with a Web-based solution. Users of the smart client solution can manage Siebel data faster because tasks are performed locally on the user’s portable or desktop PC, where a local copy of customer data is stored for rapid access, including when the user is offline. In contrast, when Siebel is accessed through its Web-based UI, each user action requires a roundtrip between the Web browser and Web server—a system on which a few shared processors must service hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users.
In developing Customer Explorer, Microsoft SMITused Windows Forms—the classes in the Microsoft .NET Framework for the development of rich Windows-based applications. Developers usedVisual Studio 2005 and theMicrosoft Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) to allow managed code running under the .NET Framework to access the Outlook object model, which runs as unmanaged code in the component object model (COM) environment.
For more information on the architecture of Customer Explorer, see the Development Process and Architecture section later in this document.
Deployment and Rollout
Microsoft completed the Siebel upgrade on schedule, rolling out Siebel 7.5.3 to 17,000 users in October 2004. The consolidation effort reduced the number of server computers required to support the Siebel solution from 200 to 60, with all servers located at the main Microsoft data center.
Close to a terabyte of customer data is stored on a single database server, which runs the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000. The system is a Unisys ES7000 enterprise server computer configured with 16 64-bit Intel Itanium II processors and 64 GB of RAM. To help ensure availability, that computer is clustered together with a second, identical computer in an active-passive configuration. Support is provided on a round-the-clock basis from locations in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Development of version 1.0 of Customer Explorer was completed in October 2004 and pilot deployment beganin early 2005. Salespeople were provided with a link to a preinstallation .exe file, which checked for the required system configuration. If software updates were needed, the preinstallation program pointed users to the latest versions of that software before downloading and installing Customer Explorer. Once installed, Customer Explorer uses Web services to check for and download its own upgrades.
Development for version 2.0 of Customer Explorer began in early 2005. New features included more granular user control over synchronization with the Alchemy service layer, the ability to associate partner information to an opportunity, and functionality needed by personnel in the Microsoft Services organization, which also will deploy Customer Explorer. Microsoft SMIT also recently launched a pilot deployment of a mobile version of Customer Explorer to a small group of 100 users.