Decision Inc. Migrates
a Multinational CRM Platform
to the Cloud
Solution overview
Industry
Information and Communications Technologies
Solution
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) migration to the cloud
Location
South Africa
Client
A global organisation in the ICT sector serving over 450 clients.
Requirement
To consolidate customer data across disparate systems and improve the ability of sales, marketing, and customer support teams to satisfy the needs of their customers.
The Client
The client is a global technology services business with a core focus on data, digital and performance intelligence. They have offices in Europe, Africa, and Australasia and 450 clients across five continents.
The Requirement
Since the client has grown and expanded over a ten-year period, they had customer data spread over several disparate systems. There was mistrust in the quality of the customer data and thus it was difficult to draw meaningful insights from it. The sales team was running a manual reporting process using spreadsheets. This process was labour-intensive and reduced the time salespeople had to engage with customers.
- The client needed a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that would consolidate their customer data into one place, allowing their sales, marketing, and customer support teams to get a single view of the customer and derive meaningful insights.
- They wanted to reduce the time spent creating reports and free up more time to engage with customers.
The Solution
Decision Inc. successfully migrated the client’s on-premise CRM environment to the cloud, consolidating sales, marketing, and support systems onto one platform. The project kicked off in January and was completed by mid-February.
The CRM migration itself went very smoothly but the challenge was to manage the data that was spread out over more than a decade of doing business. It was critical to maintain the relationships of the data while ensuring its quality. Users had to receive training on where to find information and review the migration of all their required data. This reviewal process was integral to ensuring project success. Despite this, the project saw completion within six weeks thanks to the lean and agile approach we undertook.
– Project Lead, Decision Inc.
Apart from the technical elements of the migration, Decision Inc. provided change management support to the client with user adoption:
Even though the South African operations of the business welcomed the move, there was some reluctance internationally as people were comfortable with the status quo. Change management was therefore critical to demonstrate the benefits of the new environment and reassure users that it would have a similar look and feel to their current on-premise system.
– Client’s Business Unit Manager
The Benefits
The migration not only gave the client access to new data intelligence capabilities, but it optimised the level of service provided to its clients as well. The cloud-based CRM solution featured a new user-friendly interface and incorporated enhanced features such as assessment of customer sentiment and automated duplicate detection.
Decision Inc.’s cloud-based CRM system now enables the following within the business:
IMPROVED DATA QUALITY AND CENTRALISED ENVIRONMENT
The new system migrated everything into a centralised customer repository that is accessible from anywhere in the world. Storing sales, marketing, and customer support data against the same customer record gave users a 360-degree view of the client’s interactions with its customers.
BETTER DATA MANAGEMENT
“The cloud-based CRM environment provides users with a better way to track activities across the organisation and help from a priority management perspective to keep data online, up to date, and accessible. One of the biggest advantages of going the cloud route is having its sales team benefit from greater insights into its customers,” said the client’s CRM lead.
FASTER TIME TO INSIGHTS
The client can now identify trends from its sales and understand customer sentiment better. Its business process flows are improved, and the platform provides a visual element to users making data easier to find than before.
BESPOKE PLANNING, TRACKING, AND REPORTING FEATURES
The client can now track goals and do account planning on an individual basis. Manual reporting is a thing of the past and tracking progress against sales targets is now a much faster process, with reports created automatically.
Looking forward
One of the key learnings the client experienced was the importance of data management and ensuring that its employees had the right tools available to avoid duplication. It is about continuously evaluating the data and keeping it lean to enhance the experience of the system while still delivering the functionality required.
We anticipate that the success of this migration will make corporate buy-in easier in the future. And as more systems become interlinked, the business will be more efficient and deliver greater value far sooner than was possible before.
– Client’s Business Manager
For more information about our Customer Engagement Solutions (CRM Platforms)
About Decision Inc.
Decision Inc. is a global leader in information-driven transformation with a core focus on data, digital and performance intelligence.
Our expertise in technology and industry specialisations have enabled us to help companies around the world make better decisions faster.
Our emphasis on local excellence and global scale enables us to bring clients best of breed technology solutions that enable significant improvement whilst leveraging our Global Research and Innovation teams to accelerate the time to insight. Our local consulting teams are experts in the implementation, support, and execution of these solutions and work with our clients to deliver real results and improvement.
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