Customer Solution Case Study
/ Atalys Meets the Challenge of Customer Relationships in Fewer Than 15 Days
Overview
Country or Region:France
Industry:Electronic Equipment
Customer Profile
Founded in 2003, Atalys is a company specializing in consulting, selling, and maintaining electronic equipment for big accounts. It has operations in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Business Situation
Atalys needed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution with a sales force automation tool to manage the sales cycle, maintenance contracts, hardware, and on-site initiatives.
Solution
Microsoft®CRM permits marketing reps and technicians to access customer histories from anywhere.
Benefits
Access to marketing action plan histories
Sharing information among different groups
Rapid implementation
Solution adapted to the company’s business
Ease of use and adoption / “Thanks to Microsoft CRM, we’ve got a solution perfectly suited to our business. We can manage marketing opportunities in progress as well as the futures market potential that each customer may present.”
Yannick Schneider, Manager, Atalys
To increase the performance of its marketing teams, improve its customer service, and manage contracts and on-site interventions, Atalys—a company specializing in consulting, selling, and maintaining electronic equipment—chose Microsoft® CRM (now part of Microsoft Dynamics™)in host mode to meet its objective: an application that is operational in a few days and offers immediate benefits.
Situation
Founded in 2003, Atalys (57 employees) already has some prestigious references, such as Cegetel, Snecma, and the French postal service. “In the context of the contracts with our customers, we are committed to ensuring maintenance of electronic equipment by making an annual visit to check their installation,” Yannick Schneider, Manager at Atalys, explains. Atalys very quickly determined that these annual visits are a good occasion to strengthen business relationships and improve customer satisfaction.
“Our marketing team and our technicians are onsite most of the time. It's essential that they be able to access the history of an account wherever they may be. From our side here at headquarters, we want to benefit from the information that our colleagues gather when they’re on business visits. It’s this in-depth follow-up on our customers’ needs that lets us develop our offerings in a proactive manner,” Schneider continues.
Solution
In September 2004, Atalys called upon a consultant with expertise in customer relationship management (CRM) to analyze its needs regarding a customer information system. “To sum it up, our specifications depended on three criteria: compatibility of the solution with [the Microsoft® Office] Outlook® [2003 messaging and collaboration client] and [Microsoft] Word [2003] so we wouldn’t have to disrupt users’ habits; a product that could be installed in several languages to satisfy the demands of our branches in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg; a innovative and scalable editor that could grow with us,” Schneider points out. A few weeks later, Atalys met several Microsoft partners including Titanium, which presented an initial model with Microsoft CRM.
“We were attracted to this solution that met our expectations on all points, in particular with its customization options and ease of integration with our office tools,” Schneider continues. “We appreciate the energy and motivation shown by this young company. It was a rewarding experience to share our thoughts as businesspeople and see them brought to life in Microsoft CRM!”
For Titanium, this project represented a genuine opportunity, but also a challenge: “Atalys wanted to complete the deployment with very short deadlines. This was a challenge we fully met by implementing operations cycle and sales management in only two weeks,” declares Éric Muller, Manager at Titanium.
To benefit from the solution as quickly as possible, Atalys chose the hosted mode, with Titanium assuming the responsibility of application service provider for Microsoft CRM. “It’s an approach particularly well suited to a company like ours that doesn’t want to set up complicated CRM construction zones or have to manage system administration,” Schneider explains.
Fast to implement, the application in hosted mode poses no computer-related constraints: no software installation at the company, no hardware to buy, no server administration, and guaranteed availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The application and database are hosted at Titanium in a white room. Microsoft CRM can currently be accessed by 13 marketing reps and technicians at Atalys using a virtual private network (VPN).
“Each user has a password to access the data according to access profiles that the company defines. The service is operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a guarantee of data security and protection services. Before, each marketing rep had his or her own [Microsoft Office] Excel® [2003] database, with all this entails in terms of synchronizing data. Consolidation was done once a month, and it was very unwieldy to manage,” Schneider remarks.
Titanium had to take all the data in Excel and import it into Microsoft CRM. “We recovered these data and tested them with a ‘pilot’ rep. Then, we scanned the service contacts and integrated them into the CRM solution. We also set the parameters for organizing and displaying the data. All this hardly took two weeks thanks to the personalization tools integrated into Microsoft CRM,” Muller notes.
Benefits
Today, Schneider is completely satisfied with his CRM application. “Thanks to Microsoft CRM, we’ve got a solution perfectly suited to our business. We can manage marketing opportunities in progress as well as the futures market potential that each customer may present. In addition, technicians and marketing reps have the same information at the same time. It's a major asset when you’re working for the industrial maintenance market where contracts are complex and require mastery of a large number of regulatory and technical constraints.”
Nonetheless, implementing a CRM software package can disrupt sales teams’ working methods, which requires constant monitoring of the application. “We involved the marketing team from the outset, and each person took part in the project. The stake for the company is capital. Not having to change the working environment of marketing reps because a Microsoft CRM interface was available in Outlook was a decisive factor for adopting the project,” Schneider concludes.
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 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: