Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Fast-Growing Manufacturer Steps Up Customer Service Efforts with CRM Solution
Overview
Country or Region:Canada
Industry:Manufacturing
Customer Profile
The Orthotic Group, based in Markham, Ontario, is one of North America’s largest manufacturers of custom foot orthotics and customized footwear. Founded in 1985, the company has 105 employees.
Business Situation
To continue its impressive growth and challenge its larger competitors in a highly competitive industry, The Orthotic Group sought to differentiate itself by providing high-quality customer service.
Solution
The Orthotic Group deployed and integrated Microsoft® Business Solutions CRM and Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains® to give its sales and customer service representatives access to rich, timely information.
Benefits
Improved customer service
Reduced month-end closings from 5 days to 1 day
Easy access to information
Faster response to customers
Redeployment of resources to more productive activities
/ “When a customer calls with an inquiry, our customer service staff can now find the pertinent order documents with the click of a mouse, instead of having to sort through cabinets full of files.”
Chris Patten, Vice President of Technology, The Orthotic Group
The Orthotic Group’s fixation with feet has made it one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies. But, like many organizations, The Orthotic Group found its potential constrained by a business system that simply couldn’t keep pace with the company’s rapid growth. The system was prone to frequent crashes, it was difficult to access, and it didn’t provide integration between the company’s sales and customer service professionals. As a result, The Orthotic Group lacked the information it felt was necessary to set itself apart in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
To provide the information its sales and service representatives needed to serve clients quickly and effectively—and to safeguard its confidential customer data—The Orthotic Group, with the help of its partner, Options Software & Consulting Inc., deployed Microsoft® Business Solutions CRM and integrated it with the company’s Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains® back-office solution.
Situation
Founded in 1985, The Orthotic Group is one of North America’s largest manufacturers of custom foot orthotics and customized footwear, such as shoes and sandals. In addition, the company also sells a hardware and software tool, called GaitScanTM, which assists medical practitioners in assessing patients’ foot biomechanics. Based in Markham, Ontario, Canada, the company sells its products through a worldwide network of healthcare professionals. The Orthotic Group maintains a comprehensive support system for its professional partners, providing technical support, marketing materials, training seminars, customer service, and personal field support.
The company has clearly found a receptive audience for its products, as evidenced by its meteoric growth. In 2003, The Orthotic Group was ranked by PROFIT Magazine as one of Canada’s brightest growth firms. With revenue growth of 926 percent over a five-year period, the company ranked sixty-fourth on the PROFIT 100, a listing of Canada’s 100 fastest-growing companies.
According to Bruce Marrison, Senior Vice President, the company’s success reflects its commitment to high-quality customer service. “We’ve been able to grow revenue at over 50 percent a year for five years in a row in a mature marketplace due to our reputation for delivering premier services to our clients,” Marrison says.
Nevertheless, the company’s managers realized that, to challenge its larger competitors and continue to grow in a highly competitive industry, the company had to show tremendous agility and responsiveness to customer needs. “We realized that if we could manage every single customer contact, answer every question without delay, and act proactively, we’d really make it difficult for our competitors to keep up with us,” saysChris Patten, the company’s Vice President of Technology.
Unfortunately, company officials realized, The Orthotic Group’s previous business solution wasn’t up to the task. The company had used Integrated Office Accounting, from IOA Software, a Microsoft®Windows®-based financial solution that used a Microsoft® Access database. The solution was heavily customized to address The Orthotic Group’s unique business needs, including both back-office and customer-facing activities.
The system’s limitations included:
Stability and reliability issues. The previous system was unreliable, difficult to support, and prone to frequent crashes, which put The Orthotic Group’s financial and customer data at risk. Plus, the system had to be shut down for at least one hour each month to deal with database corruptions. In fact, the system’s instability forced the company’s IT department to take a hands-on, day-to-day maintenance approach to running the Accounting department’s system.
Lack of sales tools. The company’s sales force has grown from 10 people to 21 in just two years. Unfortunately, the previous system didn’t provide remote access, which meant that sales representatives lacked the ability to access client information, monitor account status, or place and check product orders while they were out of the office. In addition, the solution did not integrate with many of the other systems its sales force used, including the Microsoft Outlook® messaging and collaboration client.
Inability to handle increased transaction volumes. As The Orthotic Group grew and its users and transaction volumes increased, the system became a bottleneck. This was particularly worrisome because the company estimated that its transaction volumes would double annually for the next few years. Because the system was unable to keep pace with transactions, users often experienced complications while opening or saving records, and order entry became a difficult, time-consuming task.
In assessing its system needs, company executives realized that The Orthotic Group needed more than just a front-office system for its sales and customer service professionals; it needed a powerful back-office financial system to secure its vital—and often confidential—information.
The Orthotic Group’s selection guidelines required that the new systems be highly customizable and completely standardized on Microsoft technologies. In addition, the new front-office and back-office systems had to integrate closely with one another, which would ensure that sales and customer service staff have easy access to real-time financial, customer, and order information. In addition, the new customer relationship management (CRM) solution would have to be robust and provide remote access and true sales force automation capabilities, which would allow sales representatives to identify and follow up with the company’s estimated 80,000 leads.
Solution
After evaluating a number of solutions, The Orthotic Group chose Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains® as its back-office solution and Microsoft Business Solutions CRM as its front-office system. “We chose Microsoft for many reasons, including the company’s reputation for superior customer service and because we believed that our reseller partner, Options Software & Consulting Inc., would be able to implement the solutions within a short timeframe and with all of the customization we required, so we could meet the needs of our growing customer base,” says Patten.
In addition, Patten says, “There were a lot of things we liked about Microsoft CRM. The interface looks great; the fact that it’s Web-based is perfect, especially for our sales reps; and the integration with Microsoft Outlook is a real plus for us.”
Even though Microsoft CRM was, at the time, a version 1.0 product, the company had no qualms about moving forward with the new solution. “Because this is a Microsoft product, we knew Microsoft was going to put in all the time and effort needed to make it a great product,” Patten says.
Options Software & Consulting Inc., based in Burlington, Ontario, implemented both solutions, and migrated the data to Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 using the Data Migration Framework, which ships with Microsoft CRM.
The process of implementing Microsoft CRM took approximately four months, with The Orthotic Group experiencing no downtime during implementation.
During that time, Options worked closely with The Orthotic Group to improve the workflow the company employed under the old system. In all, Options imported approximately 250,000 historical transactions, 4,000 customer records, and 80,000 leads into the new system.
In addition, Options incorporated bar-coding capabilities that enable anyone in the company to quickly track the manufacturing stage and physical location of any order. This scanning capability automatically generates an invoice when the product reaches the shipping stage. Finally, Options created a customization that accommodates the unique payment terms common to the industry.
To provide sales and customer service representatives with instant access to customer and product data, Options also implemented AnyView Creator and AnyView Browser, by Accountable Software. These independent software vendor solutions for Microsoft Business Solutions allow The Orthotic Group to customize Microsoft Great Plains SmartLists and publish key Microsoft Great Plains data securely over any Internet or intranet connection.
Benefits
By implementing Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains and Microsoft CRM, The Orthotic Group is realizing a wealth of benefits, including advanced customer service capabilities, more efficient business processes, and better use of resources.
Immediate Access to Information for Improved Customer Service
With Microsoft Great Plains and Microsoft CRM, The Orthotic Group can now track, monitor, and influence every customer interaction. In fact, all of the company’s customer service and sales employees are now using Microsoft CRM. “With this combined system, our customer service staff are fully empowered and now have full visibility into our client base,” says Patten.
The Orthotic Group scans all work orders and related documentation into Microsoft CRM, attaching the images to their respective work order record in Microsoft Great Plains. As a result, the company’s customer service professionals have fingertip access to the information they need to answer customer questions and resolve issues. “When a customer calls with an inquiry, our customer service staff can use Microsoft CRM to find the pertinent order documents with the click of a mouse, instead of having to sort through cabinets full of files,” Patten says.
The company’s sales representatives enjoy similar access to information through the Microsoft Outlook messaging and collaboration client. “Our sales reps can follow up on leads, monitor orders, and place orders for their customers in real or near real time over their laptops, which is something they couldn’t previously do,” Patten says. “And because Microsoft CRM is Web-based, remote users who don’t have access to their computer but have one nearby can jump on and pull up any information they need—just as if they were in the office,” Patten says.
In addition, the AnyView solutions make it easy for the company’s sales representatives to quickly see the status of orders and inventory, and look up their valued customers, even if they are out of the office.
Streamlined Business Processes
According to Patten, the new system is easily able to handle the company’s current transaction volume—as well as projected future volumes. In addition, order entry has improved dramatically, with no record locking or errors, and no delays in either opening or saving records. “The system itself is no longer a bottleneck,” Patten says.
With the old system, month-end procedures took The Orthotic Group’s accounting team five business days, and postings couldn’t be performed until the end of the business day, when all other users were logged off the system. The new system has dramatically reduced the amount of time spent on month-end closings. In fact, the accounting team recently closed two months in a single day—and without the need for users to log off the system.
Ability to Redeploy Resources
The combination of Microsoft Great Plains and Microsoft CRM means that the company’s IT department no longer needs to run the day-to-day operations of the accounting department, which saves valuable time and frees up IT staff to perform other, more important duties. “In the past, we had one or two IT resources dedicated to dealing with daily accounting issues,” Patten says. “We’ve been able to dedicate them completely to other growing projects.”
Microsoft Business Solutions
Microsoft Business Solutions offer integrated business applications and services that allow small and midsize organizations and divisions of large enterprises to connect employees, customers, and suppliers for improved efficiency. The financial management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and analytics applications work with other Microsoft software, including the Microsoft Office System and the Windows operating system, to streamline processes across an entire organization. This gives businesses insight to respond rapidly, plan strategically, and execute quickly. Microsoft Business Solutions are delivered through a worldwide network of channel partners that provide specialized services and local support tailored to a company’s needs.
For more information about Microsoft Business Solutions, go to: