Payment Processing Company Consolidates CRM Systems to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Benefits Brief

• Assist customers from any location and using any device
• Access one, 360-degree view of its customers
• Tight integration with its Microsoft Stack: Dynamics 365 Finance, Office 365, and Teams
• Lower total cost of ownership than previous solutions
• Improved customer experience across their expanded customer community
• Use configurable dashboards and data visualization software to gain actionable insights
• Create positive, customized customer interactions to boost sales growth
• Build team collaboration and let the sales team sell as a team
• Work smarter to close more deals by leveraging easy-to-design process flows

System Simplification Project

For a payment processing company that continues to grow through acquisition, one of the common challenges is that each newly acquired company comes with its own systems. The IT team is then tasked with integrating and supporting a myriad of different systems, creating complexity. The resulting system sprawl must eventually be addressed and diminished.

The company found itself running five different customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Over time they had come to the point where they were using features from each to perform specific tasks. Ultimately, this created confusion amongst the 300+ sales and operations users they were supporting.

When the Senior Director of Business Systems and his team embarked on a mission to create a singular systems environment for all sales and operations people, it was appropriated dubbed the “System Simplification” project.

The company’s project team began by answering key questions and defining objectives and goals for the new, consolidated system. After several internal meetings, it occurred to the team that one of their B2B customers was Velosio, experts in designing and deploying integrated CRM systems. Why not engage their customer to become their consultant to help determine their best systems strategy?

Velosio’s knowledge of the Microsoft stack and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365 CE), coupled with a history and understanding of the company’s goals, and a proven track record in helping businesses move from CRM solutions like Salesforce to D365 CE solidified the partnership decision.

The company reviewed existing CRM systems such as Salesforce, but soon determined that Microsoft D365 CE has a lower overall cost of ownership (the cost per user for Microsoft D365 CE is about half of the cost of Salesforce CRM). Microsoft D365 CE was also selected because of its seamless integration with currently used Microsoft D365 Finance, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams solutions. By running their entire business on Microsoft, the payment processor’s sellers and customer service representatives would have a 360-degree view of every customer – including sales history, customer service cases, invoice information, and much more. Additionally, Microsoft 365 CE provides the incomparable Power BI tool for data visualization, reporting capabilities, user friendliness and more.

Immediate, Out-of-the-Box Value

The team was enthusiastic about selecting Microsoft from the start because they could immediately see functionality that would bring them value right “out-of-the-box” without costly customizations.

The Senior Director of Business Systems expresses great satisfaction mixed with surprise when he reports, “Once the agreement was signed between both parties, it was floodgates! We all just started working, achieving a substantial list of initial objectives within a very short timeframe. Our sales team was up and running right away,” he continues.

The biggest goal was to replace Salesforce, Sugar, and all the other different CRM systems they had acquired with Microsoft D365 CE. The team used this opportunity to clean and normalize their data. While standardizing data, they resolved to also focus on creating a better customer experience across their expanded customer community, serving everyone in a quicker, more efficient way.

Complex Interconnectivity

“Our implementation was somewhat complex because our old systems were interconnected, which did not allow for sunsetting and replacing one solution at a time,” explains the Senior Director of Business Systems. “With five systems, for example, one supports agent tasks, another tracks ticketing or support cases, while another provides pricing translation from our billing system.”

He continues, explaining, “To further complicate matters, all five systems were working together on some functions such as demographics, which creates a problem because each one of them was once its own CRM with its own database. So, each one of those systems thinks they’re the system of record, and of course there can only be one system of record.”

This brings the IT team to what they see as the biggest value coming from this System Simplification: “Beyond creating a single work environment, data is gold. Data is what it’s all about. We now have one system of record for our customer schema, which is awesome.” The company now has a 360-degree view of its customers, insights into buying behavior and patterns, and an understanding of customer lifecycles. All 300+ sales and operations users have access to the same valuable customer information, with an ability to provide better customer support.

The Importance of Partnering

The payment processor is a deep believer in creating partnerships with both internal and external teams. “It’s all about partnerships and working together,” the Senior Director of Business Systems explains. “Velosio is pretty unique because, while implementing the solution, they provided additional value by advising our staff on best practices for optimizing the system to align with business processes and goals,” he concludes.