The Dynamics setup was via GCC, Alcumus' technology support partner. GCC, in turn, was using a 3rd party to host the CRM service. GCC was not sufficiently knowledgeable of MS Dynamics CRM to support this project. The 3rd party hosting provider was small and potentially at risk due to Microsoft's direction to invest in their own hosted service.

In addition to these points, Alcumus as an organisation operated an old version of Dynamics CRM which limited functionality and upgrades to the latest advances. The current CRM was not available to handheld devices.

• To move to a setup that was not exposed to 3rd party risk
• To move to an environment where the Alcumus CRM was always on the latest version
• To make the CRM seamlessly available to handheld devices to speed up the response to enquiry times
• To tighten up the associated record-keeping in CRM
• To work with a company who were expert in MS Dynamics CRM deployments and who can expertly guide them through to a successful deployment

Alcumus faced a significant challenge in coordinating within account management and crossed selling activities due to not having the visibility of what an account is doing with Alcumus across the multiple service line offers, thus missing out on opportunities.

This had also become evident from the management team that the team were not communicating effectively to provide the optimum service to their customers – this lead to a risk of damaging Alcumus' credibility with their customers, which would affect the organisation's ability to move up to higher-level decision-makers.

• To configure the CRM to make it easy and transparent to users Alcumus services a customer took, how they progressed, who the relevant contacts were from both an Alcumus and customer view and what general activities were in progress (particularly the sales opportunities).

Measuring the pipeline in a useful way for up the line and down the line reporting is currently time-consuming and manual. Relevant reports for investors will be different from those required for sales teams.

• To provide intelligent and personalised reporting automatically without the need for manual intervention.

Measuring the performance of the numerous and varied marketing/lead/prospect generating campaigns is currently manual and difficult to maintain in the enlarged Alcumus Group.

• To provide reporting that made it easy to measure the performance of campaigns
• To make it easy to identify relevant customer groups for well-targeted marketing and sales campaigns • To improve the continuous cycle of data accuracy.

Experience an end to end service that can move seamlessly between marketing, support, sales and account manager.

DNA consultants ran a consultancy workshop with all locations, including HQ, to understand and outline the process and pain points. This resulted in a solution whereby we streamlined their entire process by deploying a central CRM platform (cloud version), enabling all individual locations to connect. This architecture had scalability, where an additional location can be connected to the central CRM platform relatively easily. Furthermore, this new solution enabled the senior management team board members to gain access to reports organisation-wide (as opposed to location-based) with a click of a button. The CRM system was integrated with click-dimension (which is a marketing 3rd party marketing system) AX (the accounting system) and Sharepoint (the document management system) to intelligently automate and seamlessly enable flow, minimising administration efforts. [Platforms integrated: Microsoft Dynamics CRM, AX, Click-Dimension, Sharepoint]