The Customer
The Customer is one of the world’s foremost facilities management and support companies. Headquartered in the UK, the company had revenues in excess of £3 billion in 2015 and a global workforce of around 75,000 people.
The Customer specialises in providing corporate advice, design, construction, equipment, and frontline public services.
The Challenge
Crimson began working with The Customer in August 2013. The Customer had been using an inefficient CRM system, which it was growing increasingly dissatisfied with. Crimson has a Gold standard Microsoft Dynamics CRM competency and is a member of Microsoft’s Partner Advisory Council. The Customer brought in Crimson’s CRM consultants to develop and deliver their implementation of Microsoft’s customer relationship management solution into the organisation.
The strategy, which was created by Crimson following a number of workshops with The Customer’s teams, was to deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM to the Central bids team across The Client’s Support Services, covering; commercial, civil government, defence, communities, industrial (excluding hard services) and separately to its healthcare division. The aim was to support The Customer’s Business Development teams providing them with a global single view of the sales pipeline and opportunity lifecycle in real time.
In March 2016, The Customer turned to Crimson CRM consultancy services again as they wanted to build additional functionality onto Microsoft Dynamics CRM for their healthcare division. This upgrade was to provide additional support to the Business Development team, who wanted to refine the way they managed customers and leads.
The Strategy
For the initial 2013 project, Crimson provided a core team of Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultants with a matrix of expertise to implement this project, with one consultant remaining onsite at the Customer throughout the process. This team was responsible for the infrastructure and planning, systems testing, project management, data migration, and training 150 users of the new solution. End user adoption and transferring knowledge of the system to key stakeholders was a particularly important part of the project as it instilled long-term CRM skills into the Customer’s teams.
The 2016 upgrade, involved a similar process. Initially, Crimson was responsible for hosting a five-day workshop to produce design document, which included detailed plans that The Customer could use when searching for potential suppliers. Crimson then provided specialist Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultants (on-site at the Customer’s offices and off-site) to oversee the upgrade engagement from start to finish.
For this project, Crimson’s objectives included; deploying a new user friendly environment, reviewing CRM roles and security privileges, establishing a test environment, creating a change control and support process, training users, transferring knowledge to key stakeholders, testing the new systems, and reviewing all user documentation.
Return on Investment
Both of these projects were implemented thoroughly, met the Customer’s deadlines, and were delivered in budget.
Throughout the project, Crimson provided the Customer with in-house training to improve knowledge of the system, which instilled key skills within the firm for the future.
The solutions that Crimson created for The Customer’s Business Development teams helped the company grow. In 2015, the company achieved a revenue increase of 10% to more than £3.2billion, total operating profit growth of 12% to £131.8million, £3.2billion of new business was won in 2015, and a future workload of £7.7billion has been projected.
“Our business development teams now have a universal sales pipeline that can be used to support each business unit and drive growth.
“Crimson’s approach ensured successful adoption, with each unit taking ownership of their Dynamics CRM solution and its configuration.
“Ultimately, these solutions have helped to consistently its grow financial results over the last three years.”
– The Customer’s Head of Sales