Case Study

Enhancing Customer Relationships With the Capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365

SUMMARY/OVERVIEW

Managing Customer Accounts Without Central Automation

A regional credit union faced challenges with scattered data and limited reporting, impacting customer satisfaction and internal efficiency. BDO’s Enterprise Business Applications team assessed the systems and created a plan to integrate applications, remove duplicate records, and improve customer service with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM tools.

Key Takeaways

Unified data

Eliminated thousands of duplicate customer records to unify critical data. 

Improved communication

Improved marketing efforts through analytics-driven communications. 

Integrated systems

Successfully established integration among all three systems tied to CRM. 

Team meeting
The Challenge

Duplicate Records and Disparate Systems 

With customer information scattered among different systems, the credit union faced significant obstacles in account management, marketing campaigns, and analytics reporting. These disconnected systems made it difficult for users to track customer interactions and locate the relevant data to provide efficient, consistent, and comprehensive service. It also led to users creating multiple records for the same customer, meaning critical pieces of information were dispersed among multiple entries, even within the same system. 

The client also had a flattened CRM Dataverse schema design, meaning data was only loosely categorized and didn’t exist in a structured hierarchy. Combined with the duplicate records, this made tracking customer interactions inconsistent and often resulted in the accounts unintentionally being targeted by the same marketing communications multiple times. 

A lack of central automation added further difficulty to the client’s data management struggles, forcing users to manually track and enter each interaction without automatic visibility to existing records. 

Two colleagues discussing
The Approach

Automating CRM and Organizing Data With Dynamics 365 

  1. We began by conducting discovery sessions with the client to understand their difficulties and what their goals were. As part of the assessment, we reviewed their existing operating procedures and tools to identify the source of the challenges. Because of their established practices and familiarity with the multiplatform setup, the client wanted to maintain their data warehouse software, accounts platform, and CRM application while integrating the data shared among them.

  2. Even though the credit union was already using Dynamics 365 as its CRM platform, their data warehousing software and accounts platform weren’t automated to allow data to sync among the three applications. But before we could add central automation capabilities, our team first needed to remove the duplicate customer records while consolidating the critical data contained within them.

  3. Once we had finalized that step, our team implemented automation tools that tracked each customer interaction and let it flow into each system, allowing the client to appropriately handle their customers’ financial needs while informing marketing efforts.

  4. Additionally, we instituted a more robust structure into the client’s data warehouse, helping them categorize information in a way that made it easier to retrieve and apply during customer interactions.

Colleagues discussing while viewing a laptop.
The Results

Delivering Greater Customer Service 

The organization needed to gather, use, and protect data from important stakeholders in an efficient manner. Each business unit within TWC became siloed, and employees were using IT solutions that had reached their expiration date. The inability to update and improve on their outdated platforms also increased TWC’s risk of data loss.

Some of the specific issues they faced included:

  • Improved Service

    The client saw both immediate and long-term benefits from the work our teams performed. With the duplicated records now merged, customer service representatives were able to serve credit union members faster and with greater insight into their banking history. 

  • Enhanced Data Analytics 

    Because critical data points now flowed among the different systems used by the client, the reporting process became faster and required significantly less manual effort on the part of users. It also simplified the act of identifying and drawing insights from KPIs, thanks in part to the more organized data warehouse structure our team put in place. 

  • Flexible Options Within Budget 

    Although we had recommended moving data into the Dynamics 365 platform, we were able to meet the client’s request to continue using all three of their platforms while still helping them use the CRM capabilities of Dynamics more effectively than they had been. This provided heightened capabilities to the client while addressing their concern over short-term costs. It also positioned them to scale their project in the future should their needs grow. 

“Meeting with the client gave us the opportunity to understand their unique needs and desire to maintain three core systems. Those conversations allowed us to shape a solution that addressed the credit union’s issues with disparate, disconnected platforms while maintaining an operating framework they were familiar with.”
Daniel Spees
Principal

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