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Integrated Operations Means More Food On the Table
The Challenge
"Coordinating sales, customer service, product design, and manufacturing processes had become a major challenge at Zagat Survey," commented Harry Collins, Director of Development at Netsoft USA. "While Zagat provides standard restaurant guides and books for all major cities in the world, their corporate clients see a higher value in custom designing the front and back covers with their own logos and images. Given the seasonality of these orders - highly concentrated around Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays - the strain on the team and on order processing was exacerbated by the lack of integration between Zagat Survey's customer facing and order management systems."
The Sales and Marketing team at Zagat Survey relied on Salesforce.com's on-demand Customer Relation Management (CRM) tool to track customer information and history and to manage customer information and marketing activities. Meanwhile, Microsoft Dynamics GP release 7.5 ERP solution was being used to manage orders, inventory, and manufacturing processes. The lack of integration between these two systems required manual entry of information from one system to the other and provided limited or no visibility to customer information and into the order-to-cash lifecycle. It also meant that Zagat employees were frequenly required to perform manual reconciliation of data, resulting in loss of both time and revenue.
Because of the lack of integration between Zagat Survey's systems, performance data was not easily accessible to their management team. Information regarding customer service requests was not properly collected and stored but instead had to be gathered from each sales and customer service representative individually and then compiled into a consolidated report, all of which required an inordinate amount of time. The end result was that Zagat Survey did not have the tools to proactively manage customer satisfaction.
Marketing information was also not readily available. Zagat Survey found that, with their existing systems, collecting information on their customer base for marketing lists was extremely time consuming, as was the process of gathering performance data from their previous marketing campaigns.
In summary, Zagat Survey was struggling with several critical issues:
- Sales people spent too much time entering customer orders in the system.
- Customer service had to constantly revisit orders to ensure that they represented the customers' requests and complied with internal procedures and product formats.
- Marketing had no automated tools available to extract and consolidate information on historical sales, customer service efforts, or marketing data.
- Employees had to perform manual consolidation, de-duping, and scrubbing of redundant or mis-entered records from a variety of sources.
The Solution
To rectify these problems and regain their competitive edge, Zagat Survey selected Netsoft USA, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Netsoft stepped through Zagat's entire business process and developed a plan to provide an integrated solution with seamless processes and robust reporting tools.
The overall solution implemented by Netsoft USA for Zagat Survey provided the following features:
- Complete Customer View. Netsoft USA provided Zagat Survey with a complete customer view in Dynamics CRM via Microsoft Office Outlook and Dynamics GP integration. This provided Zagat Survey with the ability to view all account and contact information, customer e-mail communications, tasks, and appointments, along with complete customer history right in Dynamics CRM.
- Enhanced Sales Process/Order Management. Through the integration of Dynamics CRM and Dynamics GP, Zagat Survey gained the ability to view all historical and current sales order information in Dynamics CRM. This enabled sales representatives to identify top customers right in Dynamics CRM, thereby eliminating the need to query and consolidate various data from Dynamics GP.
By providing Zagat Survey with a full featured product catalog in Dynamics CRM, Netsoft USA was able to ease and further streamline the order entry process for sales reps by the addition of Experlogix Configurator to assist with Dynamics CRM orders. The accuracy of order information would now be ensured by the validation rules specified in the Experlogix Configurator for various types of sales orders.
- Efficient Customer Service. Zagat gained the ability to create, assign, and route customer service requests directly in Dynamics CRM 3.0. Zagat Survey finally had the capabilities to easily run reports to evaluate customer needs and to measure service performance from within a single application.
- Marketing Automation. The marketing automation provided by Dynamics CRM 3.0 enabled Zagat Survey to manage and report on all facets of their marketing initiatives such as marketing lists, campaigns, campaign responses, and campaign performance.
The Bottom Line
"The new system developed by Netsoft USA has provided Zagat Survey with a simplified process for creating customized guides and has increased customer satisfaction as well as profits for the company," noted Arman Ozgun, Managing Partner at Netsoft USA. "Reduced overhead, faster product delivery times, and more accurate reporting have all come about as a result of the customized solution developed by Netsoft USA."
Improved Ordering, Fulfillment, and Tracking
With the new system in place, Zagat Survey's sales reps are spared from a number of manual steps during order entry, thus allowing the sales reps to focus more on revenue-generating activities. By reducing the number of hand-offs between customer service and the sales reps, sales order processing has been expedited, resulting in a decrease in the order-to-cash lifecycle and an increased accountability with regard to the release of orders.
Because the system designed by Netsoft USA reduced the amount of data that had to be manually processed, Zagat Survey’s capacity for order processing has greatly increased. The number of sales processing errors has been reduced and fulfillment time has been shortened, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
In the new system, once orders are completed, the system automatically captures the shipping information and provides both customer service and the sales team greater visibility into the shipment status. This automation has positively impacted customer satisfaction by reducing errors, thereby improving order profitability for Zagat Survey.
Increased Customer Satisfaction, Automated Marketing, and Simplified Reporting.
Netsoft USA’s custom solution has increased Zagat Survey’s ability to promptly and efficiently address customer complaints. By simplifying the process of running reports, Zagat Survey is able to quickly locate customer cases and create targeted campaigns for those customers with complaints, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and ultimately, customer retention. In addition, Zagat Survey is now able to efficiently maintain and manage information pertaining to their marketing efforts in Dynamics CRM and generate reports that provide them with crucial data regarding historical marketing campaign performance and/or marketing lists. Netsoft utilized Scribe Insight and Scribe Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics GP, and Scribe Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to achieve the seamless real time flow of information between the two applications.
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