The voice of the customer is driving business to a degree never seen before. Today, it’s the personalised, proactive and predictive customer experiences that matter, and as audiences increasingly seek experiences over products and services, organisations need to meet them where they are.
This begins with empowering and equipping sales, service and marketing employees appropriately to enable new levels of customer interaction.
For public sector organisations where stakeholders can sometimes encompass an entire state or territory, understanding the audience can seem impossible.
Sustainability Victoria and NSW Trustee & Guardian are two very different public sector organisations, both of which have overcome the challenges of legacy technology to evolve their business processes and redefine their customer and stakeholder engagement.
Whether they’re empowering employees with intelligent, adaptive processes, or enabling end-users with self-service technology, these organisations made the move to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online one year ago, and since then, they haven’t looked back.
For Beyond Bank, one of Australia’s largest customer- owned financial institutions, it was a similar story. To ensure the success of their mutual business model, and gain a transparent view of customers, they too are now flying the Dynamics CRM flag.
To time with yesterday’s release of Dynamics Spring Wave 2016, we wanted to walk through how these organisations are using CRM Online today, the results they’re seeing, and what this means to their audiences that matter most.
Sustainability Victoria – living their vision, from the inside out
Charged with facilitating and promoting environmental sustainability initiatives across the state, Sustainability Victoria has an important role to play when it comes to preserving the state’s resources for future generations.
The organisation was, however, running with IT systems that were inefficient, and even hindered the agency’s ability to best serve the community.
To address them, Sustainability Victoria made the switch to cloud based processes with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
Led by Chris Moon, Information Systems Business Manager at Sustainability Victoria, employees were empowered with new capabilities, such as the ability to self-serve analytics, enabling them to identify patterns of engagement with their stakeholders, speak to them more effectively and track the associated outcomes.
Chris Moon, said, “Using Dynamics CRM Online has freed up our staff to spend more time doing what we employed them to do, which is to figure out ways to improve recycling or get more people to use solar energy.”
“One of the benefits of choosing the Microsoft stack was that we didn’t have to write custom integration for Office 365, SharePoint, Dynamics GP, Outlook, or Skype for Business,” Moon says.
The Cloud was a much better fit for the organisation because it aligned with a longer-term strategy to digitise and virtualise all processes. This includes a 16-24 month strategy to completely remove the organisation’s most energy consuming resource, their onsite data centre.
Moon explains, “Having Microsoft manage the cloud environment and infrastructure meant that we didn’t have to commission a separate system on premise. As we know, funding is changing and for us, the move from on-premise to Cloud with CRM online has paved the way for further digitisation. Now more than ever, we’re focused on living our own sustainable vision.”
The team at Sustainability Victoria credits an agile-based, iterative process to its successful deployment of Dynamics CRM Online, completed in partnership with SMS Management and Technology.
“We had a lot of people involved in the deployment and it really gave them an opportunity to be innovative in the way we thought about things,” Moon says. This agile methodology continues today with fast transitions to new upgrades, most recently to the 2016 update, completed in fifteen minutes last Friday night.”
An end-to-end, digital customer experience with NSW Trustee & Guardian
In October last year, the NSW Government announced a substantial transformation of NSW Trustee & Guardian, the public trustee which acts as an independent and impartial Executor, Administrator, Attorney and Trustee for the people of NSW.
The program, called ‘2017 and Beyond’ marks a significant transformation of the organisation’s operating model, including an enhanced online presence for the organisation – the introduction of Wills- On-line, rolled out in partnership with Praxa.
According to NSW Trustee & Guardian CEO, Imelda Dodds, “NSW has an expanding and ageing population with a strong need for trustee and financial management services. We’re modernising our services in order to meet this demand in a more convenient way for our customers, both today and tomorrow.”
Dodds continued, “To mark the first phase of our digital transformation, our online wills service is set for launch in July, developed using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Clients will soon be able to interact with an enhanced digital interface, enabling a degree of 24×7 service and quicker resolution of enquiries.”
Beyond Bank – The promising pilot
While the service is currently in pilot stage with their Community and Broker divisions, Beyond Bank CIO Robert Aitken is working toward a goal of moving to a full UAT (user application test) in June, where CRM Online is rolled out across the business.
Aitken explains, “Beyond Bank needed to know more about its customers. We needed a solution that could integrate information from the previously-siloed systems across customer touch-points to deliver a single view. The solution also needed to integrate with our core systems to streamline business processes and let us capitalise on potential opportunities sooner.”
So far, Dynamics CRM has been integral to this change.
Outlining Beyond Bank’s plans for CRM moving forward, Aitken outlines, “In June and July the change management stream will be stepped up with Subject Matter Expert training, technical and other training being rolled out. The rollout for Office 365 (including SharePoint Online; Exchange Online and Skype for Business) will commence in June; and the go live for CRM Online is in early August.”
Some of the other initiatives that will come soon after will be through Dynamics Marketing; Voice of the Customer, and leveraging the new data sets through analytics. Beyond Bank also plan to further integrate into CRM Online into the Wealth Management arm of the business.
Two main partners have worked with the bank to assist with the transition- Kloud, for the Office 365 streams of work, and UXC Eclipse, for the development of Dynamics CRM.
Aitken explains, “Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365 provides our business with a clever ecosystem of tightly coupled applications that will improve staff productivity, business process efficiency and importantly enable us to deliver an exceptional customer experience”
“Dynamics CRM Online will allow Beyond Bank staff to view customer details, accounts, communications, and product information. The combination of tightly-integrated applications makes it possible for Beyond Bank to gain the 360-degree customer view, and to act quickly on portfolio insights to meet customer needs and improve business performance.”
While for Beyond Bank and NSW Trustee & Guardian their journey with CRM online is still fresh, the future certainly looks bright.
For more information on the latest Dynamics CRM Spring Wave 2016 update, and the new capabilities and enhancements, check out the blog here.
