SG Global is Asia’s leading outsourced partner for charities and not-for-profit organisations. It provides charity partners with a complete suite of services to support their daily operations and administration, freeing them to focus on their mission, whether it is to preserve nature, alleviate poverty or empower those in need.
Scalability for ever-ready support
Change is the only constant—SG Global appreciated this and has placed an emphasis on staying agile and ever-ready to support charity partners in their mission, and to be alongside them wherever they had their operations in.
But as the company grew, it faced database constraints that grew in tandem with its quest to grow regionally—expanding across Asia introduced the challenge of maintaining multiple instances of databases, and the company needed a solution that scaled seamlessly. Its legacy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system however, lacked the robust performance and database scalability needed to cater to a growing user base.
2015 marked a pivotal moment for SG Global. To protect their market leadership as the leading outsourced partner for charities, SG Global turned to digital transformation. It developed a new CRM system based on asp.net while adopting a web architecture based on Azure. SG Global was looking at the long term and Microsoft represented a natural choice for SG Global’s team, as it is well-aligned with their technical/software and business development roadmap.
An elastic infrastructure for a responsive CRM system
SG Global now has a CRM system that scales on-demand, enabling it to improve its turnaround time. It has also gained added agility to react to changes in the business, and swiftly expand in tandem with market opportunities, alongside its charity partners. This responsiveness also enables the company to address its partners’ need for world-class donor management. “The new CRM has improved the turnaround time to respond to changes in our business and those of our charity partners, enabling us to better prevent or salvage attrition of our partners’ donor base,” said Richard Prentice, Chief Operating Officer.
On-demand deployment comes easy
Azure’s global distribution of datacenters enabled SG Global to get closer to their customers, and further facilitated their set up and deployment of the CRM system across the respective markets which proved helpful especially during testing and iteration phases.
By adopting Azure, SG Global also effectively leveraged an OPEX model for a leaner cost structure and more billing clarity. It can now dynamically scale resources to support their rollout of solutions across Asia. “The ability to dynamically scale goes very well with SG Global’s approach to stagger delivery and rollout of our solutions by country or regions without a significant investment in hardware,” said Derrick Ng, Head of Information Technology.
The high availability offered by Azure also minimizes any downtime to the business, and significantly improves service delivery as compared to the legacy system.
On a trusted platform from day one
To cater to the mass market, SG Global had to comply with the relevant data regulations, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). As Microsoft was compliant with these requirements from the start, SG Global’s decision to go with Azure effectively meant that they gained a compliant and secure platform from day one.
Staying open and secure
SG Global believed a consolidated view and management of its application activities and resources contributed to more data security. “There was an organisation-wide exercise to have all our users and multiple sites to be part of a consistently manageable domain. With Azure Active Directory, we gained a single repository for all user account references,” said Derrick Ng, Head of Information Technology. This secure and consolidated arrangement not only facilitates the onboarding of personnel and their access to resources and applications, but also allows for equally quick action when there were changes in the roles of personnel or when some specific personnel have moved on.
With the requisite controls in place, SG Global’s CRM system can now be accessed by internal users as well as customers, while data security remains firmly in place—customers can be granted limited/partial access to self-service their data. This represents a step towards greater transparency and reinforces the credibility of SG Global in the eyes of its customers who now have more control over their data.
Mission-ready with an agile cloud-based CRM
Complementing the adoption of Azure are related services such as PowerBI which has allowed SG Global to open up more conversations with its customers, paving the way for potential business opportunities. SG Global is charting product development roadmaps which will revolve around data processing, visualization, analytics, and reporting, and they are confident they can pursue these opportunities with Microsoft. “Ultimately this is about SG Global providing our partners with a greater level of flexibility in how they access their own data – wherever they are. We want to facilitate strategic decisions for our partners. Decisions that will drive better outcomes for their organisations. A big part of that is having an application that provides clients with secure and direct access to core data / information,” said Richard Prentice, Chief Operating Officer.
SG Global now stands ever-ready to enable charity partners to strategically manage, retain and grown their donor base with its responsive and resilient CRM system that serves as the wind beneath its wings.