A service-based systems integrator specializing in fire protection, security, and integrated audiovisual solutions sought guidance in maximizing the potential of their existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Business Central platform. They needed a partner capable of delivering tailored technology solutions to meet their evolving business needs and achieve their business goals.
Challenges
Outdated Customer Support Experience
As a large safety and communications systems integrator in the United States serving thousands of customers worldwide, this company offered traditional phone and email support alongside a customer portal for case creation, support requests, and status tracking. However, the outdated design and poor user experience of the portal led to low customer adoption and doubts about its effectiveness. Consequently, customers frequently bypassed the portal, directly contacting employees for assistance. This increased the manual workload for employees, who had to enter customer details manually, resulting in inefficiencies. Recognizing the need for more automation, the company sought to revamp the customer portal to instill user confidence, provide transparency, and reduce the time employees spent on internal submissions.
Inconsistent and Inefficient Sales and Quoting Process
The sales team of this customer relied on a complex Excel spreadsheet to create customer quotes. This spreadsheet had over 30 tabs, extensive code, and dependencies on other spreadsheets, requiring a VPN connection to function properly. It included a wide range of items sold by the company and its acquired organizations. This approach was neither scalable nor manageable, especially with frequent acquisitions and the need to onboard new item masters and users. The manual effort to create sales quotes for numerous products and teams led to user errors and consumed significant time. Additionally, the spreadsheet lacked real-time cost-based pricing capabilities, resulting in inaccurate and inconsistent quotes. The customer needed a quoting tool integrated into Dynamics 365 Sales that could support highly customized quotes for hundreds of sales users across business units. This challenge was further complicated by the need to support item masters from multiple Business Central (ERP) environments.
Managing High Volume Migrations without Employee Burnout
Due to consistent acquisitions, the company lacked the bandwidth to fully support the integration of every new organization into Business Central. Although their team was capable of handling these activities, the sheer number of monthly migrations risked employee burnout. The limited bandwidth often led to prolonged migrations, causing disruptions for the acquired companies and their customers. They needed a partner to act as an extension of their team and support the numerous migrations they had to manage.
Solution
Having previously worked with other Microsoft partners, this company found JourneyTeam’s guidance on best practices to be more comprehensive. JourneyTeam helped improve processes, identify automation opportunities, and streamline user interfaces to align with Dynamics 365 standards. Acting as an extension of their internal technology team, JourneyTeam enhanced their Dynamics 365 platform with an improved customer portal, a custom sales quoting tool, and streamlined Field Service processes. They also provided ongoing support for Business Central and assisted with migrations for various business acquisitions.
Outcomes
Revamping the Customer Portal for Enhanced Functionality and Support:
JourneyTeam collaborated with the customer’s marketing and Customer Success groups to redesign their customer portal, addressing the previous lack of confidence in the portal. The teams aimed for modernized functionality and design, developing a comprehensive interface that provides better visibility into the status of cases and support requests. New automated features ensure all customer needs are routed through Dynamics 365. For instance, if a customer emails support directly, an automated system triggers Dynamics 365 CRM to create a case automatically. This has saved employees significant time each week and ensures prompt attention to all customer needs.
The vision for the portal project focused on seamlessly integrating Customer Service and Field Service capabilities while exposing customers to additional service offerings. When a customer reports an issue, employees can determine the best course of action—whether it’s training, a call, or a field service visit. With the new systematic process, the speed of triaging requests and dispatching them has improved significantly.
As the organization frequently acquires new businesses, the updated portal supports smoother onboarding, particularly within their security business. Enhancements include self-service capabilities and single sign-on, allowing businesses to manage their own users and reducing the burden on internal staff. These improvements provide newly acquired businesses with greater visibility and control over their cases. Previously, the portal only supported single-site functionality, making it difficult to offer detailed support to customers of acquired companies, often resulting in a poor new customer experience. Now, these companies have quick access to the portal, enabling them to promptly assist their customers and ensure excellent customer service.
Enhancing Quoting Processes with Integrated CRM Tools
JourneyTeam collaborated with the organization to develop an integrated quoting tool within Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM), enabling teams to create highly customized and accurate quotes with ease. This tool features automated pricing, regional labor rates, maintenance and recurring services, contract pricing, and management approvals. Additionally, an integration was developed to feed Dynamics 365 CRM with items from multiple Business Central environments, supporting the acquired companies.
The automated pricing feature introduces dynamic cost-based pricing, ideal for companies with multiple Business Central environments. This allows the sales team to generate quotes for multiple companies using different integrations from various environments into CRM. The team also has access to a master inventory list of items available for sale across their business units, enhancing quote accuracy, the approval process, and margin visibility. With this master list, sales teams can confidently pull updated and accurate details as needed, significantly benefiting the onboarding process for acquired companies by providing immediate access to necessary items for quote building.
The integration of regional labor rates into the quoting tool enables the sales team to accurately bid on labor in nationwide markets. Additionally, the organization, which collaborates with numerous educational, healthcare, nationwide retail, and government organizations, can now systematically manage contract pricing within Dynamics 365 CRM. This ensures the correct contracts are selected, resulting in accurate cost and sales pricing. This quoting tool has created a comprehensive solution for the team, providing Leadership and Sales Management with a feature-rich platform capable of delivering the visibility and process continuity needed to support the growing enterprise.
Strategic Migration Support
JourneyTeam has partnered with the customer to assist with their acquisition migrations. As companies are acquired, JourneyTeam acts as an extension of their team to migrate the organization into one of their Dynamics 365 Business Central instances while simultaneously executing data validation. This approach expedites the migration process and minimizes disruption to the newly acquired company and its customers, allowing the team to onboard at twice the previous pace.
The customer is also working with JourneyTeam to enhance the efficiency of these migrations by adding another instance of Dynamics 365 Business Central. This new instance provides a blank slate for initial migrations, troubleshooting, and then horizontally migrating the organization into one of their other instances. This approach preserves performance and avoids overloading a single server.