MyTailor.com Tailoring Company Automates Processes to Save 30 Person-Hours per Week

MyTailor.com is a private tailoring company owned by Master Tailor Joe Hemrajani who started his family tailoring business in Hong Kong around 30 years back. Now through myTailor.com, the Hong Kong tailors tradition of craftsmanship and personalized service is available throughout the world with online convenience. With existing disintegrated applications and multiple platforms, employees spent hours in maintaining customer profiles, categorizing orders and communicating the same to the concerned departments. With uncompromising quality standards, these delays were not acceptable. The company implemented Microsoft® Dynamics™ CRM 4.0 Professional Edition under the supervision of Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, GSR Business Services. The unified customer profile and transactions records in a central location ease the working at MyTailor. Automated service processes reduce manual effort. Use of workflows and triggers on order status, communication, customer profile verification and status updates saves 30 person-hours per week.

Established in 1998 by Master Tailor Joe Hemrajani, www.myTailor.com is a private Men's Clothing tailoring company. Based in Hong Kong, it provides custom shirts, trousers and suits. With its worldwide reputation for quality, it began receiving requests to tailor entire offices of attorneys, investment bankers, stockbrokers, doctors and other professionals.

With expanding clientele for custom suits and shirts in United States and other countries around the world, it established a second office in California which allows travel to customer offices and provides onsite fittings. It stays in touch with its clients through its website and responds immediately to the individual requests.

MyTailor was using a combination of Apple Mac and Microsoft applications. It had also deployed locally developed custom applications for order management, customer profile management. All communications were done through emails via Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Office Groove.

The company used multiple applications to capture the customer profile details such as sizes, preferences etc. and financial transactions. Because of bespoke disintegrated applications, manual effort was put in to map the financial transactions and email communications to respective customers. Maintaining the same profile in different applications through different locations caused ambiguity and duplication. Moreover, customer communication wasn’t recorded historically.

On account of disparate applications, customer service cycle was unnecessary longer and less effective. Another key challenge was sending specific emails to each customer on their queries. The volume was as high as 250 emails per day. “Our customers are individuals who have specific clothing needs. To cater to each individual personally and track their activities right from sales to service was the key challenge for us,” states Joe Hemrajani, CEO, MyTailor.com.

A reputation of uncompromising quality standards had enabled the organization to grow rapidly. To ensure that MyTailor’s reputation remains untarnished, the company was anxious to centralize the entire system on a common platform; automate the service process to reduce manual triggers and tasks. It identified the need of customer relationship management (CRM) system which could help the company in tracking the service cases, orders and customer profiles in a single view instead of using heterogeneous applications.

Initially management at MyTailor.com thought of replacing the entire set of disparate applications with a custom application that could be specifically developed to meet the business requirements. But second school of thought suggested that it would consume a lot of time and money. Joe Hemrajani, CEO, MyTailor.com explains, “We are using a number of Microsoft products and custom applications built on Microsoft platform, hence Microsoft CRM solution was an ideal choice as there wouldn’t be integration issues." Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 was evaluated on two parameters: the ease of customization and integration with other applications. MyTailor also focused on automated customer service process to reduce manual intervention.

The company partnered with GSR Business Services for the implementation. GSR, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner was well experienced and led the company through a quick and smooth deployment; effortlessly transitioning the company from legacy system to Dynamics CRM. The implementation started in July, 2008 and the solution went live in, January, 2009. It was deployed for 11 users at offices in Hong Kong, United States and India.

Sales and Service modules were deployed. The implementation was split into two phases: Implementation of customer profile management and customer service in phase 1; and order management and integration with the legacy system in phase 2.

The solution was completely customized to maintain unique customer profile, automate order management as well as services and integration with existing applications.

Unique customer profile is a perfect example of customization possible in Dynamics CRM. At MyTailor, the customer profile is not a standard profile but dynamically changes based on customer needs. The profile includes customer sizes, style, preference, images etc. Custom pages are co-created in every profile to hold each style with customer’s snapshots.

Besides, product and order management is automated in new CRM solution easing the supervision of increasing number of customers and their changing orders and requirements. Orders from each customer are unique and change dynamically based on order type like shirt orders, suit orders, pant orders etc. Each order is recorded with the specific styling, preferences, size and several dynamic images. This is also integrated and synchronized with the custom back-end application using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).

Service cases are created based on various parameters such as order type to order product type, customer type, location and availability of material etc. Automated business rules defined in the CRM application allow identification of type of service cases and appropriately assign them to the concerned department for follow-ups at each stage which reduces manual intervention. “The extent to which Microsoft Dynamics CRM is tailored to match our needs is really amazing. Automating the service cycle, mainly in the communication side is a big step ahead for us. The Outlook interface gave the users the much needed confidence to adapt to the solution easily,” explains Joe Hemrajani, MyTailor.com.

“Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives access to important data, ranging from a customer's profile to past purchases, through a single source in real time,” explains Joe Hemrajani, MyTailor.com. “This also helps us track of loyal and preferred customers who have been doing business with us for many years”. It provides an efficient way to bolster customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs and increasing overall profitability.

A customer profile is dynamically created and the centralized view shows all the details such as sizes, style, images etc. The multiple cases for each order of a customer i.e. out of stock, alterations, fit confirmations, returns etc. are methodically tracked. Since MyTailor processes orders in different locations, CRM is used as the centralized system for all locations to view and update cases. “Visibility of customer information based on territory, tailor, salesman and verification status in easy views saves time in searching for each customer detail separately and improves efficiency,” states Joe Hemrajani, MyTailor.com. Moreover, offline access to data offers an advantage of always having the customer profile when visiting a customer.

Order-delivery cycle at MyTailor usually takes 2-3 months. Customer service becomes a must during this time. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it’s easy to track orders and status in a single application and revert in no time. “Microsoft Dynamics CRM has eliminated the need for multiple applications, reduced the customer service cycle by 40 per cent.” says Joe Hemrajani, MyTailor.com. “The services team saves time. Email updates are sent regularly, thus improving customer satisfaction by 50 percent.

The time spent on manually categorizing cases, follow up, emails and status updates to each location and department has been eliminated. Case management and automation of service activities now save 30 person hours per week. Users can now utilize time in processing and attending to the orders. “Automatic status updates and communication triggers save 3 hours per day just in email communication,” elucidates Joe Hemrajani, MyTailor.com.

The employees have been able to adapt to new CRM solution easily due to an easy interface and navigation. With customer profiles, orders and related activities in a single centralized system, team is equipped with the ability to easily track status, issues as well as recurring orders. Employees are happier with less manual entries and higher productivity.

Seamless integration with existing applications permits access to all the customer-centric transactions from Microsoft Outlook. This helps the team which is heavily dependent on Outlook communication as orders are majorly online. The tight integration with custom pages and ability to access these custom solution and pages within Outlook interface is definitely a major advantage. Similarly synchronization with the back end legacy system eliminates the possibilities of miscommunication and duplication to a great extent.

CRM offers a clear view of all the cases that are being worked on and this gives way for easy management. “As of today, marketing is outsourced and is managed by some third party vendor but we are looking forward to bringing it into CRM in near future,” wraps Joe Hemrajani, MyTailor.com.

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems that your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success. 

For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:

www.microsoft.com/dynamics

Founded in 1992, Global Software Resources (GSR) is a global IT services and solutions provider headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in Pleasanton, California and offices in Chennai, India. It is as an independent custom development and maintenance consultancy. GSR has worked closely with companies ranging in size from start-ups to large enterprises to help them build efficient and agile businesses. It designs, develops, integrates, implements, and maintains IT solutions using latest technologies that address business challenges, streamline operations, optimize collaboration across all groups and boundaries and help companies grow.

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For more information about myTailor products and services, call (800)(466-7133) or visit the Web site at: www.Mytailor.com

For more information about GSR Business products and services, call (91) 044-4238 2081 or visit the Web site at: gsr-inc.com