Logos Bible Software

Publisher Improves Customer Service and Operational Workflow

Logos Bible Software is a leader in multilingual electronic publishing. The company’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution had become cumbersome, expensive, and inflexible. Logos needed cost-effective, customizable tools that its sales and support staff could use to simplify data management and provide a smoother service experience for customers. Working with Microsoft® Certified Partner Madrona Solutions Group, Logos boosted productivity and collaboration across its sales, marketing, and customer support organizations.

 

Situation

Located just 90 minutes north of Seattle in Bellingham, Washington, Logos Bible Software is the premier international developer and distributor of multilingual Bible software. Logos software is primarily used by members of the clergy, seminary students, missionaries, and lay leaders. The company’s product line includes collections of electronic Bibles, theological works, grammar references, study tools, pastoral resources, and texts and morphologies in many languages, including Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Today, Logos software is used in more than 180 countries, and the company’s annual sales have topped U.S.$15 million.

Logos had been using a CRM system to manage its growing database of customer information, products, and sales activities. Just getting its IT staff trained to support its existing system was costly, because the solution manufacturer required all administrators to be trained outside the state. Logos needed a solution that would be easy to learn without off-site training, so employees could stay in the office and remain productive.

This customized system empowers us to take charge of the growth of our business. Andrew Skipton Chief Financial Officer Logos Bible Software

Information was difficult to access. Customer service representatives had to navigate several unconnected databases to retrieve data, which meant delays in answering customers’ questions. The sales team was unable to track opportunities through the sales cycle. Instead of pursuing lucrative, long-term leads, they were relegated to processing inbound orders, often for one-time purchases. “We weren’t maximizing future sales opportunities, we were simply reacting,” says Jared Bryant, Logos Direct Sales Representative. “There was no good way to identify the most valuable customers for repeat sales.” Logos desperately needed a tool that employees could use to access customer data from across multiple databases.

The marketing department had been manually tracking campaigns, activities, and events, but they found that as the company grew, it was becoming impossible to plan and implement marketing strategy effectively. Marketers needed an easy-to-customize operating environment with the functionality to track marketing campaigns and monitor the return on investment (ROI) of events they attended.

Clearly, it was time for Logos to replace its expensive, aging system with a more customizable, cost-effective solution that would grow with the company.

Solution

Logos had three main objectives in deploying a new solution. One was to collect all its existing data in one system. Another was to increase functionality and improve the user experience for staff and customers. And finally, the company needed to track and evaluate marketing ROI for campaigns and events.

To accomplish this, Logos worked with Microsoft® Certified Partner Madrona Solutions Group to replace its solution with Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 3.0 Professional business software, integrating CRM with its existing Microsoft Dynamics GP application. Brian Paulen, Managing Director of Madrona Solutions Group, says that interoperability and ease of use made Logos choose the technology. “Logos ultimately chose the solution because the Microsoft products work well together. The integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP, an application with which the staff was already familiar, made it easy for them to learn to use the new system.

With the new system in place, the Logos staff gets a complete view of their customers. Now they can view order history, and create new orders and view returns within one system, instead of having to navigate between databases. With the new solution, the company can use real-time shipping information, electronic product keys, and event and marketing records to manage its customers, partners, and vendors and their associated orders and activity histories. “Activating a product key over the phone and being able to generate a complete record of the transaction in a single database is more efficient and a real time saver,” says Bryant. Logos is also using the system to track its marketing and event activities in order to gauge ROI, to plan resources, and to identify and change ineffective strategies. In all, the people at Logos can access more data more easily.

Benefits

Since the deployment of the new solution, Logos has been able to provide a dramatically better service experience for its staff and customers, significantly decrease its annual expenditures for employee training, reduce licensing expenditures, and begin to automate tracking and analysis of its marketing campaigns and event activities.

Improved Customer Service

With the high volume of daily sales and customer service interactions, an integrated environment was essential to providing a good experience for customers and staff. In the past, the Logos customer service agents would have to call customers back with requested information, because they had to look it up in multiple other systems. Now they can find all the customer information they need in one place, which means they can answer questions quickly in just one short telephone conversation. Jerry Godfrey, Logos Customer Support Manager, says, “Microsoft CRM has been a great solution. With real-time access to customer information, we’ve been able to improve our customer service dramatically. It also helps us track information and create reports, which we have not been able to do in the past.” Because they can now easily view all data associated with any given customer, the customer service staff is also able to more effectively up-sell customers on software upgrades or other products.

Reduced Training Costs

Logos is now able to provide company-wide system training in-house, which reduces training costs by 75 percent over the previous solution. Logos employees got comfortable with using the new CRM system in days instead of months, because Microsoft tools and technologies were already familiar to them. With this cost savings, Logos has been able to expand its sales and customer service staff to process greater volumes of prospect calls and sales. Staff can be quickly trained on the new system and spend more of their time managing customer relationships.

“Since [the new solution] was based on Microsoft technologies we had already been using, learning how to use the new system was easy,” says Bryant, “and the benefits it provides from a sales and marketing standpoint will really help us to increase the sales of Logos Bible Software products.”

Rapid Implementation of Sales Initiatives

With the deployment of Microsoft CRM, the Logos sales organization has been able to launch ambitious sales initiatives in record time. After recently bringing aboard a new National Sales Manager, Logos was able to hire 10 sales representatives, provide full CRM training for them on site at the corporate office, and have them in the field selling in just six weeks.

The new system enabled Logos to easily import lead lists into their corporate database, and the sales team was able to quickly process and fulfill orders while sitting in the customers’ offices using wireless-enabled laptops. By enabling the sales representatives to sell quickly and move on to the next opportunity, the new CRM solution is helping Logos to increase sales volume every day. According to Andrew Skipton, Logos Chief Financial Officer, “The Microsoft CRM solution has been a God-send for us. It’s made a critical difference in getting field sales initiatives up and running in so little time.”

Decreased Licensing Expenditures

The licensing fees for the old system were so expensive that only a limited number of employees had access to the application. “I never had direct access to the old system,” says Daniel Foster, Logos Press Relations Manager. “Whenever I needed to get data from the system, I always had to ask another employee to get me the information. Everyone’s really busy around here, so having that dependency caused a lot of delays and frustration.”

The new solution saved Logos 40 percent in software licensing. The company used the resources freed up by this cost savings to increase the number of staff members licensed for the Microsoft solution by more than 60 percent. Because more employees have access to real-time data when they have a specific business need, the sales, customer service, marketing, and accounting staffs now work more productively and efficiently.

Enhanced Marketing Planning and Tracking

In the past, Logos had tracked its marketing activities using Microsoft Office. With the new solution in place, Logos will be able to more efficiently monitor event ROI and performance, plan and allocate resources and campaigns, and market directly to specific customers through e-mail and blogs.

According to Foster, the new system has improved Logos’ marketing efforts. “Now it’s easier than ever to run system-wide queries that enable us to market to specific groups of customers about opportunities such as upgrades and software enhancements. Using the new database, our marketing group can more easily identify conferences that offer a strong return on investment, and they can focus more on developing campaigns around those events.”

“The Microsoft solution delivers the robust reporting we need, and lets our users create and execute powerful queries autonomously,” says Skipton. “This customized system empowers us to take charge of the growth of our business.”

Andy Skipton, Chief Financial Officer, Logos Bible Software

Executive Biography
Andrew Skipton has been with Logos Bible Software since 1997, presently serving as their Chief Financial Officer. A Certified Public Accountant, he previously spent eight years practicing in his family-owned accounting firm. Skipton serves as a cabinet member of Vision House North, a transitional housing project under development that will serve homeless men, women, and children in Snohomish County, WA. Skipton spends much of his free time with his wife and two children, and enjoys fishing and travelling abroad.

 

 

 

 

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