Volt Information Sciences, Inc.

Staffing Service Coordinates Sales Activities, Utilizes Business Intelligence with CRM Solution

Volt Information Sciences, Inc. provides staffing services, telecommunications, and information solutions to Fortune 100 customers. The company’s 5,000 employees used diverse tools to access customer data located in a wide array of databases. These solutions created silos of customer information, limited visibility into sales and marketing data, and hampered employee collaboration. Executives completed an in-depth request for proposal process to narrow CRM solution options to four enterprise alternatives. They selected Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM because it best met the firm’s usability, user acceptance, and system integration criteria.

Business Needs

Volt Information Sciences, Inc. (NYSE: VOL) provides staffing, telecommunications, and information solutions to Fortune 100 companies through four business segments. The firm’s 5,000 employees represent a global workforce, operating out of the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and South America. When it came to marketing and sales operations, the U.S.$2.3 billion-dollar-a-year company faced a number of challenges.

The many-to-many relationship feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 gives our employees the ability to effectively coordinate across numerous accounts with multiple sales opportunities. Steve Acterman Director of Corporate IT, Volt Information Sciences, Inc.

Employees had adopted a heterogeneous mix of contact management solutions, relying upon the Microsoft® Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, ACT!, their Rolodexes, and spreadsheets to keep track of customer data. This led to the proliferation of customer data silos. With visibility into sales limited to the local office level, business units could not coordinate their efforts. For example, business units focused on placing engineering personnel could not always utilize the success of business units placing accounting personnel to penetrate the same account.

Moreover, managers could not effectively collect and report customer-related data beyond their own office, nor were they using consistent terminology across offices.

 

Solution

“We applied a rigorous process to find a CRM solution,” says Steve Acterman, Director of Corporate IT at Volt. “We did extensive research beginning with the tools our employees were already using, then expanding the search to focus on scalable enterprise solutions.” Additional criteria included the ability to seamlessly operate with Office Outlook, as the firm’s employees rely on it heavily every day. Additionally, IT staffers needed a solution that could tightly integrate with the company’s Microsoft SQL Server® and Microsoft Exchange Server systems. Finally, they needed a CRM solution that would effectively support both online and offline work.

Decision makers narrowed the field to Siebel CRM, Onyx CRM, SugarCRM, and Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM, and selected the Microsoft CRM solution because it best met their requirements. They implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 on a wide scale and have since upgraded to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Initially, the Staffing Services Group will be issued more than 450 licenses for the new version with other operating segments joining as the solution is phased in.

Employees will use the sales module to support sales force automation objectives. “The activities of our salespeople will be seamlessly integrated into the familiar Outlook interface,” explains Acterman. “Their phone call to-do list will be provided to them and where they make contact, the results will be logged into Microsoft [Dynamics] CRM [4.0] so that coworkers in their office and other business units can use that data,” added Robin Kibota, CRM Project Manager at Volt.

Another enhanced feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the ability to support many-to-many relationships. Volt managers will make use of it to facilitate up-sell and cross-sell opportunities across business units.

The sales module implementation will eventually encompass international offices, taking advantage of multi-tenancy and the support for multiple languages and currencies now available in the new version. Later phases will introduce the application’s marketing module for general use throughout the company.

Benefits

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is designed to meet the needs of a multi-national company like Volt. It can support the firm’s diverse business units, allowing them to collaborate on Fortune 100 accounts and ensure executives have the global data they need to create reports that capture sales intelligence and lead to sound decisions.

Multi-tenancy, multi-language, and multi-currency features position the company for global expansion and enhanced competitiveness. The application’s multi-tenancy feature ensures that Volt can implement its CRM solution enterprise-wide to envelope all its international locations. Moreover, by phasing in its international offices, salespeople there can be as effective as their North American counterparts to be more competitive in winning additional business from international Fortune 100 accounts.

Sales force automation increases employees’ performance. Using the new solution, salespeople will more effectively manage their pipeline to increase their win rates and shorten the sales cycle.

Highly configurable and flexible solution speeds time-to-use. Because Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 can be configured so easily and quickly, Volt managers can bring other departments and customer-facing platforms on board very rapidly.

Reports based on comprehensive customer data create usable intelligence.

• The new solution standardizes Volt’s CRM platform and allows Volt employees to utilize the same sets of reports based on common data fields and terminology. Hence managers can create reliable reports to identify trends and measure sales activity.
• In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, users may generate custom queries and views and save them to a pick list without the aid of a programmer.

Centralized solution eliminates data silos to increase cross-sell opportunities.

• The many-to-many relationship feature, which provides the ability to tie many accounts to multiple opportunities with multiple roles, gives employees the ability to more effectively coordinate their sales efforts. So rather than approaching the same company as three different divisions unaware of the experience of the others, salespeople can touch them as a single company.
• Additionally, salespeople can research Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to get up to speed on how others have penetrated accounts before they even pick up the phone to make the first call.