Business Challenges
The Microsoft Client Experience solution helps professional service organizations to identify new client opportunities with insight and understanding, differentiate from other companies by showcasing capabilities and proven ability to deliver, connect professionals across time zones and geographies, and coordinate a company-wide approach to client and pipeline management. Some challenges with Client Experience include:
Prioritizing Prospects and Growing Profitable Clients - When targeting and capturing profitable projects, firms need to assure satisfaction from the most profitable clients while identifying and growing critical client relationships.
Increasing Competition for Client Wallet-share - More players are vying for an increasing share of client’s spend making it hard to differentiate, show consistency and innovate due to a lack of insight into competitors.
Client insight – If firms do not make full use of the knowledge and insight they have with clients, it can result in poor understanding of the client and their business needs.
Finding and connecting expertise – Difficulty in making real-time connections with experts inhibits value delivery and slows decision making. Professional turnover and an aging workforce can make finding the right resource even more difficult.
Complex, Hard-to-Use Tools - Standalone tools lead to poor adoption and current tools are difficult to use, resulting in poor and incomplete information.
Solutions
The Microsoft Client Experience solution enables professional service organizations to coordinate a firm’s approach to pipeline management, differentiate the firm, identify new opportunities, connect the right professionals, and utilize familiar and customizable tools with:
- Dynamics CRM with Outlook for tracking client interaction which may be published to a SharePoint Records Repository.
- Opportunity management
- Relationship management
- Workflow/Building out and extending CRM to address industry and business specific requirements
- Online Services provides a scalable approach for managing CRM infrastructure
- OCS Live Meeting to provide online presence, communication and meetings with clients.
- LiveMeeting
- Presence
- Secure instant messaging
- Unified Communications (VoIP)
- SharePoint Server helps organizations and users improve efficiencies and effectiveness by enabling them to better manage their information sharing. The sites capability of SharePoint 2010 serves as a “one-stop shop” for all of the organization’s business web sites. Whether a team site for employees, an extranet site for partners or clients, or an internet site, users can share and publish information using one familiar system.
- Client Experience in the Cloud – The cloud provides improved ability to access, interoperate and manage information; examples may include hosted CRM and CRM applications (i.e., Dynamics CRM 5.0) and client-targeted digital marketing initiatives. Storing customer information and making it available through Azure SQL Services and Silverlight aims to provide the desktop experience in a thin client.