Improving Client Service with Integrated Team and Client Workspaces

Professional services firms can build success by empowering their people with the right tools to deliver consistent, high-quality service to every client. Role-based team-client workspaces are one such tool. A team-client workspace can enable consolidation of information, foster sharing of ideas, and provide intuitive access to the firm's intellectual capital. It can help teams and clients plan, communicate, collaborate, and track projects more efficiently, even from geographically and technologically diverse locations. The results can be better connections within the team, improved customer service, and heightened client satisfaction.

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  Situation
  Solution
  Benefits

Situation

Professional services organizations face increasing competitive pressure to deliver better customer service at lower costs, and these factors often generate the following challenges:

•	Teams lack effective tools for collaborating across multiple locations
•	Remote worker productivity is limited due to firewalls and poor connectivity
•	Clients have no visibility into the status of project deliverables and tasks
•	Project status reporting is labor intensive and time-consuming

Solution

An integrated team and client workspace built using the 2007 Microsoft Office system can help professional services teams deliver high-quality customer service. Office system technologies can provide benefits such as the following:

Collaboration Tools

•	Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 team sites help teams find and share information on project tasks, issues, history, and deliverables related to clients and engagements
•	Messaging and communication tools simplify communication and enable real-time collaboration beyond traditional technical and organizational boundaries

Mobile and Offline Capabilities

•	Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 provides an offline view of project information stored on a SharePoint site
•	Microsoft Office Groove 2007 enables offline access and peer-to-peer synchronization

Integrated Workflow

•	Workflow tools streamline approvals, track status of project deliverables, and enable reporting
•	Tools to automate task assignments and alerts
•	Version control can capture document history and prevent unintended circulation of multiple copies of documents

Benefits

An integrated team and client workspace solution based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system can help professional services firms attain the following benefits:

•	Keep clients and team members up-to-date on tasks, issues, and case information
•	Retrieve information about cases and clients more quickly and easily
•	Increase mobile worker productivity when offsite or in areas with limited connectivity
•	Collaborate offline and across firewalls
•	Share and reuse information to take advantage of the firm's intellectual capital
•	Spend more time on strategic, high-value work

Case Studies

See how other companies are using the Microsoft Office System for their project and portfolio management solutions:

•	Agility: "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has played an important part in the building of our collaboration platform. It has helped streamline business processes and enhanced employee productivity." - Junaid Siraj, IT Collaboration Department Manager, Agility

If you have a solution based on the Microsoft Office System, learn more about opportunities to showcase your solution with Microsoft.

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