Businesses around the world rely on Ingram Micro for its deep technology expertise. One of the world’s largest providers of not just information technology products but services as well, Ingram Micro knows the value of supporting both its employees and its customers with deep relationships. Using Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics 365, it offers a master class in the exquisite balance between efficiency and the all-important personal touch.
“The holistic view we’ve shaped with Microsoft technology puts us in a better position when the vendors we serve present their unique services to us. We use the technology to deliver an experience no one else can touch.”
Kirk Robinson, Senior Vice President and Chief Country Executive, Ingram Micro US
Ingram Micro walks its talk: it helps businesses fully realize the “promise of technology” while constantly improving its own processes. The Irvine, California–based company innovates not just for its customers, but also within. It prioritizes experience for both Ingram Micro employees and customers—deeming it key to fulfilling customer needs and hastening company growth. After rolling out Microsoft Dynamics 365 to unify customer data and improve sales processes, the company embarked on the next step in its program to amplify the synergy between relationships and data. For one of its many initiatives, Ingram Micro used Microsoft Power Platform, especially Microsoft Power Automate and AI Builder, along with Microsoft Azure SQL to create its InstaQuote solution, which generates sales quotes from email inquiries. Having offloaded much tedium from salespeople, Ingram Micro sets the stage for a whole new level of customer service.
Enhancing relationships with data
As he plots the company’s strategic course, Kirk Robinson, Senior Vice President and Chief Country Executive for Ingram Micros US, focuses on relationships. His team’s five-year plan calls for surfacing deeper understandings from customer data, while shifting the sales team toward more value-added work. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Sales were key to that strategy. “We believed that by focusing on relationship management, we could transform our interactions with customers and move share to Ingram Micro,” he says.
Ingram Micro US Vice President of US Sales, Susan O’Sullivan, was enthusiastic. Her sales teams spent up to seven minutes generating each quote from customer emails. In light of the more than a million and a half emails that her team analyzed each year, that was a significant amount of time diverted from high-quality customer interactions. “We have some of the best salespeople around,” she says. “But so much of their great information was in their heads or in disparate systems. We knew that if we could create a smart customer data repository and eliminate the ‘finger work’ of creating quotes, we would then give our customers and our people an even better experience. It’s truly helped us to redefine roles and ensure that everyone can do the work that best matches their talents.”
Jim Annes, Ingram Micro US Vice President of Business Operations and Transformation, and James Laws, Director of CRM and Business Applications, collaborated with Robinson and O’Sullivan, focusing on a holistic view of the organization. “We wanted to get everyone in the organization on the same platform to both contribute to and use our customer data,” says Annes. “That would naturally progress to using automation and AI capabilities to free our sales associates so they could engage with customers and drive success together, faster.”
Pulling opportunity out of complexity
The plan hinged on a deep understanding of every customer. Traditionally, companies like Ingram Micro stratify their customers into broad categories, such as value-added resellers, managed service providers, and cloud service providers. But that approach misses the complexity that reveals what’s most important to those customers.
As their conversations with customers revealed more about those businesses, the Ingram Micro team began to uncover that information, using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as a connected repository. This enabled Ingram Micro to unify customer data into a single dashboard and gain a 360-degree view of each profile. Because the data is infused across Dynamics 365 applications, sales associates access this data in Dynamics 365 Sales, which allows them to personalize the customer experience across all touch points and accelerate sales performance. It also enables leaders to assign specific tasks to the best qualified associates, regardless of department, and to track the results of those engagements.
“The holistic view we’ve shaped with Microsoft technology puts us in a better position when the vendors we serve present their unique services to us,” says Robinson. “We use the technology to deliver an experience no one else can touch.” Creating detailed customer profiles took the team deeply into the weeds, but it was a profitable exercise. “Going deeper and deeper, we found more complexity,” adds Robinson. “But with complexity came opportunity.”
It also solved a lot of issues for sales teams. “Because we provide so much data, sometimes suggesting detailed questions and actions, even our less experienced sales associates can lead high-quality conversations,” says O’Sullivan. “Best of all, we now have such a complete picture of our customers based on their solution design, quoting, and buying history that we can call them with upcoming opportunities. Our customers regard us in a new light, and it’s all possible because of the connected data we have with Dynamics 365.”
As the effects of COVID-19 rippled through supply chains, Ingram Micro was gratified to share information with its customers that it found helped allay panic. Annes attributes that adaptability to the connected nature of the solutions. “Having a better understanding of the customer gives us the flexibility to react even to rapidly changing needs,” he says. “When shutdowns created stresses for businesses, we identified the customers most vulnerable to those disruptions, proactively extended credit, and took other measures. It’s not easy to fully understand the connections in a complex system, but we have the tools to collect, analyze, and act on those connections.”
Tying it all together with Microsoft Power Platform
For Laws, the strength of the solution that his team has devised lies not only in the interoperability across Dynamics 365, Azure, and Microsoft Power Platform but also in how fast his team can create solutions. “We can rapidly deploy a proof of concept with Microsoft Power Platform, share it out to the business teams, and get their feedback,” says Laws. “Then not only can we refine that solution for a particular group, we can adapt it to other business units for even greater value.”
His team created an internal solution, InstaQuote, for Ingram Micro. They used Power Automate, AI, and Azure SQL to validate products against the product database and API capabilities to automatically create quotes in Microsoft 365 from customer emails. InstaQuote scans incoming emails, identifies those that contain quote requests, and extracts the pertinent details, including SKUs and manufacturer part numbers. It makes calls to APIs for pricing information and builds the quote, which is then assigned to the sales associate who can expand or modify it to best serve the customer. Using AI Builder, a feature within Microsoft Power Platform, the solution extracts information from the attachments to create the quote. Not only does the team automate the processes underlying InstaQuote, but it also pulls rich insights from data within the app.
Laws and Annes partnered closely with O’Sullivan and her sales teams to create the InstaQuote solution. That collaboration created trust and produced just what O’Sullivan’s teams needed. But Laws believes that his team benefitted from that approach, too. “The speed we get with a low-code solution like Microsoft Power Platform eases change management. It’s easier to show employees that we can enhance their experience and accelerate adoption.”
With its InstaQuote solution, Ingram Micro uses Microsoft business applications to give internal teams a leg up on productivity. And the company is also extending technologies, including chatbots, to its customers. It’s launching the Ingram Micro Customer Care platform to not only automate processes and create a self-service ecosystem but also take advantage of bots to answer frequently asked questions, look up orders, and help customers with next steps, like returns. “We’re planning to embed chatbots in several other portals to streamline customer service,” says Laws.
Agile solutions translate into best-fit answers. “It’s important that everyone from customers to sales associates views us as a team that adds value,” says Annes. “And the great thing about the solutions we create is that we can help each person to be the best version of themselves—putting their unique perspective, skill set, and passion into their work.”
Flexing the power of deep insights
Ingram Micro uses Power BI Premium for the presentation layer in most of its in-house applications, and it also builds dashboards on the fly for fast answers to crucial business questions. “We answer our most pressing questions, from a sales associate seeking to identify a sales trend for one customer to companywide performance inquiries from the executives,” says Annes. “Our leaders use Power BI Premium to make the best possible decisions.”
Sales managers and directors rely on Power BI reports as the basis for interesting conversations about trends, according to O’Sullivan. “They’re starting to dissect the business in imaginative new ways,” she says. “I think my sales associates are much more confident. Everyone is approaching data as a way to lift their performance.”
For Robinson, the customer relationship takes first priority. Using technology to give sales associates time to focus on their customers is as much good business sense as it is personally rewarding for everyone. Field sales teams may work remotely now, but they’ve remained present for their customers via Microsoft Teams. The principle is the same. “We have two ears and one mouth,” Robinson says. “We want to listen to our customers and understand them at a deep level before we start talking. With our Microsoft tools, we can bring in everyone at Ingram Micro who should take part in that dialogue. That’s the power of the platform, and it helps us to have conversations with our customers that we’ve never had before.”
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“We want to listen to our customers and understand them at a deep level. With our Microsoft tools, we can bring in everyone at Ingram Micro who should take part in that dialogue. That’s the power of the platform, and it helps us to have conversations with our customers that we’ve never had before.”
Kirk Robinson, Senior Vice President and Chief Country Executive, Ingram Micro US
Beginning September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will merge into a single offering under Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Learn more about the evolution of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
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