Belimo embraces Dynamics 365 to cement a future-focused strategy, save time, and improve experiences

Belimo, a Swiss leader in field devices for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, has a unique opportunity to influence how people experience their environments. The business has a global footprint, contributing to more comfortable and energy-efficient buildings around the globe, and has distributed more than 100 million damper actuators since its founding in 1975. Even with its international reach, Belimo has maintained a customer-focused strategy that, combined with high-quality products, sets the business apart. “The building automation industry has a very face-to-face culture,” says Uli Fischer, Senior Project Manager at Belimo Automation. “Belimo is very customer-focused. A very important customer touchpoint is being there in person, onsite.”

However, Fischer sees the latest digital channels as equally important—a future-focused strategy to help Belimo stay ahead of developments in its industry. “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a key tool supporting market communication. We embrace the latest CRM and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications because we see the changing attitudes and expectations of customers and employees in our industry,” adds Fischer. With those evolving expectations in mind, Belimo chose Microsoft Dynamics 365—including Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Sales—to help enhance agent productivity, boost customer experiences, and improve sales and marketing effectiveness.

Consolidation, ease of interoperability, and trust were differentiators from the competition

As part of a new strategy, Belimo wanted to consolidate solutions and focus on a platform approach. "The previous solution did not coexist well with SAP," says Fischer. “We wanted to turn our focus to trusted players in the market and for us, and that included Microsoft and the Dynamics 365 solution,” he adds. Interoperability with SAP was important, as was finding a cultural fit for the organization—both requirements that Dynamics 365 delivered on.

Interoperability with Microsoft Teams was another standout feature of Dynamics 365 and one that cemented the cultural fit Belimo was looking for. “I cannot imagine having a CRM system which uses another communication solution, because we use Teams already for internal communications,” says Fischer. Additionally, Belimo employees already had familiarity with the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, including Outlook, making Dynamics 365 a seamless fit. “The usability of Dynamics 365 was a big improvement over our previous solution, in part due to its continuity with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem,” says Fischer.

HSO partnership leads to integration, implementation, and custom workflow

Belimo chose to engage HSO, part of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, to roll out Dynamics 365. Belimo selected HSO in part for its understanding of the building automation industry. Says Fischer, “HSO dove into our industry environment and has built up a rather good understanding of it.” The two businesses worked together to create a seamless SAP integration built on Azure. “The experience went very smoothly,” says Fischer. “We have no problems with corrupted data, and the bidirectional interface is working well.”

Belimo has discovered an additional benefit of Dynamics 365: the ability to implement changes quickly. “It’s easy and fast to implement changes to the Dynamics 365 solution,” says Fischer. For default values, customized attribute catalogs, and workflows, Belimo has found it simple and efficient to create customizations. “For example, we have created a customized workflow that shows employees which steps are mandatory and what is optional in a given workflow,” says Fischer. “The ability to seamlessly visualize process flows helps employees take the right steps and work effectively.”

Improving employee experience and saving time with Dynamics 365

Belimo is also using Dynamics 365 to reduce the amount of data employees enter into the system. “We have a very holistic marketing and sales funnel that includes leads, orders, opportunities, and offers,” explains Fischer. “We have the system learn that not each offer or quote has an underlying opportunity, and this reduces data entry for our employees.” And employees use the Dynamics 365 Customer Service queues feature to manage orders and quotes more effectively and to respond to technical and logistical queries after a sale.

Today, Belimo aims to use Dynamics 365 to help improve collaboration and insights between business functions and monitor important customer touchpoints. “We use Dynamics 365 Sales and the timeline feature to make sure customer communications are progressing along the appropriate timeline,” says Fischer. The unified timeline feature in Dynamics 365 Sales brings together customer touchpoints like marketing interaction history from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, sales emails, calls, and appointments together to create a holistic view of customer interactions. “The sales team now has much more visibility into the marketing activities,” notes Fischer. “Today, sales reps use Dynamics 365 Sales to increase transparency and focus on new opportunities,” he adds, noting that employees convert leads to opportunities, manage opportunities, and monitor all stages of the sales pipeline from one place.

Belimo has already started to consolidate its customer data into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. “Today, we use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to improve the quality of our customer data and gain a richer view of customers,” says Fischer. Marketing teams at Belimo are exploring all the capabilities of the new platform and working to create more targeted and tailored communications using the insights gained with Dynamics 365. Belimo’s previous solution did not provide insights into key KPIs such as emails opened and clickthrough rates.

Belimo is looking forward to improving customer engagements too, and Fischer anticipates time savings from moving to a consolidated, highly interoperable platform. “As employees begin to work regularly with Dynamics 365, I expect an efficiency gain will be achieved,” he says. “Our next step with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is to use analytics to target campaigns more accurately and improve engagement,” adds Fischer.

Welcoming innovations while staying focused on customer experiences

Fischer describes Belimo as a “hidden champion” in its industry, one that gains customer loyalty with its high-quality products and attentive service. As Belimo continues to grow, the business uses the Dynamics 365 platform to maintain its high level of customer attentiveness and utilize leading-edge technology to support customers and employees alike. Today, Belimo is exploring additional aspects of the Dynamics 365 platform. “We are excited to continue exploring the ongoing evolution of the Dynamics 365 platform, including innovations like Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365 and live chat capabilities within Dynamics 365 Customer Service,” says Fischer.