Effective customer relationship management connects sales, marketing, and services across a diverse array of manufacturing relationships.

• Efficiently manage your complex relationships—including partners, direct and indirect sales channels, distributors, retailers, and service providers.
• Gain cross-organizational insights and automate processes to drive a consistent customer service experience and boost productivity.
• Quickly develop and deploy enterprise applications that streamline and optimize the manufacturing process using the xRM framework.
• Leverage existing CRM extensions that serve the needs of the manufacturing community.

Manufacturers know that sales, marketing, and service effectiveness will make or break them in today’s global economy. That’s why they are turning to customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to provide them with the competitive advantage they seek. They need CRM solutions that people will want to use, that offer a holistic view of complex customer information and interactions, and that integrate efficiently with legacy systems.

Increasing numbers of manufacturing organizations, from independent companies to worldwide enterprises, are turning to Microsoft Dynamics® CRM business software. To better understand the specific reasons that manufacturers select Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft turned to Mainstay Partners. This independent IT advisory firm interviewed a number of manufacturers to identify the measurable benefits they have achieved through deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The customer profiles presented below demonstrate how Microsoft Dynamics CRM has helped these companies build lasting customer relationships by improving sales, marketing, and service effectiveness.

IMPROVED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND SERVICE EFFECTIVENESS
Centralizing complete customer information helps customer service representatives respond to and resolve issues faster. For example, Polaris—a designer and manufacturer of snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles, Victory motorcycles, and the Polaris RANGER—needed to make it easier for service representatives to access customer information. After implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Polaris’s service representatives can access customer information faster and address customer questions more efficiently online.

Productivity Improvement: With self-service functionality, service representatives can be more efficient at processing customer cases, allowing more customer cases to be processed by the same number of service representatives.
Improved Service and Satisfaction: Polaris continues to receive positive customer feedback because of the improved service that they are receiving—in part because representatives can access more accurate customer data quicker.
Today, Polaris customer service representatives can easily locate up-to-date, integrated information through a single data source. Service representatives work more productively with faster data entry, confirmation, and efficient routing of customer information calls.

EASY-TO-USE INTERFACE, IMPROVED PLANNING AND PRODUCTIVITY
Microsoft Dynamics CRM works as a natural extension of the Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, helping to drive user adoption. The solution also helps eliminate manual data entry, significantly reducing errors. In addition, Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides sales and service employees with the mobile capabilities they need when working in the field. Catalyst Paper—one of North America’s largest mechanical paper companies and one of British Columbia’s largest public companies—offers a case in point. The company recognized that providing field sales teams with critical customer information could help drive sales effectiveness and significantly improve customer satisfaction. By integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Office SharePoint Server with existing information from its SAP system, Catalyst Paper created an easy-to-use, familiar solution that field sales rapidly adopted. Salespeople now can quickly develop complex documents while working in the field and then easily synchronize information with the company’s server system. Microsoft Dynamics CRM also provides Catalyst Paper with greater visibility into its sales pipeline, resulting in more accurate capacity planning and improved efficiencies across sales and marketing.

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Catalyst Paper has:

• Reduced by 95 percent the time it takes to access customer data.
• Increased quote accuracy by more than 5 percent.
• Cut by 98 percent the time needed to create mass mailings.
• Improved time-to-customer quote by 10 percent.

INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY, SALES, AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Many manufacturing companies struggle with the inability of legacy applications to meet changing business requirements. Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrates with existing server systems, enabling companies to adapt quickly to changing needs.

Borusan Automotive A.S. offers an example of how back-office integration achieves bottom-line benefits. Borusan Automotive is the BMW, Land Rover, and MINI importer in Turkey, with more than 150 employees, 26 dealers, and 25 authorized service centers. While car sales comprise 70 percent of total revenues, parts and after-sales service provide nearly half of the margin. Customer service effectiveness is critical to the company’s success. Prior to deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM, pre-sales and post-sales data existed in disparate repositories, making a complete customer view impossible.

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Borusan Automotive now has a holistic view of the customer. Because employees can access a single repository of complete customer information, they can easily refer to previous issues, events, and discussions, allowing them to be more knowledgeable about and responsive to customers. The company integrated Microsoft Dynamics CRM with its existing AS/400 system, enabling real-time access to information and nightly batching of invoices, service orders, and customer changes

Equipped with centralized information access and easy sharing for customer account activity, communication history, related contact details, orders, invoices, and service activity, Borusan

Automotive anticipates the following benefits:

• 45 percent gain in sales force efficiency
• 10 percent increase in customer retention (a 5 percent increase in top-line revenue from return customers and ancillary product sales)
• 14 percent increase in revenue generated by each customer service representative
• 900 percent increase in lead follow-up activity
• 15 percent increase in customer satisfaction