It’s been said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. At The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, that’s never been truer—innovation is an integral part of the culture at Goodyear. From the continual evolution of our tires, manufacturing processes and information systems, innovation is present just about everywhere in our business. We have a market-oriented innovation strategy, which means we combine the needs and desires of our tire consumers with technology to create tires and service solutions that add value and distinguish our branded products from our competition.
In fact, we made the tire-buying process easier for consumers in North America when we recently launched an e-commerce program where consumers can purchase tires online. We’re the first tire manufacturer in North America to offer this kind of service, which is just another example of the continuous evolution of our sales program.
Sustaining this level of innovation throughout Goodyear depends on three essential elements: our people, processes and technology. Hiring the right people with the right skills at the right time is a critical component to ongoing innovation. We work hard to attract talented associates. Once they’re on board, we want them to succeed, so we make sure to put them in positions where they can be challenged and they have opportunities to grow and contribute. We also bring modern technologies to bear, providing our associates with useful solutions like Microsoft Office 365.
As a global company, we need to ensure that our associates are able to work effectively together as a team from anywhere. The better the communication and collaboration mechanisms that we give them, the more productive they can be. To that end, it’s never been easier for our associates to connect than it is today. With Office 365, they conduct meetings with geographically dispersed team members using Skype for Business Online, exchange instant messages for quick issue resolution and participate in enterprise social networking to bring creative ideas to the surface.
We’ve also made mobile productivity easier, supporting our associates with greater flexibility in how they handle their work. In the past, associates could take a laptop and work from home or elsewhere once they logged on via a virtual private network. But what we’re finding now is that associates are collaborating from home and elsewhere, using Office 365 to work closely with decentralized teams. We’ve always seen a certain amount of remote working, but now that associates are tethered even less to their laptops, they feel they can connect and get things done from anywhere.
One of our associates told a story about how he was driving to work on the way to an 8 a.m. meeting. Suddenly someone in front of him got a flat tire, so he pulled over to help the person, knowing that it would cause him to be late for his meeting. Then he realized that he had his phone with him and all he had to do was click the Skype for Business URL and join the meeting on time from his parked car after helping out. It was that easy for him. He wouldn’t have been able to do both in the past. Since road safety is one of our primary tenets of civic responsibility at Goodyear, we were happy he was able to help that individual and still participate in the meeting from his roadside location.
Taking advantage of Office 365 to give our associates that sort of flexibility helps us accommodate the current convergence between personal and work life. It’s more and more natural now for someone to handle a personal item while at work and a work-related item from home.
Simplifying associate collaboration is the most important way Office 365 supports innovation at Goodyear. Whether it’s co-authoring a document in Microsoft SharePoint Online, brainstorming with a team using Yammer or Skype Meetings or using presence to see who’s online to answer a question quickly—the way we use Office 365 services to streamline the collaboration process is a key contributor to our enhanced ability to innovate.
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Wednesdays With Will: Improving The Service In Customer Service
Wednesdays With Will: Improving The Service In Customer Service
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
In our last few installments, we touched on how your marketing and sales teams can more easily acquire new business by leveraging a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). As a business owner, you know that client acquisition is only half the battle. Once they become your customer, that’s when the real work starts. Sadly, this is often an overlooked aspect for some businesses which can lead to frustration for both the client and your own employees in supporting them. Today we are going to cover how you can help setup your customer support and customer service teams for success.
During the sales process, your marketing and sales team have set the expectations as to what will be delivered when a prospective customer becomes a client. As we all know, a promise is only as good as how well you are able execute it into reality. Sadly, there is a common tale of the chasm between what was promised by Marketing/Sales and what is delivered by Services. Worse, it will sometimes lead to finger pointing as to who is at fault…Marketing/Sales for overpromising or Services for under delivering. What if there was a way to mitigate if not prevent this from happening by having everyone on the same page.
In the previous blogs, we discussed the benefits of increased transparency and collaboration between your marketing and sales teams as you bring the prospective customer through the sales cycle. What if you could take it a step further to provide a streamlined handoff to your Services team? By leveraging a platform like Microsoft Dynamics CRM it is now possible. Under a single pane of glass, you are able to collaborate more easily between disparate teams (Marketing, Sales, Services, etc.) while coordinating enterprise-level support services. It enhances ease of use not only for your internal teams but also from the customer perspective. Let’s discuss how.
As I mentioned, there is often a disconnect between Marketing/Sales and Services. One of the most powerful aspects of collaboration is enhanced communication. If your Marketing/Sales team has a better understanding of what Services are capable of delivering, there is less chance of overpromising. If your Services team has a clear understanding of what the client is entitled to, it makes it easier for them to deliver or prepare and make adjustments accordingly.
Dynamics CRM provides your Services team with the tools to successfully deliver. A service agent will be able to view pertinent information regarding the account such as service entitlements, case history, customer service scripts, and context-based information. The context based information is pretty interesting because it uses machine learning to recommend information that would be most useful based on similar past experiences. Great time saver! Besides the information that is provided some of the tools include a Service Level Agreement (SLA) timer, a guided resolution process flow, and resource management/dispatch. What I love about the resource management/dispatch function is the ability to easily find the person with the correct skillset that is closest to the service destination. Another great time saver and a way to improve customer satisfaction.
Speaking of customer satisfaction, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will help make your customer your greatest advocate. As times change so have the ways customers prefer to interact with their chosen partner. Did you know the average customer uses 3 or more different channels of engagement with a company today? Dynamics CRM is able to provide a consistent customer experience whether your client chooses to communication through web, chat, social, email, or phone. Giving the client the option to interact the way they feel most comfortable promotes a stronger dialogue.
Social media has given businesses a new level of insight as to how they are doing as an organization and how they are perceived. This is important because it allows you to rectify an error before it becomes “big news” and pinpoint areas of improvement. On the flipside, it also lets you know what you are doing great and why your clients appreciate you.
One of the most popular methods of customer support today is self-service. It makes complete sense as to why it has become the trend. With the increased popularity and use of internet search engines over the past 20 years, most people are more comfortable searching for an answer themselves vs asking for assistance. Microsoft has recognized this trend and recently incorporated a solution into Dynamics CRM. Clients now have access to the answers they are seeking regarding your product or service through a company branded online portal. Once again, it leverages machine learning so it provides recommended context based topics to assist as you type in your query. If you are unable to find the answer to your questions, you can easily create a new case in the same portal. It will then be answered, saved, and available for future use for others with the same question.
The last topic I would like to touch on is engagement experience and brand loyalty. A platform like Microsoft Dynamics CRM will help streamline how your internal teams work together and hopefully improve employee satisfaction and retention but that’s only half the story when it comes to Services. Having the ability to effectively assist your clients and for them to easily be assisted is the beginning of the story around brand loyalty. The more they enjoy interacting with your organization, the greater chance there is of them becoming not only a loyalist but an evangelist for your brand. This will often lead to new leads, opportunities, and sales generated by your clients!
There is much more to discuss when it comes to the Services portion of Dynamics CRM but I like to keep these articles short and to the point. As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
A private Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) was conducted for a company at Managed Solution headquarters today. CIE workshops are complimentary through the end of the year. Register for one today.
The Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) is a hands-on introduction to Microsoft’s suite of productivity tools. A true-to-life user experience, CIE takes you through everyday business situations, such as working remotely, analyzing sales data and collaborating with coworkers, and lets you see how Microsoft products make it all easy, convenient and secure.
All products are setup and configured with representative (fictional) users and data, allowing real life scenarios to be instantly simulated.
The CIE is a great way to get hands on with the latest productivity tools including Office 365, SharePoint 2013, and Yammer, in an interactive, experiential and fun environment.
Upcoming CIE Workshops
12/01 Arizona: Microsoft Corporation, 60 E Rio Salado Pkwy #1200, Tempe, AZ 85281
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Wednesdays With Will: Empowering Your Sales Team With Microsoft Dynamics CRM
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
As a Business Owner, VP of Sales, or Sales Manager you are heavily invested in the level of success your sales team can reach and rightfully so. If they are unable to close enough business in a set period of time it may lead to the downsizing of your overall staff. If they are greatly exceeding company goals, this can lead to challenges for your operations teams to meet the expectations of your clients. It may also lead to a secondary adverse effect on your customer service team in keeping current customers happy. It seems to be a delicate balancing act in this ecosystem you call your business.
Last time we discussed a smarter way to market, “smarketing’, by using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The methods highlighted in last week’s post were suggestions for improving lead generation. Leads generated by your marketing team will become new opportunities for your sales team. Once you have entered these opportunities into Dynamics CRM, you can now properly usher them through your company’s defined sales process, increasing your probability for a win. If the opportunity is lost, you now have the ability to analyze why it was lost as to make corrections for other future opportunities. If you are looking for a way to increase the value of an opportunity, Dynamics CRM makes it simple to set up upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Possibly the most important aspect of opportunity tracking is forecasting. Proper forecasting plays a huge role in scheduling and allocating the proper resources on the operations side of the house. From a management prospective, it may be used to dictate whether to hire more people and if so for which role or roles.
Something that may seem so basic but is often overlooked is the handoff from marketing to sales. The reason the lead, from marketing, became an opportunity, for sales, is because they followed a certain path or journey that qualified them. Understanding how and why they arrived is imperative to understanding how your business can solve their challenge and gauging the timing for a decision to be made. When you leverage a tool such as Dynamics CRM, you are able to align your sales and marketing departments, in turn making each much more effective.
From a sales aspect, contact management has been the most fundamental use of a CRM system over the past 20-30 years. It gives you a searchable, centralized location to keep information about an organization, contact information for its people, as well as a place to log notes from phone calls, emails, appointments, and other interactions. Most systems will also provide you a follow-up component that alerts you of when to reach out to a particular contact. These functions are highly valuable when prospecting and/or managing multiple accounts. With Dynamics CRM you can add more meaning to the way you follow up with prospects and clients through social selling. The Microsoft Insights and Social Engagements components of Dynamics CRM gives sellers this ability in two different ways. Microsoft Insights pulls information about an organization (size, annual revenue, industry, etc.), its people (phone number, email address, role, etc.), and recent news (mergers, acquisitions, expansions, etc.) from multiple social media platforms. By leveraging Social Engagements, you can captures information about what is trending on social media. This is helpful for learning about a change occurring in your prospect or client’s business without them having to tell you.
Most sales professionals are always on the go so most of what we have discussed would not be as useful unless it was easily accessible “out in the wild”. Dynamics CRM can be used on a variety of mobile devices such as tablets and cell phones. This allows you to access information already entered into the system as well as the ability to input additional information. I’m really excited about the next iteration, Microsoft Dynamics 2016, which will take advantage of Cortana’s search by voice capabilities.
We covered quite a bit today regarding the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM sales automation and there is still so much more such as the ability to instantly generate proposals through the system and save documents pertaining to accounts. I can go on forever about how you can empower your sales team with this platform but I digress. As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
I saw how we could use SharePoint Online and team sites as a security-enhanced, easily accessible collaboration platform. We deployed Office 365 and now we can coauthor documents simultaneously, track versions accurately, and store our data with robust security in the cloud.
Nonprofit moves to Office 365 and SharePoint Online to improve income generation
As written by Fiona Knower, Office Manager, British Ballet Organization as written on https://blogs.office.com
The British Ballet Organization (BBO) trains students and teachers in the globally respected BBO syllabi. As a nonprofit organization, we organize courses and events locally, nationally, and internationally to enrich lives through the medium of dance. Working on these events was a challenge because we had limited collaboration tools. We had a shared file server running on an old PC in the office, and I worried about losing teacher, student, and event management information if a backup failed. When we worked on documents, versioning was always a nightmare, so we ended up sending drafts to one another by email. It wasn’t very efficient.
Office 365 and SharePoint Online
Then we heard about Microsoft Office 365. I saw how we could use SharePoint Online and team sites as a security-enhanced, easily accessible collaboration platform. We deployed Office 365 and now we can coauthor documents simultaneously, track versions accurately, and store our data with robust security in the cloud. Because we can access our work from any PC, laptop, or mobile phone- wherever we have an Internet connection-we are no longer restricted to meetings in the office to get things done. With Office 365, we can work more productively on more events and reinvest more money into the organization!”
View more information on technology solutions for non-profit and please complete the contact form if you would like someone from our team to reach out to you.
About Managed Solution
We're technology enthusiasts with a people-first approach. For over two decades, we've witnessed the profound impact that the right technology and support can have on businesses and individuals. Success, to us, is seeing our clients, partners, and team conquer challenges to achieve their greatest goals and build lasting connections. This relentless pursuit of inspiration drives us forward, pushing us to deliver innovative solutions that empower growth and lasting success.
Are you a realtor on the go that is looking for a simplified way to manage your current clients as you take on new accounts? Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides you a single place to streamline business operations and manage assets, properties, vendors and prospects in marketing, service, sales and support functions.
Seven ways Realtors Use Microsoft Dynamics CRM
To manage client contact information & notes
To track activities and set alerts for follow-up
To store and access internal/external documents
To execute marketing campaigns
To track opportunities & goals
To capture and track trends from analytics
To generate reports
Since Dynamics CRM is built on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure it can be accessed from any device (e.g. laptop, tablet, phone, etc.) that has an internet connection. It also integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office 365. For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
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