Hill Associates improves their customer relationship management with Microsoft 365 and iGlobe CRM

Summary

Representing products and furnishings for restaurants, bars, hotels, casinos, schools, clubs, conference centers, and senior living facilities, Hill Associates is a 33-year-old business with sales offices in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and El Paso, Texas.

As an organization focused on providing their customers with the best products, pricing and service, Hill Associate views their relationship with customers as more than sales numbers. To better manage these relationships, Hill Associates looked for a Customer Relation Management solution based in Office 365, specifically with Outlook and Teams availability. Hoping to find a solution that would also help the organization improve individual and team productivity as well as accelerate and increase sales, Hill Associates turned to iGlobe for help. iGlobe CRM with Office 365, Teams, Microsoft Flow, Planner, PowerApps, and Power BI were chosen to organize, support, and accelerate Hill Associates’ sales and customer service processes.

Challenge

As Hill Associates’ business grew and became more complex, it became apparent that their system of for tracking contacts wasn’t working. In addition, manufacturers and the growth of the industry were increasing the need for marketing campaigns created in-house, rather than outsourced. Along with their growth came growth in their sales force, necessitating that Hill Associates find an easy way to communicate to each employee in the company.

Modern IT is meant to improve both individual and team productivity. Some of the challenges facing Hill Associates were managing internal communication and planning activities efficiently; managing contacts and communicating with them through marketing campaigns and determining which IT platform could be integrated with the already familiar Microsoft Office 365 all while providing the most secure and user-friendly experience.

Strategy

First, Hill Associates migrated to Office 365 and began transferring contacts over from the Mac OS software they’d been using.  Once that was completed, Hill Associates looked at and tried several CRMs, but didn’t find one that fit their specific needs. After discovering that Office 365 offers many services that can improve productivity, both individually and collaboratively, Hill Associates determined that the CRM they would move forward with ideally should be simple to use, would seamlessly integrate with Office 365, would both use and be available across Office 365, where Teams and Outlook are key access points. Hill Associates decided to move forward with iGlobe, as it had everything they were looking for. It was an easy-to-use CRM that was customizable, and had the ability to create email lists, could integrate MailChimp with Microsoft Flow, and it is fully integrated in Office 365.

Results

Using iGlobe CRM, which integrates with Outlook and Teams, Hill Associates employees can work with their data from either platform without opening the CRM application itself. Working with iGlobe CRM, Hill Associate employees can sort data by customer type, territory, or sales representative, helping them create more targeted marketing campaigns. Using Power BI, employees get an overview of current customers and contacts in a clear and concise way, that was all but impossible before, making it much easier to plan activities.

Hill Associates generates a lot of emails and quotes in projects which can now be saved from Outlook using the iGlobe Outlook Add-in for iGlobe CRM.  Customer inquiries are converted and added into iGlobe CRM and followed up by creating a Planner task. Using iGlobe MIPA – a personal assistant App for Outlook and Teams, users have always-on access to their tasks and activity list, ensuring tasks are not forgotten. Customer feedback is also organized in a similar way and can be used in order to provide great individual customer service.

Hill Associates decided to leverage Teams to communicate on projects within the company. Often, employees begin working on a restaurant or hotel project in the early phases of design and others in the company will join and work on the project at various stages.  Teams helps keep all project members up-to-date with meeting notes, documents, and Planner tasks. In conjunction with iGlobe it is now even easier to be more productive using Teams. All users’ Teams have MIPA implemented as a tab. MIPA gives a complete overview of tasks pulled from Planner, Outlook To-Do, meetings, and from the iGlobe CRM. With MIPA, Hill Associate employees can more easily maintain timely follow-up on customer meeting reports and on sales opportunities, making it easier for the account teams to reach their sales targets. MIPA provides an all-in-one reference for users inside Teams. Users can also make an iGlobe CRM tab inside Teams whenever it’s relevant.

Additionally, with iGlobe and Office 365, Hill Associates knows the solution is always up-to-date and can provide availability on all devices, even when users are out visiting customers.