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Customer Success Stories

Go Software

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GO Software, Inc. develops and markets payment processing software. GO Software customers range from small to large businesses that operate as retailers, mail-order and telephoneorder companies, and Internet marketers. GO Software deployed Microsoft CRM integrated with an existing Great Plains deployment to replace its old contact management system while improving process management, sales force productivity, and customer service.

The Challenge

Up until the end of 2003, GO Software had used ACT! for Lotus Notes and Great Plains, but the two systems weren’t integrated. Lack of integration meant orders and contacts had to be entered twice and as the contact database grew, GO started to have problems with performance and scalability. By spring 2003, the ACT! solution was crashing about once a week and the company found that even an hour per week had a significant impact on sales and product support productivity, so it started to look for a different solution.

The Strategy

At first glance, GO wasn’t interested in using Microsoft CRM because it was an early release and GO expected it would have challenges until later versions were available. The company was considering another CRM application from Soffront because of its flexibility. However, given its clear integration needs, GO reconsidered the future of Microsoft CRM and how it could meet both the present and future needs of the company. Based on Microsoft CRM’s ability to integrate with Great Plains and other applications, the SQL database support, and the ability to rapidly customize screens to reduce order entry time, GO selected Microsoft CRM.

After selecting Microsoft CRM, GO started looking for a company to help it implement the solution. It found Customer Effective, a Microsoft VAR that had experience in implementing solutions, and began the project in April 2003.

Working with internal personnel as well as a team of Customer Effective developers, GO worked first to map existing processes and practices to the new solution and determine changes that needed to be made. Then it developed a custom order-entry interface that pushes new records into Great Plains and then pushes them back into Microsoft CRM.

The new application was easier to use and less time consuming than the previous manual process, but GO recognized it still needed to invest in training to ensure that employees would rapidly and effectively adopt the new solution. GO had two rounds of training for power users and then relied on a “train the trainer” scenario to provide tactical on-the-job training for the broad user base across the organization. Today, the application is used by almost 100 employees and GO expects that number will grow as more users are trained and given access.

The application supports order entry as well as tracking of sales calls and customer information, Web-based customer support, sales forecasting and planning, marketing, and analytics. GO expects to achieve more value from the application over time as a key part of its strategy was to hire an ongoing developer with extensive Microsoft experience to expand the application as the company’s needs grow and change.

Key Benefit Areas

Deploying Microsoft CRM and integrating it with its existing Great Plains application has enabled GO Software to reduce system downtime while increasing employee productivity. Key benefits achieved include: 
  • Increased sales force productivity. Reducing the time required to manually enter orders in two systems, search for information, and verify information is correct has enabled GO to increase sales force productivity and avoid the hiring of additional sales people.
  • Reduced time correcting errors and omissions. Integration of data between the database, Great Plains, and Microsoft CRM systems enables the company to reduce time correcting errors and omissions and reduce the time and effort managers must spend resolving any questions about conflicting data.  
  • Increased marketing productivity. Rapid access to customer profile and other information as well as analytical tools enables marketing to build more effective lead generation and other campaigns in less time.
  • Reduced customer call support costs. Better access to information in the call center and more self-service information available via the Web has reduced calls to the call center while reducing the time for call resolution.  
  • Improved visibility and analysis of customer trends. Analytical tools enable managers to drill down into customer information for better forecasting and planning.  
  • Increased customer satisfaction. Access to self-service information as well as better sales follow-through and customer service has increased GO Software’s customer satisfaction.