Microsoft CRM reforms sales, marketing for IOM

Insurance Outsourcing Managers (IOM), a leading provider of financial services to the short-term insurance market, has implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide access to its customer information for improved management of its various sales processes and marketing activities.

IOM provides financing of annual insurance premiums, a debit-order collection facility, broker acquisition financing as well as management of outsourced portfolios on behalf of clients.

Its services cater mostly to the short-term insurance industry and, in particular, the broker community.

IOM previously relied on multiple line of operational business systems to access customer information as well. While these proprietary systems are responsible for the transactional components of IOM's business, they were not designed to cater for information management from a sales and marketing perspective.

"We identified the need for a customer relationship management system that could provide information for sales and marketing purposes, specifically to improve the management of our client relationships, identify cross-sell opportunities between our various product lines as well as provide intelligence to penetrate new market sectors," explains Ian du Toit, director at IOM.

"As our operational systems run separately, it was impossible to identify situations in which a client may, for example, be using one of our products, but not others."

CRM would provide a consolidated "dashboard" view of client information as well as insight into the depth of product and service utilisation of each customer. This would ensure new market opportunities could be identified, while also offering additional product benefits to IOM's customer base.

CRM would further ensure a more structured approach to IOM's sales management processes, which were largely paper-based prior to the implementation. "From a business perspective, this would bring about improved productivity, greater and more effective control over legal compliance and the ability to view the stage of each of sale," says Du Toit.

IOM has a specific flow for each of its sales processes, from proposal, acceptance and quotes, to documentation, risk, compliance and payments, for example. Du Toit adds that the financial services industry is also highly regulated in terms of the national credit act and specialised legal requirements.

"Our sales processes vary from one product to the next, which introduces a number of complexities in the workflow requirements for each of these processes. CRM was introduced to streamline sales and ensure improved management control over each of the different sales cycles," he says.

"CRM has further given us the ability to allocate tasks to different people during each stage of the sales process. This has assisted in managing the process better, while also providing accurate information on the stage of each sale, the products involved and information on individual agreements."

While IOM's target market is fairly narrow, products differ in terms of their inherent structure. Each product also has a unique sales drive associated with it. "The CRM solution caters to each product specifically and to all products simultaneously," Du Toit adds.

He says IOM now has a single view of all clients and related sales activities. "We have a better overview of sales productivity at any given point in time, firmer control over our sales processes and more information available from a general sales perspective to more effectively manage client relationships.

"The single most important benefit has been the ability to obtain a dashboard view of our entire sales environment, which branches out to all areas of our business."

While the first phase of the project brought a greater focus to customisation of the solution and ensuring user acceptance, the aim is to use information analysis and built-in reporting capabilities to further improve efficiencies throughout the sales and marketing environment.

"Our future intention is to derive greater benefit from the system to market more efficiently to our existing client base and, through access to client profiles and related geographical information, explore new market opportunities going forward.

"Microsoft CRM has addressed our business need in a single packaged application. It easily integrates into our existing Microsoft environment and familiar applications such as Microsoft Outlook, for example. The solution was also customisable, and so catered effectively to IOM's highly specialised requirements," Du Toit says.

He adds that IS Partners presented a solution that demonstrated a thorough understanding of IOM's business. IS Partners' technical and product expertise further ensured the system was customised and implemented to IOM's specifications. "It's a matter of understanding both the business environment and business needs intensively, while also having an understanding of the CRM product and combining these capabilities to IOM's advantage."