MicrosoftImprovesAccesstoCustomerDatawithNewSmart.docVIP

Overview Country or Region: United States Industry: Information Technology Profile Microsoft is the world’s largest software company, with 60,000 employees, subsidiaries in 94 countries and regions, and more than U.S.$36 billion in annual revenues. Business Situation Microsoft needed to make customer relationship management (CRM) data more accessible to its enterprise sales force. Solution Using Microsoft? Office Professional Edition 2003 for solution development, the?company built a smart client application that provides access to data in Siebel and other back-end systems through Microsoft Office Outlook? 2003. Benefits Rapid return on investment Improved user productivity More efficient collaboration Better data quality and reporting Rapid time-to-market Reduced support and training costs “Customer Explorer helps overcome the ‘last mile’ challenge of traditional CRM solutions by putting customer data at the fingertips of our sales force through the tools that they use most frequently.” Jon Elliott, Senior Director, Microsoft Microsoft needed to make the customer data in its Siebel solution more accessible and actionable to the company’s 8,000-member sales force. As part of its Project Elixir effort, Microsoft developed Customer Explorer, a smart client application that uses Microsoft? Office Outlook? 2003 to provide access to customer data in several back-end systems. Field sales personnel now can manage customer data with the same tool that they use to communicate with customers—a capability that lets them spend less time in the office and more time with customers, facilitates collaboration, and improves the quality and quantity of data in Siebel. And that helps Microsoft get a better picture of its sales pipeline. The company developed the pilot version of Customer Explorer in nine months at a cost of U.S.$500,000—a small price to maximize the return on its multimillion-dollar investment in Siebel. Situation At Microsoft, the e