The dotDigital Group was established in 1999 as Ellipsis Media Ltd, specialising in bespoke website design and development. Over the last 10 years, they have experienced exceptional levels of growth by focusing on meeting clients’ web and e-marketing needs. They are now a full-service digital marketing agency employing an in–house team of over 50 web and email marketing specialists.
The Problem
With their increased growth, managing and reporting group sales had become time-consuming and complex for dotDigital. With few formal recording procedures and no central system to store records, compiling reports and keeping up to date with customer account management often involved cross-referencing disparate spreadsheets, relying upon the efficacy of the account managers. As new staff came on board, each with their own way of performing their function, there was a need to analyse and formalise sales procedures and improve upon service desk functions for their growing customer base.
Whilst internal procedures needed streamlining, there was also a requirement to report upon the activities of third-party re-sellers of dotDigital services. Without this overview, there was potential for the dotDigital sales team to inadvertently contact existing customers of third-party partners and vice versa.
The Solution
We identified that Microsoft Dynamics CRM was the best solution for dotDigital. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a highly customisable solution that Blacklight could develop to model and streamline dotDigital’s business processes. This solution would integrate with Microsoft Office, Sage and a bespoke package developed by dotDigital to perform some of the key services they provide.
We developed a system that would allow all newly generated sales leads to be cross-referenced with existing customers and those of their partners using what we refer to as “fuzzy matching”. This process searches multiple fields within all existing records; cross-references these with the new information (for example, leads generated from a website) and awards a score to the incoming information. Whether the score is above or below certain criteria determines where in the system the new information is stored. This then works in conjunction with specific workflows to ensure the information is acted upon.
The Benefits
dotDigital has been able to improve its sales, marketing and customer service with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The Blacklight fuzzy match system ensures a non-duplication failsafe process to promote data integrity within the system and minimise the risk of contacting partners’ customers. New leads are automatically assigned correctly with any duplicates already merged with existing records. This process also provided a degree of data cleansing upon implementation.
The introduction of CRM necessitated a more formal approach to both sales and marketing processes within dotDigital. Separating the accounts managed by partners into different parts of the system made reporting upon revenues much quicker and less labour-intensive. The ability to create custom workflows to automate formal procedures has simplified the roles of users, decreased time spent on administration and freed up more man hours, encouraging increased efficiency from the workforce.
Blacklight Software