How Zones Revived a Complex CRM Project and Created a Unified Customer Experience

Global technology provider Zones recently found itself in a difficult situation with its planned Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation. Their technology plan was solid, but after an un-finished implementation project, they needed a new partner that could offer expertise but also align with their own in-house IT and development processes.

Zones offers more than 250,000 products and solutions from 2,000 leading IT manufacturers, as well as a broad portfolio of professional services. And executives had set out growth plans requiring the onboarding of hundreds of sales people over the next few years.

Zones faced a multi-pronged challenge: to deploy Dynamics CRM 2015 for sales and service in concert with a new order management user experience that was being built with an in-house team in a parallel work stream. The new CRM also had to integrate with legacy Dynamics AX and e-commerce solutions.

The project's end goal was to create a true "solution selling" environment where quoting, ordering, sales, customer service, and field teams could share a single accurate view of customers and prospects without blind spots.

Their legacy CRM application had serious shortcomings, according to company representatives. It did not provide sales opportunity tracking or mobile access for sales representatives in the field. Data duplication across disparate platforms was causing operational inefficiencies. And with multiple user interfaces, the entire sales technology platform was cumbersome to use.

Zones brought certain strengths to the project, like its global IT footprint and a well-defined set of processes and best practices for managing development and IT deployments. When their original Dynamics CRM partner failed to adapt, the two sides parted ways with the project un-finished.

Zones selected Avanade as its new ...