Red Hawk Tech | Microsoft CRM Customization

Customer Photo Management System - CRM Customization

2010-01-20T13:22:00.019-05:00

Divisions Inc. provides property management services to customers across the United States. Microsoft CRM is heavily leveraged to ensure quality of service to their customers. Red Hawk has been contracted to customize Microsoft CRM on multiple occasions for Divisions. The following is just one example of our application and CRM customization expertise at work.

Challenge: Field representatives visit customer locations for a variety of reasons. Typically, the purpose of a visit is to document requirements specific to a client maintenance request. Photos were taken, but the process of integrating photography with the maintenance request in CRM was non-existent.

Solution: Using Microsoft CRM and custom Blackberry software developed by our partner, Signal US, we enabled the field representatives to take photos using their mobile phones, organize them on-site, and send them into Microsoft CRM. Within CRM, the photos are organized by Customer and grouped arbitrarily by the field representative. Those groups are sent using the normal CRM email mechanisms and are received at the destination inbox in a client branded template in Microsoft CRM. The photos are stored in their original format with all embedded information (including GPS coordinates) at SmugMug, a third-party provider. We chose to use a third party provider for photo storage for a variety of reasons:

SmugMug has an easy to use and well-documented API.
SmugMug offers unlimited storage for a small yearly fee and has no impact on the client's available bandwidth. SmugMug also provides multiple watermarked versions of every image.

Details: Several options were researched prior to making a decision regarding the aforementioned technologies. Red Hawk researched GPS and Wi-Fi enabled digital cameras. The iPhone was also researched and a prototype was developed. It was eventually decided that the cameras researched were too expensive and too easily lost or damaged. The iPhone had great image quality and GPS support but the poor quality of AT&T's network, coupled with poor battery life, made it an undesirable option. The client had confidence in the Verizon network and determined the Blackberry Tour was the best option. The client purchased Blackberry's for all of the field representatives and select corporate office staff. The phones were pre-configured with the custom photo software, managed via the Blackberry Enterprise Server.

The flow of pictures into the system functions in the following manner:

Field representative takes a photo and can select to send that photo to the Client. When that option is selected, they can then choose the customer to receive this group of photos and create a name and description for the photo group, as well as each individual photo.
They can then take more photos and attach them to the newly created photo group.
When the photo group is ready, the field representative sends the images.
The web application developed by Red Hawk receives the photos from the field representative's Blackberry, and places them in temporary storage on the CRM server. Next, the web application creates a photo group record (if it doesn't already exist) and photo records for each image in CRM.
A workflow is then triggered in CRM, moving the photography to SmugMug and synchronizing the image data with Microsoft CRM.
When completed, SmugMug generates publicly accessible URLs for a variety of sizes and watermarks all of the photos with the client's logo.
Photos can be stored in multiple photo groups, and anyone with access to CRM can create photo groups and use the images.

Results: Field representatives can now locate photo groups quickly within CRM and email the images with comments to clients, colleagues, and vendors. The email is contained in a branded template. The images include pertinent data including; date, time, comments, and a link to Google Maps indicating approximate location. The approximate location link is only displayed when the field representative chooses to include GPS data when taking the photo using the Blackberry.

Flexibility was top-of-mind for Red Hawk during the planning and application development phase of the project. The Customer Photo Management System will allow us to quickly change photo storage providers, templates, and will also adapt to handle new photo data that may be available in the future.

Within the first 90 days of use, the system had over 1700 photo records in more than 350 photo groups in CRM. Each group contains an average of 4 photos.

Customer Portal - A View Into CRM

2010-01-18T17:25:00.012-05:00

Challenge: Divisions Inc. provides property management services to customers across the United States. Responding to requests for maintenance services is integrated with their installation of Microsoft CRM.

Their customers currently submit helpdesk tickets using ZenDesk. This is later captured by Divisions' CSRs and a case is created in CRM to address the customers request.

Divisions recognized a need to enhance services by providing a way for their customers to monitor the status of service requests submitted through their helpdesk system.

Our goals were to streamline communication with customers, reduce call center support, improve the overall quality of services provided, and plan for future enhancements.

Solution: Red Hawk Technologies developed a custom web portal, providing a view into Microsoft CRM, which empowers customers by allowing them to monitor open and completed cases. In addition to monitoring cases in CRM, customers can view a summary of all helpdesk entries, including those that have not been converted to cases in CRM.

The current helpdesk provider is ZenDesk, chosen for use because it is web-based and provides a powerful API. The web-portal was designed so that ZenDesk can be replaced with minimal effort if the need arises. It's possible a CRM-based custom entity will be developed at a future date.

Details:

Created a website on a machine that has visibility to both the outside world and to the client's Microsoft CRM.
Created web services on an intranet website that has access to Microsoft CRM. Then created a page that could "proxy" requests between the externally facing site and Microsoft CRM. This was done to get around the "Kerberos Authentication" issues that can arise from certain configurations of Microsoft CRM. It is also used to control which account is used to access the CRM data.

Created three controls on the external website that allow for the display, filtering, sorting, and paging of the helpdesk tickets, open cases, and closed cases. Each control communicates with a "data processor."

Created three "data processors" which are responsible for requesting data from the external sources. These processors are also responsible for caching the data received for 10 minutes.
Placed the three controls on the default page.

Wrapped the site with ASP.Net forms authentication that communicates with the CRM server via the proxy to determine which customer to display upon successful logon.

The system performance was slow until paging and ASP.Net data caching was implemented. Without paging, the data transmitted to the web browser was 85 KB, and would grow as the cases and helpdesk tickets were added. Paging would lock the amount of data transmitted to around 32 KB every time when 10 records for each section were displayed. We also used a little jQuery magic to lock down the more wordy pieces of data with a tooltip-like feature, helping to limit the vertical growth of the site.

We set the cache timeout to 10 minutes. This means that the data displayed on the site could be up to 10 minutes old. The client was comfortable with that number. Before caching, a page of data took around 7-10 seconds to render. After caching, the page was loading in under a second. Paging between the three sections was also slow prior to caching (because it was pulling all the data all the time), and it benefited in the same way after the caching was implemented. The same could be said of sorting. One trick that we implemented was to pre-cache the data once the logon page was loaded. When a user hit the logon page and typed their username, we waited until they focused on the password input. Once that happened (while they typed their password), we would use the username to get the data caches primed with that users' data. It eliminated the initial load after logon because the data was already there. In the future, we hope to add a mechanism that will automatically detect when the cache is going to expire and keep it fresh if there is still activity on the site. That should eliminate the occasional 10 second load every 10 minutes.

Custom Quoting Module - Simplifying Microsoft CRM Workflow

2010-01-18T16:06:00.010-05:00

Challenge: Field Representatives each had their own system for quoting work. Quoting was a manual process and terribly inefficient. Each branch of the Company had their own quotation forms. Approved quotes were manually entered into the Company's ERP software when received by corporate.

Solution: Utilize and extend the Microsoft CRM quotation system. Create a wizard-like interface that condenses the quotation process into 6 steps. Standardize products and services within CRM. Standardize quotation forms using SQL Reporting Services. Develop a workflow to support a quote
approval process. Integrate approved quotes automatically within the Company’s ERP system for billing.

Details: Red Hawk conducted several discovery meetings with the client to define all of the available products and services. We also investigated the skill level of the personnel that would be using the system. Skill levels ranged from "Power-User" to "Novice." Ease of use was paramount. We chose to develop the custom quoting module in CRM with the novice user in mind. We developed a wizard interface that condensed the process into 6 steps. These steps are consistent across all products and services. During the development of the wizard, the client added new products and services. The wizard was developed to handle modifications to product and service offerings, minimizing the impact of these types of changes.

The wizard process contains 6 steps:

Type of quotation
Target Customer, Contact, and Provider
Billing/Payment Schedule
Line Items Quotes for the quotation type (with an option to add ad-hoc services)
Per-month payment details
Review

After the review step, a request to create a printable quote is sent to the SQL Reporting Services server and those documents are attached to the quote itself within CRM. The Field Representative can then email or fax the documents to the appropriate parties for approval. Upon approval, the Field Representative navigates to the Review screen in the wizard and uploads the signed approval documents. This step triggers a workflow for the corporate office to review the quote and create an active contract within CRM and the ERP system. The ERP system triggers billing on the schedule set forth in the proposal.

The custom quoting module uses the built-in quote entity in CRM. As a result, the wizard automatically handles revisions. This provides visibility into all levels of the process, enabling our client to view the process from quote to cash.

The quotation process takes 5 to 10 minutes for most users, and less for more experienced users. The module includes a "copy" function to speed the process of producing similar quotes. Of course, the data this produces could be entered using CRM's built-in forms, but the process would take 20 to 30 minutes on average, and would require extensive training for the field personnel.

Effectively, the custom quoting module resulted in 85% time savings and provides a means to measure the effectiveness of the process from quote to cash.