Century Payments Inc. a growing company in the electronic payments industry, and which is ranked 11th on the Inc. 500 Fastest-Growing Companies list, has saved more than $300,000 and counting since switching from one company, Salesforce.com, to another Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online in 2009. Century Payments also helped increase end-user adoption and overall company productivity as a result of the switch.

Why CRM?

Using the development tools built into Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Century Payments designed and developed a robust method for tracking and managing the company’s corporate customer portfolio. In a recent observation, they noted that we were able to cut the development time from months to a few weeks.  This then meant that they cut  costs by leveraging existing resources to rapidly design and developed a new core platform.

What is CRM?

Think of this situation. You have a product that needs to be developed, or manufactured. You have clients that want the product. You have a sales and marketing force that wants to sell it. And you have management, finance and accounting that wants to guarantee that costs are controlled and brought under budget. What is the best way to garner all of these goals together? The answer is for the company to adopt CRM.

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.  CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

Century Payments and Microsoft: CRM in practice

After adopting Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Century Payments noticed something important, it saw its user base. Previously, Century Payments used their CRM solution for basic lead management support. But by expanding their core, with the built-in feature set that came with customized workflows and automation-enabled forms, they expanded support to partners by offering them the ability to do more work with less effort.

Source: Microsoft

Image: Microsoft

Century Payments Inc.