Customer Effective – Elevating Microsoft CRM to Maximize Performance Through Continued Innovation

Viewpoints: An Inside Look at Innovative Business Models

Jerry Seinfeld’s punch line in one of his routines is “who are these people?” That is a question that every organization deploying CRM software should ask as well. But they need to know more than the who. With a plethora of data and the need to access, parse and process it, the opportunity to retain a customer and make a sale is more important than ever, especially in a withering economy and more importantly in the field of financial services.

Scott Millwood, CEO, Customer Effective, www.customereffective.com, shares some thoughts, best practices and hands-on knowledge as a practitioner of CRM and the innovation it needs to address, embrace and deploy.

WFS: How about an overview of Customer Effective and your keystone product and service?

SM: Customer Effective’s core business is consulting services with a focus on delivering Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We help companies leverage software to solve their business problems and automate their business processes.

We are 100% focused on helping firms achieve success with Microsoft CRM and we have hundreds of implementations under our belt. We serve as expert guides for firms that are looking to automate their front office with Microsoft CRM.

WFS: What is Customer Effective’s definition of innovation?

SM: We view innovation as taking something that is already being done and improving upon it in a way that helps end users become more effective and productive in their work. This is how we approach Microsoft CRM with Capital Effective. Our innovation is the enhancements we add to address the requirements of financial services.

WFS: What are the key advantages of Capital Effective?

SM: Capital Effective is specific configuration and customization of Microsoft CRM for financial services firms in capital markets, banking and insurance. Our solution is built to address the unique business processes, workflows and key performance indicators that are important to a particular industry. By leveraging a pre-built, template-based application, our customers save time and money in getting started with business process automation with Microsoft CRM versus building it themselves.

WFS: Provide an example of a customer implementation. What was the before and after scenario?

SM: CAPTTRUST saved millions of dollars in the meltdown a year ago. They were able to reach out to their customers (investors) and rebalance their portfolios, saving them money too, and creating goodwill and value. Leveraging Microsoft CRM helped them understand details about their customers, how to reach them and what their investment interests were. They were able to react to the market collapse in a much more proactive way than if they had no automation in place. We have several case studies on our Web site that represent a solid customer spectrum and the ROI they have achieved.

WFS: Where do you see Customer Effective in the next five years?

SM: Our vision is to continue our current growth and focus. We predict that we will quadruple in our employees, revenue and customers served. Managing growth takes time and energy, but our real focus is continuing to innovate around the financial services model with Microsoft CRM and complementary tools like SharePoint, SQL Server and the Office suite. There’s no limit to what we can do as long as we continue to listen to customers and help them achieve success with front-office effectiveness.

WFS: What makes Customer Effective a company worth watching?

SM: We have the right focus, a great team and a proven solution offering with Capital Effective. The key to our success so far has been our singular focus on making sure our customers are achieving their desired results through their work with us. We have built a team that understands the importance of doing great work for customers. This is now baked into our culture in a very deep way so our team is constantly raising the bar for one another and driving our performance to new levels.