Zoomio Microsoft Business Solutions Case Study
Overview
Country or Region: Denmark and United States
Industry: Technology
Customer Profile
Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, Zoomio Holding A/S provides Web-based marketing automation solutions designed to reduce the cost of customer recruitment and retention.
Business Situation
Small businesses often find customer relationship management (CRM) solutions too costly or complex to implement. To move into this market, Zoomio needed a powerful alliance.
Solution
Using the Microsoft® .NET Framework, Zoomio built its marketing campaign management solution to integrate with Microsoft CRM.
Benefits
■ Increased revenues
■ Increased partner base
■ Reduced development time
■ Ease of integration
■ Improved customer satisfaction
| | |"We knew that Microsoft would be one of the leading players in this market. After evaluating Microsoft CRM, we had no doubt. Together, our solutions provide a powerful combination."
Lars Munch Johansen, Chief Executive Officer, Zoomio
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| | | |Looking for ways to develop long-term relationships with customers and generate new sources of |
| | | |revenue, Microsoft partners see a range of opportunities with Microsoft CRM (now part of Microsoft |
| | | |Dynamics™). Zoomio Holding A/S expects to generate revenues from 300 to 400 new customers in 2004 by |
| | | |integrating its marketing automation platform with Microsoft CRM. Zoomio now offers a systematic |
| | | |approach to customer acquisition and retention once reserved for only the largest corporations. As a |
| | | |Microsoft Business Solutions independent software vendor (ISV), Zoomio expects its alliance with |
| | | |Microsoft and the combined offering to open doors as both expand their presence in the customer |
| | | |relationship management (CRM) market. |
| | | | |
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Situation
Founded in 2002 and based in Copenhagen, Denmark, Zoomio provides a Web-based platform for integrating multiple marketing channels and vehicles, including telemarketing, e-mail, Web, fax, and direct mail. Zoomio’s customers operate in a variety of industries including distribution, telecommunications, utility, insurance, banking, financial services, travel, and technology.
The majority of Zoomio’s current customers, which range in size from those companies with several hundred employees to those with as few as 20 employees, primarily operate in Denmark, Germany, Holland, Australia, and the United States. As Zoomio helps businesses implement customer acquisition and retention management solutions, it hopes to capture a share of the global marketing software space.
In today’s competitive global business arena, companies need to establish cost-efficient ways of winning and keeping customers. Yet according to Lars Munch Johansen, Zoomio’s Chief Executive Officer, companies all too often fail to take a systematic approach to customer acquisition and retention. The small-to-medium-sized business in particular has often found taking such an approach to prospecting and customer relationship management (CRM) too complex and cost-prohibitive.
“Traditionally, the campaign management software being offered to the small-to-medium-sized business market has been very limited,” Johansen says. “The offerings have been stand-alone products that are difficult and expensive to integrate with other components of the customer relationship management cycle. Therefore, they don’t help small-to-medium-sized businesses market more efficiently and effectively, which is what they need to do to stay competitive.”
With this in mind, Zoomio designed a solution to provide marketing campaign management capabilities in a cost-effective package that businesses can use and customize easily. Further, by offering a browser-based, hosted application, Zoomio eliminates the need for software installation at the customer site and ongoing maintenance.
Zoomio’s MyMarketingMachine provides marketing professionals with a platform for building and executing multichannel campaigns and for tracking the results of these campaigns in real time. Zoomio’s customers also use MyMarketingMachine to distribute newsletters, coordinate seminars and interactions with existing and potential customers at trade shows, generate awareness about new products, and so on.
For example, a consumer electronics reseller uses MyMarketingMachine to send its product newsletter by e-mail to 30,000 subscribers each month. Using MyMarketingMachine, the reseller tracks all newsletter activity, including how many subscribers have opened the e-mail message, the number of hits on each product article, and how many subscribers forward the newsletter to others and where it’s being sent. According to Johansen, it takes about 30 minutes for marketing coordinators to develop and deliver a campaign that includes a list, an e-mail message, and a Web form.
As Zoomio prepared to release MyMarketingMachine in the first quarter of 2003, the company felt confident that it had built a platform that met the small-to-medium-sized business market’s needs. But, according to Johansen, Zoomio needed to align itself and its solution with a worldwide network of partners to fully tap the market’s potential.
Solution
When Microsoft announced its intentions to release a CRM solution based on the Microsoft® .NET Framework and scalable for the small-to-medium-sized business market, Zoomio decided to develop an application connector to integrate MyMarketingMachine with Microsoft Business Solutions CRM.
According to Johansen, Zoomio made this decision based on its confidence in Microsoft to develop a CRM application that Zoomio’s small-to-medium-sized businesses would find easy to implement, use, customize, and maintain.
“We knew that Microsoft would be one of the leading players in this market. After evaluating Microsoft CRM, we had no doubt,” Johansen says. “Together, our solutions provide a powerful combination. Companies of any size eventually need to manage the full CRM cycle, and an integrated solution allows them to do that easily and cost-effectively.”
Microsoft CRM is a scalable front-office solution that incorporates many of the technologies that companies already use to manage their businesses:
■ Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 serves as the transactional data store and metadata layer of the Microsoft CRM application. Use of SQL Server 2000, which is part of the Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software, provides a scalable and reliable platform for managing vital customer information.
■ Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or Exchange 2000 Server, also part of Windows Server System, receives, sends, and tracks incoming and outgoing e-mail. Active Directory® directory service, a central component of the Microsoft Windows ServerTM operating system, helps to provide tight security and reduced administration costs. Active Directory improves the management and support of user profiles, roles, and privileges.
Connecting the Two Solutions Yields a More Complete Offering
According to Christopher Nash, Zoomio’s President, the company designed MyMarketingMachine to integrate seamlessly with Microsoft CRM and “look and feel” like another module of the CRM application. This tight integration, he explains, gives users an easy, fast, and affordable means of adding marketing campaign management capabilities to their CRM installations.
Zoomio markets the connector as an add-on to Microsoft CRM. The two solutions communicate with each other through Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0—the Web server for the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system—and standard Web services by using SOAP and XML.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” Nash says. “MyMarketingMachine feeds data into Microsoft CRM, and the CRM solution then turns that information into actions, completely and seamlessly closing the loop between the marketing activities and sales force automation processes.”
For example, a lead management event in MyMarketingMachine—such as the submission of a Web form from a targeted customer—automatically transfers to Microsoft CRM as a potential activity. Alerts and notifications are then sent to sales personnel so they can follow up with a call or take some other action regarding the revenue opportunity.
Other capabilities of the combined solution include the following:
■ Transfer of records (leads or contacts) from Microsoft CRM to MyMarketingMachine to run a campaign in MyMarketingMachine
■ Import of records (prospects) from MyMarketingMachine to Microsoft CRM to create new leads or contacts in Microsoft CRM
■ Automatic transfer of qualified leads from MyMarketingMachine to Microsoft CRM after those leads have met certain lead definition criteria within MyMarketingMachine
■ View of the real-time status of MyMarketingMachine campaigns from within Microsoft CRM
Installing Zoomio’s Connector Takes Only a Few Hours
According to Nash, installing and configuring Zoomio’s Microsoft CRM connector typically takes only a few hours. The Microsoft CRM administrator installs the connector on the Microsoft CRM server. Once that installation is complete, the administrator sets up the connector configuration file on the Microsoft CRM server. During this step, the administrator specifies the MyMarketingMachine login name and password, which are encrypted on the server, and the location of the MyMarketingMachine Web services.
Microsoft CRM can also be up and running within a few hours and fully customized in a matter of days or weeks.
.NET Framework Ensures Rapid Development and Ease of Integration
To develop a connection with Microsoft CRM, Zoomio worked closely with developers at Microsoft and took advantage of nearly every technology provided by the .NET Framework, including Microsoft and Microsoft . The software development kit that ships with Microsoft CRM also played a key role in developing the connection between the two solutions.
The open architecture of the .NET Framework—an integral component of the Windows® operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications—contributed to the ease with which Zoomio developed its solution and the connector, and then integrated MyMarketingMachine with Microsoft CRM. From concept to market, the process took about a year.
According to Gordon Darling, President of Zoomio’s Products Division, this relatively rapid development cycle lowered the costs associated with bringing MyMarketingMachine and the Microsoft CRM connector to market. “The .NET Framework makes development and integration much more straightforward than any other option we could have considered,” Darling says. “Using any other development framework would have doubled our time and cost to market.”
According to Nash, the open architecture of the .NET Framework and the use of open application programming interfaces (APIs) for Microsoft CRM made it easy for Zoomio to integrate the application’s customer relationship management and sales force automation modules with MyMarketingMachine. And, once deployed at a customer site, the solutions integrate seamlessly with most third-party and proprietary applications.
The APIs provided by Microsoft are based on a metadata-driven data storage model and include a declarative workflow engine, an integrated setup process, and configuration and management tools that greatly reduce the cost and time associated with configuration, customization, deployment, and upgrade.
“Given that security, performance, and reliability are crucial business requirements for us, we depend on the Microsoft .NET Framework for core capabilities such as authentication, messaging, security, and data access,” Nash says. “All in all, our approach is to take advantage of all that the Framework has to offer.”
Benefits
By integrating MyMarketingMachine and Microsoft CRM, Zoomio and its partners can offer their small-to-medium-sized business customers a marketing campaign management, sales force automation, and customer service solution that significantly lowers points of entry into that targeted market.
For example, in just a few months, Zoomio has added 40 new customers and expects to add 300 to 400 more in 2004, significantly increasing revenues. The relatively new company also expects to add 50 international partners to its growing list of resellers in 2004, which will drive more sales opportunities and increase revenues.
Compelling Combination
Zoomio’s resellers and partners are using Microsoft CRM and MyMarketingMachine to add customers and increase revenues. Under Zoomio’s business model, these partners and resellers receive a 20 to 40 percent margin on the technologies that they help customers implement.
In addition, Johansen and Nash point out that their partners can build integration, customization, and ongoing maintenance opportunities around the combined offering. Because MyMarketingMachine and Microsoft CRM are built on the .NET Framework, the architecture is completely open, making integration and customization a quick and inexpensive undertaking for those implementing the solutions.
Furthermore, by offering a wider range of value-added services, these partners establish longer and more meaningful relationships with their customers as they move from merely installing technology to acting as business process consultants.
“There are a number of business opportunities around these solutions,” Johansen says. “Our partners can now give customers an integrated solution that brings them immediate value. They can help customers map the technology to actual business processes—and that’s where you establish those deep, lasting relationships.”
Customer Success Stories
Customers who are up and running on MyMarketingMachine and prerelease versions of Microsoft CRM already are reporting benefits.
An international lighting company, with about U.S.$10 million in revenues, used MyMarketingMachine and Microsoft CRM to market its products and services to 1,000 inactive customers and then manage those interactions through the sales cycle. Within a three-month period, the company generated about $250,000 in new sales from that list.
An electronics company, which sells computers through the Internet as well as in traditional retail outlets, wanted to build its Internet business. It now uses MyMarketingMachine and Microsoft CRM to communicate with more than 30,000 prospects every two weeks and manage those interactions through the sales cycle. After just four months, the Internet store’s revenues increased by 50 percent.
“Compared with traditional CRM applications installed throughout Europe, Microsoft CRM is extremely well positioned in terms of performance and price,” Nash says. “That gives us a tremendous amount of confidence going forward that our partners and our customers are going to see some impressive results.”
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems that your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship
and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
dynamics
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| |Software and Services
■ Microsoft Dynamics
− Microsoft CRM |Technologies
− Microsoft .NET Framework | |
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© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Great Plains, Microsoft Dynamics, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Document published August 2004 | | |
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
For more information about Zoomio Holding A/S products and services, call (45+) 36 94 44 48 or visit the Web site at:
Zoomio’s solution transfers lead management events to Microsoft CRM as potential activities. Alerts are then sent to sales personnel.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship. MyMarketingMachine feeds data into Microsoft CRM, and the CRM solution then turns that information into actions, completely and seamlessly closing the loop between the marketing activities and sales force automation processes."
Christopher Nash, President, Zoomio
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Lars Munch Johansen, Chief Executive Officer, Zoomio
"Given that security, performance, and reliability are crucial business requirements for us, we depend on the Microsoft .NET Framework for core capabilities such as authentication, messaging, security, and data access."
Christopher Nash, President, Zoomio
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