Age UK Islington modernises its CRM system with Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365
Age UK Islington is a charity supporting people in the London Borough of Islington, enabling them to use self-help approaches to manage their health and well-being.
With a focus on prevention, the organisation seeks to identify and facilitate the right support at an early stage and, if appropriate, connect people with other services in the borough. This helps reduce the reliance on public funded services through GPs, A&E and Social Services.
The Challenge:
Age UK Islington contacted ANS in 2015 to discuss replacing its existing CRM system, as its Chief Executive, Andy Murphy, explains. “This application did a lot of what we wanted but offered very limited scope for customisation.
We also lacked insights from our data about which services we provide for each client. Overall, it wasn’t effectively matching how we operate as a business. We needed greater control over the system we use to effectively adapt to the changing requirements of our stakeholders.”
The Solution:
The organisation quickly identified Microsoft Dynamics 365 would be a more scalable solution. “We were attracted by Microsoft Dynamics as a platform-based system which had the functionality we needed built in”, says Andy.
“This would give us greater flexibility and connect with our other Microsoft services and applications. Crucially, we saw how Dynamics could be customised to fit our processes and pathways across our clients.”
“Dynamics makes it possible for people who aren’t technical experts to make changes. Our responsiveness to implement change has been a success story, and much of this is down to Dynamics 365.”
Andy Murphy
Chief Executive
Age UK Islington
The Outcome:
Age UK Islington’s service activity is now entirely managed through Dynamics 365. “We now have virtually paperless processes across our service operations, which makes it much easier to escalate work with teams and individuals”, confirmed Andy.
“Microsoft Dynamics has been crucial in helping us standardise our work while enabling us to personalise our responses to individual situations and client needs. As we now track all essential detail about our clients in one place, we can get straight to the point.
There isn’t a need for clients to repeat the same information when they get in touch. That has created a better experience as people are assured more responsive service.”
In addition to its full-time staff, Age UK Islington is supported by a team of more than 60 volunteers. Andy says the organisation’s use of Dynamics 365 has helped reduce the time and cost of onboarding new volunteers.
“It isn’t feasible for us to spend several months getting each volunteer up to speed through complicated training. In Dynamics, we’ve built-in guidance and compliance checks across our processes. As well as providing the control and consistency we need, this directly benefits our community by extending the reach of services through our network of volunteers.”
Andy believes the implementation of Dynamics 365 has had a transformative effect on the organisation’s reporting.
“Through our management reporting and internal analytics, we are better able to demonstrate how we use the charity’s resources and funding in an optimum way. Including Power BI, we can easily monitor performance across our contracts and drill down into individual cases.
Our data now provides us with exploratory analytics to discover trends for what people in the community are looking for and what problems are occurring. This gives us useful insights we can share to improve local services, and it is a valuable layer of data exploration generated by the work we do and captures in Dynamics 365.”
Summing up, Andy highlights the support received from its Dynamics 365 partner. “Our arrangement with ANS has worked very well. Aside from using their helpdesk to troubleshoot any issues, we’ve used managed service hours as part of our planning. This has included helping us to prepare for the bigger Dynamics 365 updates.
We’ve gotten to know many of the ANS support team and those helping us on the larger projects. I’ve always found them to be very approachable, and it’s meant we have an easy type of relationship.
This makes a big difference, and certainly, not all support companies are like this! Their response times are good, and I find it refreshing that if they aren’t sure about something, they’ll be honest and upfront to say so.
This gives me a lot of confidence to know that I’m not going to be wasting time. Looking ahead, we are keen to test Dynamics 365 live chat and explore the platform’s artificial intelligence capabilities that should help us extract further insights from our data.”
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