Describe your business:
Mandatum Life, a part of Sampo Group, ( www.sampo.com )is one of the most financially solid and respected life insurance companies in the Nordic region. We provide our customers with a variety of services, including wealth management, investments, savings, and personal risk insurance, as well as incentive and reward solutions for companies. We are Pan-Baltic Company located in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, connected by MPLS with IT infrastructure in Estonia. We have ~100 employees at the moment and CRM is used by 76 persons.
What caused you to consider a custom IT database solution?
Before implementing your CRM solution we had different CRM software in each country without any integration between. Also a lot of information was stored by each sales person in his own XLS. So it was made a decision to look for one solution for all countries that would not require huge investments, with simple and clear user interface, and quick to implement. As we had SharePoint we thought maybe there is solution that can utilize SharePoint functionality but also be tailored to our processes. And your solution was chosen. It was relatively easy to customize according our needs , import of old data was straightforward so it suited us very well. Also people from Lookout were very helpful and we solved many issues together.
How did you develop your SharePoint Flex solution?
We had team of sales management persons that described sales processes and what minimum data is needed to store in CRM based on that. So this was as starting point. Later it was only me that did all the customizations inside CRM from our company and we had few developments ordered from Lookout. Implementation took ~ 2 months. In the beginning we had major issues with performance, but it was because we used SQL Express server. I think Lookout team should give “stronger” advices about infra part for the customer.
Which of the Flex modules did you use?
We use default Accounts, Leads, Interactions, Opportunities lists also installed Pentalogic products to have more reporting options. All default lists and forms are heavy customized and on top I added some jQuery functionality, like to merge fields, automatic filling of fields based on values from other fields and etc. Hundreds of list views were created.
How long have you been using SharePoint Flex, and what have the results been so far?
We started using Flex in 2014 and the results are very visible for reporting unit, we can easily count how many activities a sales person made. Who is working mostly with existing clients and who is constantly bringing new clients to the company. People already see that they can use history of communication with the client effectively, sales managers have good tool to check how their sales persons are performing each day and plan their activities for the future. We have CRM strategy with very clear requirements how we segment our clients, what service we offer for different clients, what reports are needed for top management and we will try to implement it in your solution.