Fourfront Group partners with ANS to improve processes with Dynamics 365

Background

Fourfront Group is a family of companies that create inspiring workplaces which embody an organisation’s culture and values to foster productivity and wellbeing.

The Group’s service offering includes office design and fit-out, detail and build (Area Sq), traditional fit-out (Cube Interior Solutions), workplace consultancy (360 Workplace) as well as commercial furniture solutions and move management (Sketch Studios).

In July 2017, Area Sq and Cube Interior Solutions merged to create Area, one of the largest workplace design and fit-out specialists in the UK market.

Area Sq was founded in 1999 and started out using Act! CRM which was installed and configured by ANS.

ANS has supported the business ever since as Area Sq has grown and they have been at their side as Act! was subsequently upgraded and rolled out to other companies in Fourfront Group.

The requirement

Act! was used by the telesales teams within these businesses but as these grew in size and scale the software was proving restrictive as Justin Bass, Special Projects Director – Fourfront Group explains:

“For some years we’d struggled to make progress with Act! CRM. ANS had previously suggested this was no longer capable of meeting our requirements and they presented Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a more suitable system.

We were growing at a phenomenal rate, and we had other priorities so with ANS’ help we made some customisations to Act! but it was soon clear that we would need a new solution.

When we started out, we needed an easy-to-use application that would track our sales calls and Act! handled this perfectly. As the Group grew there was less reliance on Act! which was solely being used by our telesales teams for lead generation.”

“Once a lead was qualified, the process left Act! and all these details then ended up in a sales ‘black book’, this meant there wasn’t visibility as to what happened next.

Justin highlights another significant issue that increased the need for Fourfront Group to find a new solution:

“One business-critical piece of data that we need to know about our prospects is the length of their current lease-break agreement.

Having analysed our data, it was clear this wasn’t being consistently tracked. We urgently needed a more robust process that would enforce a rule to make sure this data is captured in CRM before a lead could be qualified.

This couldn’t be achieved effectively using our Act! system so we started to investigate alternative options.”

The solution

Fourfront Group were already using Microsoft Office 365 across its businesses but Dynamics was not its immediate choice:

“Dynamics CRM was clearly a massive system, but we weren’t certain it was right for us.

We wanted to involve ANS in the discussion to understand what they would offer.”

Justin and his colleagues saw that Dynamics had changed from the system they’d previously looked at:

“From the outset, ANS demonstrated that they understood our business and they were very straightforward in demonstrating exactly how Dynamics would deliver what we wanted,

They showed us how we could use a guided process flow to enforce our business rules to ensure that we are consistently tracking all the critical data during the lead qualification process before it reaches sales.”

ANS implemented Dynamics 365 for Fourfront Group in 2016 and it is now shared by over 100 users across its companies.

The outcome

Reflecting on the successes that Fourfront Group has achieved with Dynamics 365 / CRM, Justin first points to a series of reporting improvements:

“We’ve seen a change in how we report, previously this was a manual process. We now take the view that if the data isn’t in Dynamics, it won’t be included in our reporting.

Previously, our directors would spend several hours every month updating our finance team about the timings for on-site work delivered. All this data is now available to Finance in real-time through Dynamics 365 and this alone has saved in excess of 20 hours each month across our companies.

Dynamics 365 data is now driving sales decisions across the Group as Justin explains:

The quality of data we now have in Dynamics has transformed the quality of these conversations. It exposes our activity and it has helped to educate everyone as to the levels of activities that are needed to reach our goals.

As well as helping us coordinate short term sales activities it also gives us a radar so that we can plan as far as 2 years in advance.

We now have a unified sales process which is saving us considerable time. Dynamics 365 has helped us to connect our processes which gives everyone involved in the sales process clear visibility of the customer journey from lead all the way through to payment.”

ANS did a great job in scoping our requirement which really helped to plot all the steps and stages in these processes and define how these would be mapped to Dynamics.”

By centralising its data and consistently tracking business-critical information, Dynamics 365 has helped Fourfront Group enrich its data and empower its mobile workers:

“We have carried out work in more than 9000 buildings in London and across the Thames Valley. The progress we have made in Dynamics is such that everyone can now easily access all the maps, contacts, companies, and background detail in one place wherever they work.”

Looking ahead, Justin is excited by the prospect of gaining new data insights from Power BI:

“The focus for the immediate project was to improve our process from ‘research to win’ and now we are looking at Dynamics 365 and Power BI to help us improve our processes from ‘winning to delivery’.

By connecting Dynamics 365 data to Power BI, we have clarity about the state of the sales pipeline as well as start and finish times for our active projects.”

Turning to their long-standing CRM partner, Justin credits ANS’ work:

“Microsoft Dynamics has been the single biggest systems purchase in the Group’s history and our longest internal project.

Throughout this, ANS has been excellent. They have given us great guidance, especially to help us build a project team and in stressing the need to appoint some CRM super users which has proved invaluable.

ANS have been utterly honest with us. They were very clear on what would be achieved in the initial phase of our CRM rollout. From then on, they’ve supplied what we wanted and delivered what they promised, on time and on budget. We could not have asked for more!

Fourfront Group has grown from a start-up to a £160m+ business within 20 years and ANS has supported us throughout this time. Their work on this latest project has enabled us to digitally transform our business and this will help us continue our incredible growth.”