Geojit Financial Services shortens sales cycles, increases cross-sell opportunities with Dynamics 365

Geojit Financial Services is one of India’s premier investment services companies. It guides its clients in choosing the right investment product and helps them achieve their financial goals through its wide portfolio of savings and investment solutions, such as equity, mutual funds, life insurance, and financial planning. The company serves more than 1 million clients online and through its 460 branches. 

As Geojit prepared for its own digital future, it knew it needed to update its customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. These on-premises solutions had low adoption rates and primarily got used by teams to capture leads through the company’s website or online campaigns. 

Geojit wanted to find a cloud-based solution to unify its product, service, and client history data. To comply with local regulations, the company needed a solution that kept data in datacenters located in India—which it discovered that Microsoft offered. Geojit turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 to streamline business processes, consolidate data sources into a unified 360-degree view, and improve its sales and overall business agility.

In late 2019, Geojit adopted Dynamics 365 Sales to track sales activities, add robust capabilities, shorten its sales cycles, and drive revenue. Within months, more than 1,500 sales team members, including staff who work directly with clients in the field, embraced Dynamics 365 Sales. Sellers use it to get a comprehensive view of each client’s history, which helps maintain strong client relationships even if an employee leaves the company. This 360-degree view of all client communications in a single place helps boost efficiency not just for sellers, but also for managers, who use Dynamics 365 Sales dashboards to monitor and guide sales teams. With an increased lead quality, the cost of customer acquisition decreased and Geojit improved its margins by six percent within six months. The company also plans to take advantage of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights to help its sellers focus on the next best opportunities and close more deals.

The company has also deployed Dynamics 365 Customer Service to streamline customer support processes, using it to differentiate Geojit service by capturing and analyzing key customer data points. With Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service, Geojit has been able to precisely route client questions about specific products to the right service agent, creating a higher caliber of service delivery. The company’s 200 call center agents and managers ensure a continued high level of service by managing their performance goals with more transparency within Dynamics 365.

Extending capabilities with Microsoft Power Platform

Geojit uses Microsoft Power BI for data visualization and analytics, and it plans to connect its Power BI dashboards to Dynamics 365 so that it can perform company-wide reporting across lines of business and departments, all in one place. It implemented Microsoft Power Automate to connect Dynamics 365 and its back-end systems and automatically sync the data.

Thanks to close collaboration with its partners and Microsoft, Geojit experienced a seamless deployment and started benefiting quickly from off-the-shelf functionality in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. It worked with C Centric, a company of EY and member of the Microsoft Partner Network, which helped gather technical requirements for the implementation. Geojit appreciated additional support from Microsoft Premier Support, FastTrack for Dynamics 365, and Advanced Cloud Engineering teams, along with its Customer Success Manager, who worked together with Geojit to help ensure a unified approach to deployment. “We had an excellent experience with the different teams from Microsoft—as soon as they got involved, they provided constant monitoring and guidance,” says Shaju David, General Manager, CRM & ERP Solutions at Geojit Financial Services.

Enriching client relationships

In 2000, Geojit distinguished itself in India by empowering individuals to do online trading. As part of that offering, the company is required to call clients daily to confirm trade transaction details. Geojit created an automated trade confirmation module in Dynamics 365, making that process easier and more efficient.

The company aims to continually differentiate its offerings and enrich its client interactions. As Geojit considered CRM solutions, it found that many only tracked transactions—but it wanted to give its sellers, customer service agents, and other employees better insights for more relevant, engaging conversations with clients. “We’re able to present additional investment avenues to clients and offer a value add, which is a unique and powerful approach that we achieved with Dynamics 365,” says A Balakrishnan, Executive Director of Geojit Financial Services.  

Driving revenue with cross-sell opportunities 

In recent years, Geojit began offering more products and services, so sellers needed quick access to centralized data and an at-a-glance understanding of a client holding. With the company’s previous CRM solution, Geojit sellers could see trading account details but no other products. With the move to Dynamics 365, the company has increased revenue by streamlining its sales processes and opening up new cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Geojit boosted its total revenue by 12 percent, and increased its average new deal size by 9 percent.

“Our team is now able to see a full customer 360 of all their asset holdings across different products,” says Jones George, Chief Digital Officer of Geojit Financial Services. “A financial consultant from any branch can now drill into the data to analyze client holdings and effectively propose new investment avenues as well as provide any incidental advice. Our marketing solution also consumes data from Dynamics 365, helping us to orchestrate automated workflows to well-targeted customers for a cross-sell.”

In early 2020, Geojit deployed the partner portal using Power Pages. Geojit uses this portal to track leads and better monitor the client lifecycle within its partner business. In this instance, the company takes advantage of certain capabilities of its partners to drive sales and uses the portal to efficiently share leads and details, increasing business for all parties. “Our partner portal in Dynamics 365 has been key to passing leads to our partners and gaining more revenue opportunities,” says George.

Continuing valuable service in any situation

With critical CRM data in the cloud for the first time, Geojit was able to continue normal operations during the COVID-19 crisis. Several branches had closed temporarily and most employees had to work from home, but as the exchanges stayed open, business continued. “Through Dynamics 365, we had access to full client information across any device, which had a profoundly positive impact on our ability to help our clients and maintain those relationships,” says George. 

Concludes Balakrishnan, “Thanks to our move to Microsoft cloud services, we were able to continue supporting our clients during these challenging times. We used Dynamics 365 to share valuable information with them and help them in an unpredictable market, which was very important to our business continuity and helped us stay true to our values.” 

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