Morgan Sindall drives customer engagement across eight businesses with Dynamics 365

Multiple businesses, one goal

Good customer experiences sit at the heart of any successful business but delivering seamless and rewarding engagements isn’t easy—especially when you need to provide consistency across several different business units.

Based in the United Kingdom, Morgan Sindall Ltd. delivers office fit-out, house building, construction, infrastructure, urban regeneration, and property services across eight businesses—each with its own sales, service, and marketing departments. Despite working in a decentralized model, the 6,600 employees at Morgan Sindall are united by a culture that puts the customer and quality of service above all else. The company understands that to deliver the very best customer experiences it must invest in technology to modernize its operations.

“We want to use the newest technology we can find,” says John Wiseman, Digital Workplace Manager at the Morgan Sindall Group. “In the cloud, we get to take advantage of the latest developments in Dynamics 365 automatically, as soon as they’re available, and that really appealed to us.”

To help sustain its customer-first culture, optimize its sales and service engagements, centralize field operations, automate processes, and expand its development capacity, Morgan Sindall uses Microsoft Dynamics 365. It also runs Microsoft Power Platform to support and extend a standardized, consistent customer-engagement experience across the organization while still meeting the unique needs of each of business unit.

The company worked with third-party implementation partners and multiple Microsoft support teams to deploy nine separate Dynamics 365 customer engagement platforms for seven of its eight business units—and thousands of users—in just five years. Today, different business units use different Dynamics 365 business applications, depending on each business’s needs.

Most divisions, like the infrastructure, fit-out, and home-building businesses, use Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service to access the data and insights that sellers and agents need to deliver more personalized, timely interactions. A few other divisions, such as property services, use Dynamics 365 Field Service and Dynamics 365 Project Operations to simplify project management, improve maintenance, and ensure customers get the best level of service from all Morgan Sindall professionals.

Easy remote collaboration, more effective customer engagement

To facilitate communication and collaboration, Morgan Sindall deployed Office 365 and launched Microsoft Teams in early 2020. The rollout was just in time to help keep employees productive and safe during COVID-19. In just two weeks, 97 percent of Morgan Sindall employees were using Teams meetings to connect with colleagues and customers remotely, share documentation, create project plans, and host important business conversations. The company had to complete two of the Dynamics 365 migrations while working remotely in 2020 and used Teams to keep the transitions on track and on schedule. “Teams made a massive difference to the way that we could run this project,” says Wiseman. “We kept all 6,500 employees in the Morgan Sindall Group working, and we could execute our migrations without a hitch.”

A centralized view

Morgan Sindall wanted to enhance and standardize its customer experience across each of its businesses—whether in the service center or on a site. Field agents at Morgan Lovell, Morgan Sindall’s refurbishment company, uses Dynamics 365 to replace complex, spreadsheet-based processes with automated workflows for 92 percent of their project workloads. They also use iPads to access a centralized data source, collate customer information during interviews, share documentation, and answer customer emails.

“With Dynamics 365, we can deliver IT projects faster and cheaper to meet the ever-changing demands of the sector. Both our customers and our employees are far more satisfied,” says Wiseman.

Great customer service requires great customer insights, so Morgan Sindall uses Microsoft Power BI as its core reporting platform across all its business lines. With Power BI, the company can streamline data from the Dynamics 365 systems to provide each unit with a centralized data source and a complete, 360-degree view of its customers.

Every business line can now see exactly what’s happening with its customers and projects, which helps sellers stay in touch with what their customers need, helps agents resolve service issues quickly, and helps managers make decisions that create the best customer experiences. Users are only a click or two away from every customer’s history, so each employee can deliver seamless customer interactions no matter who picks up the ticket.

“Everyone can use Power BI to access and manipulate the data at a completely different level, without needing any specialized IT skills,” says Wiseman. “We are no longer limited by our technology, and we can onboard customers, manage customer relationships, and provide the level of service customers expect much more easily. It’s made a huge difference.”

More power to innovate

To accelerate developer velocity and help optimize development operations, Morgan Sindall has implemented Microsoft Power Apps to quickly develop new applications. It uses Microsoft Power Automate to connect data and streamline customer-engagement workflows, using low-code development tools and drag-and-drop connectors to reduce the need for APIs when business users need new services.

“It’s a lot quicker for us to deploy a solution using Power Platform rather than have someone coding it,” says Wiseman. “And, as an added bonus, anything we deploy is supported by twice-yearly upgrades.”

The company has even created a Center of Excellence to encourage citizen development, so its people can build new applications to solve the business problems in their day-to-day lives without the need for specialist knowledge or support from IT.

Looking forward, the company plans to explore further capabilities, like using Power Virtual Agents to create chatbots that help customers automatically raise service tickets without needing to interact with an agent, adding further efficiency to customer resolutions.

Lower costs, better outcomes

With Dynamics 365, Morgan Sindall’s developers have been able to do more in less time—and the company has used Power Apps to enable thousands of potential citizen developers to solve their own problems. All of this contributes to higher employee satisfaction and a more successful organization.

The improved transparency that Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service delivered out-of-the box means the company can onboard new customers more easily, track their entire engagement history, and resolve issues and deliver services more efficiently, all while growing revenue. The result is better customer relationships and increased loyalty.

“Without Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, I think 2020 could have been a really difficult year for collaboration,” says Wiseman. “As it stands, we’ve had a really good year, and with these new capabilities I expect us to build on that.”

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