Alkemy improves customer service with Dynamics 365 Sales

Alkemy is a specialty chemical systems company that has focused since its inception in 1989 on providing the industrial and institutional market with solutions differentiated by their value. Through innovative systems, the Central American company has been able to provide its customers with a careful integration of chemical technology, high standards of service, and commercial viability. Today, they have coverage throughout the Central American region, as well as in Panama and Mexico.

In 2018, Alkemy identified the need to improve the customer experience and gain control of all business activities. So a year later, along with Intelibis, a Microsoft partner, it began adopting Dynamics 365 Sales.

Managing the business with Dynamics 365 Sales

Alkemy handled all of its business management with a proprietary ERP that operated under the client-server architecture. It also used Excel spreadsheets. In turn, the company relied on paper for sales advisor business processes, planning, and audits.

"We needed a tool to make reports, sign them, and send them digitally, and have all this information on a platform where we could consult it freely," says Erwin Mejia, Technological Innovation Manager at Alkemy S.A. "Before, all the information was left on paper to the advisor. I wasn't working in the company," he adds.

Faced with this situation, and with the aim of providing better service to its customers, the Central American company carried out a test with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice for four clients, where it obtained a very good acceptance from them. For this reason, Alkemy decided to try a CRM, acquiring the Dynamics 365 Sales license.

Dynamics 365 Sales is a suite of intelligent enterprise applications that help manage all aspects of the business, enabling long-lasting customer relationships, acting on customer details, tracking accounts and contacts, and consolidating sales from leads to orders.

A CRM that fits the needs of each business 

Alkemy categorizes its customers based on their billing level, so each segment has its own business model. "A development was made to validate that when a new customer is created, they are automatically positioned in the segment that corresponds to it, telling the sales consultant what they must do to properly serve it," says María Andrea Cordero, CRM specialist at Intelibis. "The ERP on premises from Alkemy was integrated into the CRM from where the billing information is obtained.”

With Dynamics 365 Sales, the company automated the generation of the segments with their corresponding business model. "It used to take us four days to classify our customers to verify growth by niche markets. It's done automatically today," explains Mejia.

Once the customer is added to the system, the CRM auto-generates all the activities that sales consultants need to perform, ranging from a visit schedule to service reports with the data to be completed in the audit. This report, which was previously left on paper in the hands of the consultant, is now being done on site with a tablet. There, a Word template is populated, which is then transformed into a PDF and automatically sent to the customer at the end of the call. This entire process is made possible by the integration of Dynamics 365 Sales with Power Automate, a solution that enables the automation of repetitive manual task business processes.

Mejia details that "all reports are consolidated into a database that is stored in SharePoint. In this way, we can access the report to view the obtained note, improvement and action points, and view the entire history."

Thanks to Dynamics 365 Sales, quarterly sales advisor planning was also automated, including the calls to be made per day, the customer attraction and retention strategy, along with the three-month business objective. All of this is automatically generated. In addition, it allows for a better assessment of the advisor against the objectives achieved. According to Erwin Mejia, Technology Innovation Manager at Alkemy S.A, the process used to take three days to complete and is now done instantly.

Customer service excellence

In addition to offering the customer access to their reports instantly after the consultant's visit and visibility into their entire history, Alkemy has modernized its customer service. The company automated the process so that the service manager can distribute and channel those responsible for each claim.

Once this is resolved, the claim is closed and the client is notified, who also receives, thanks to a Power Automate workflow, a survey to evaluate how the claim was handled and whether it has been resolved successfully.

A digital future

Thanks to Dynamics 365 Sales, Alkemy has been able to reduce its operational burden by 90%. They have over 4,000 customers, and since the adoption of CRM, over 2,900 reports have been generated. Right now, they are developing an internal chatbot for HR queries using Power Virtual Agent, a low-code solution that allows bots to be created to answer questions easily.

For the future, the Central American company aspires to become completely digital. "We want to be a company that counts all the controls we need within an easy-to-access and secure management platform," Mejia says. "Our goal is to be more agile with predictive controls to grow and expand in the marketplace.”