Today we are introducing the second part in our series on our We Believe statement: We Believe in being creative. As stated in part 1, being creative can mean many different things. At MSN, it often means using the different software solutions at our disposal and adapting them to meet the needs of our clients…sometimes on very short notice. We creatively use a variety of cloud-based SaaS (software as a service) solutions and on-premise CRM (Customer relationship management) tools to accomplish this.

A few examples of the many services/solutions that we use at MSN are Formstack, Salesforce, and Act!. Formstack is one tool that you are probably all familiar with. It is a cloud service that allows us to quickly and easily create web forms. In the past, these kinds of forms would need to be custom programmed which was time-consuming and not very flexible. Now we can create web forms much faster and integrate them with our clients. Another tool is Salesforce, which is a cloud-based CRM that allows companies around the world to easily share lead data from almost any computer or mobile device that is connected to the internet. This type of CRM allows MSN to log in to a customer’s existing system and integrate seamlessly with their internal team. A third CRM that we use is called Act!. While Act! is hosted on-site at MSN (not in the cloud), and does not give us the global reach of Salesforce, it does integrate with our phone system to allow one-click dialing. It also helps our agents easily manage outbound calling lists, and allows for callback task scheduling, which is very important for lead generation.

In our contact center, we are currently working with a client that requires the use of all three of these tools. However, this was not the case during the onboarding stage. Originally the client came to us with a set of complicated needs and asked MSN to create solutions to handle them. Formstack was used to handle customer service issues and as an interaction guide for how to process different leads types. Salesforce was the CRM that our client was just starting to implement, but had no specific plans on how they wanted to use it. MSN created a blueprint for how records would be handled in Salesforce and that process is now the basis for how the client handles their internal lead queue across the country. The final piece was to use Act! to call through large lists of the client’s customers to offer them enrollment in a free program and to organize emails from the customer’s Microsoft office 365 account. All three of these solutions have their strengths and weaknesses, but MSN was able to creatively combine them to meet and exceed the needs of the client.

Stay tuned for part 3 as we continue to share stories of how all of us at MSN creatively meet the needs of our clients on a daily basis!