With a canvas app Sikich created and embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, New England’s leading provider of high-end kitchen appliances makes it easier for showroom consultants to serve customers and enables targeted outreach to customers and dealers.
Clarke presents high-end kitchen appliances from brands like Sub-Zero, Wolf, and Cove in showrooms spread across New England. In these facilities, customers meet with highly experienced consultants to receive advice on the products and models that might best serve them. They can try out ranges and other appliances in full-scale working kitchens designed by the region’s best designers. A team of chefs helps them hone their cooking skills and achieve great results from their appliances.
Once customers choose their appliances, showroom consultants enter the appropriate product selections and configurations in a software system. Because the company doesn’t want technology and devices to get in the way of a customer-focused conversation, consultants wait to take this step until the end of appointments. They forward the details regarding the selected products to one of Clarke’s authorized dealers, who then helps the customer complete the purchase. After delivery and installation, dealers share the actual products purchased with Clarke.
Clarke is a Sikich client of many years and knows how to take advantage of modern technology. Years ago, the company adopted its first customer relationship management (CRM) system and currently uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Consultants rely on this cloud-based CRM solution to enter customer and order details.
For Clarke, it’s important to equip showroom consultants with easy-to-use, efficient tools that allow them to work quickly and maintain their focus on serving customers. For consultants and business managers, the processes of recording customer and order data and eventually reconciling it with dealer information still required some manual intervention and searching. When Sikich team members in a conversation with Clarke stakeholders learned that these workflows could see improvement, they quickly developed a concept, created a solution, and made it available to the consultants and managers.
Specifically, Sikich used the canvas app feature within Microsoft Power Apps to create an app for Clarke. This app-building approach makes it possible to create apps simply, dragging and dropping elements onto a canvas instead of writing code. Canvas apps can incorporate data from a broad variety of sources. The Sikich team embedded this app in Clarke’s CRM cloud environment.
The experience of Clarke showroom consultants has greatly improved with their streamlined functionality. Accessing the company’s catalog as soon as a consultant enters a term in a field on the opportunity record, the canvas app offers names, model numbers, and other details pertaining to appliances and add-on products. Jeremy McCulla, Manager of Clarke’s Boston showroom, says, “I love the solution Sikich built for us. It helps me cut in half the time of entering a customer opportunity together with product information.”
Recording opportunities early in the buying cycle is not the only activity that has improved. When dealers close sales and submit their information to Clarke, business managers now can more easily reconcile CRM records with dealer data and perform in-depth, multidimensional reporting on sales and business performance. Mike Nelson, Director of Marketing at Clarke, says, “Closing an opportunity and indicating what was actually purchased will be even more of an improvement.”
The Sikich canvas app enables Clarke to report more easily and in greater detail on which products customers actually acquired. If they purchased products that weren’t initially quoted in the showroom, it becomes an add-on item to the original sales opportunity. “We are going to have significantly better capabilities to report on the differences between what was recorded with the opportunity in the showroom and what ended up being purchased,” Nelson explains. “We’ll be able to report by brand, product, dealer, and other criteria.”
With more advanced data insight, Clarke can more effectively target its marketing outreach to specific customer and dealer segments. Managers can get a better sense of dealers’ activities and improve the company’s collaboration with its channel. Nelson comments, “Finding the dealers that best support our brands will be much easier.”
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