Independent Franchise Partners: Dynamics 365 Customer Case Study

Uncover a winning client engagement deployment powered by Dynamics 365, as part of a broader digital transformation strategy for Independent Franchise partners LLP.

Client Engagement deployment powered by Dynamics 365, as part of a broader digital transformation strategy for Independent Franchise Partners LLP.

“The Xpedition team exceeded expectations with its collaborative approach and understanding of our requirements, with a level of success and deployment that the previous supplier was never able to achieve.”

The Challenge

Independent Franchise Partners, LLP (Franchise Partners) was established in 2009 to offer the Franchise investment approach to institutional investors through a dedicated, independent investment management partnership. Capacity in both the US and the Global equity products is available via a waitlist process and current investors include a full range of pension funds, endowments and foundations, sovereign wealth funds and family offices globally.

Franchise Partners’ existing CRM solution was overly complex and underutilised. With an upgrade to Microsoft Office 365 already underway, the Firm needed to establish if Dynamics 365 was a cost-effective solution that could help to solve its business challenges and streamline the client service function. The executive team knew that its chosen supplier needed to have sector expertise, and offer an assessment pathway that ensured the implementation strategy would align to its business goals.

The new solution would need to be flexible enough to support Franchise Partners’ Data Management requirements, and fully support the Firm’s client engagement strategy, waitlist, on-boarding and offboarding processes.

“During the Definition phase, Xpedition made a realistic and accurate assessment of the implementation timescale, which was very reassuring. The team was highly flexible and worked to our schedule and budget.” 

David Warlow, Business Manager, Independent Franchise Partners

The Process

Effective partnership through collaboration

Franchise Partners needed to weigh up its options – an upgrade with the existing supplier, a move to another well-known CRM platform, or a deployment making the best use of Dynamics 365 functionality configured by a partner that understood the Firm’s requirements.

A flexible approach and support for the Firm’s assessment were among the reasons the Xpedition team was selected. The initial scoping phase was low risk and established that Xpedition would be the right partner. The thoroughness of this phase helped to create a comprehensive project scope and answer key business case questions.

During the definition phase, Xpedition created a plan to cover all the existing and new functionality within a tightly defined scope and price. In deployment, data migration was particularly challenging due to dependencies on the incumbent supplier and underutilisation having led to quite a data degradation over time.

A number of data extraction and user testing phases had been planned to address this. There was no impact on budget or timescales despite the data challenges being much more complex than first identified. The solution included ClickDimensions digital marketing, to segment, manage and communicate to investors with important quarterly investment updates.