OREANDA-NEWS. August 03, 2011. Fujitsu has migrated the National Skills Academy (NSA) for Sport and Active Leisure to Salesforce CRM, moving the NSA from a disjointed set of customer systems to a single Cloud-based solution able to meet the NSA’s developing business needs, reported the press-centre of Fujitsu.

The NSA is made up of a number of organisations and sub-sectors, offering a wide variety of approved sports and active leisure training programmes and certifications to businesses and the public. Each sector previously employed its own method of managing customer databases, varying in complexity from simple spreadsheets to online CRM systems.

Due to this fragmented nature, however, customer data was duplicated from one system to the next with no ability to cross reference notes or records of contact with customers between databases. This led to mistakes in over-communication with customers, detracting from the overall customer experience.

The NSA identified a need to amalgamate its customer databases into one central location, enabling all staff to access and update a single instance of clean information. It selected Salesforce CRM due to its flexibility and integration with Microsoft Outlook. Salesforce.com recommended Fujitsu as a system integrator due to its excellent track record in swift and successful migrations, enabling companies to move their entire infrastructure to the cloud without ceasing operation in the process.

Julia Whitehead, business development manager at the National Skills Academy for Sport and Active Leisure said: “Salesforce.com recommended Fujitsu as an integrator; we assessed the benefits and concluded that using Fujitsu would enable the transition to occur over a few days – whereas managing the deployment internally would have taken weeks.”

Fujitsu also integrated a number of reporting tools and dashboards, enabling an at-a-glance view of metrics on customer data, campaigns, email broadcasts and users.

Whitehead continues: “Fujitsu’s consultants were highly knowledgeable and refreshingly amenable; most impressive was how quickly they understood our business and shaped Salesforce CRM into something that met our needs perfectly. This solution hasn’t just helped us streamline our customer relationship processes; we can now perform tasks that simply weren’t possible using our old system. Event invites would previously be sent as spreadsheet attachments – Salesforce enables us to send interactive traceable emails and export information directly to the finance department’s systems.”

Mark Peplow, senior consultant at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, said: “Salesforce CRM is a hugely flexible solution - it needs to be sculpted into something bespoke to meet each company’s requirements. Fujitsu investigated the National Skills Academy’s current CRM system in order to fully understand the current functionality in relation to present day requirements. Salesforce was deployed and an agile approach was taken to build the configuration.”

Fujitsu offers a range of services for business-critical applications including CRM. Fujitsu also offers information management and application outsourcing services and works with leading providers such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.