OREANDA-NEWS. March 20, 2012. Fujitsu has migrated Leaders’ Quest to a Salesforce CRM solution, enabling the international leadership experience organiser to move to a globally accessible Cloud-based customer management system.

Leaders’ Quest is a social enterprise committed to improving the quality of leadership in the world. It takes senior leaders from all sectors on ‘Quests’ to countries such as India, China, Brazil, Turkey, the UK, USA and parts of Africa for a wide range of experiential visits to companies, institutions and local communities – from mining corporations, factories and universities, to slum and rural communities. Typically, for a week, participants engage with people from all walks of life to explore opportunities, challenges and purpose for themselves and their organisations.

The company previously used a fragmented set of offline and online tools to manage these Quests, organise flights, excursions and hospitality. Customer data was stored in servers based within the company’s UK office and accessed by a limited number of trained Leaders’ Quest staff in India, China and the US. Slow uplink speeds, combined with inefficient web access, resulted in staff looking to third party applications such as Dropbox or simply email to share information. Important data was spread out and became unobtainable from any central point - either being stored in inboxes or in folders on desktops.

Leaders’ Quest identified a need to converge functionality of such applications into a single, company-wide standard. The company’s JustGiving department had already implemented Salesforce CRM with good results, so Leaders’ Quest chose to migrate its other departments with the help of the Salesforce.com Foundation and Fujitsu.

The Salesforce.com Foundation supported Leader’s Quest through salesforce.com’s 1/1/1 integrated corporate philanthropy model where 1% of the company’s time, 1% of its equity and 1% of its products are given forward to the community.

Fujitsu was engaged to implement the Salesforce CRM solution and designed a tailored portal that, rather than entirely changing Leaders Quest’s processes, built on them to make them more efficient.

Diane Richards, Quest programmes manager at Leaders' Quest, said: “We were recommended Fujitsu as we were on a budget, and needed to work with a company whose expertise would allow us to quickly build a bespoke, effective CRM system. Fujitsu got it from day one; their representatives instantly understood what we needed and helped us craft the solution we required. The company has been invaluable, not only during the planning and roll-out stages but in aftercare service too.”

Previously, all new registrants had to fax or email an application form to join a Quest, but with Salesforce CRM customers are able to complete registration forms online, freeing up staff time. Leaders' Quest is now looking to implement a full self-service portal, enabling customers to check course information and flight details directly from the website.

Richards continued: “The real game-changer for us has been Salesforce’s collaboration tools; rather than sending emails with attachments back and forth, we can discuss and amend documents in real-time in the Cloud.”

Mark Peplow, senior consultant at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, said: “The Salesforce.com Foundation is ideal for not-for-profit organisations that want to work more effectively with their customers without spending a large amount of money on a new CRM system. In Leaders’ Quest’s case, the inclusion of a customer self-registration system and, soon, a more advanced self-service portal, has really cut down man hours required to input information into the database – while moving to a Cloud solution has also saved money on internal server maintenance costs. For many organisations, a move to the Cloud makes any server very much a legacy item.”

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