Network of Independent Truck Stops and Service Centers
Executive Summary
ABC is a big distributed network of all over nationwide of independent truck stops, fuel stops and service centers in USA. ABC also provided membership to others to work with them in the sale, marketing, purchasing and operated truck stops and service centers nationwide.
ABC has a large number of recognized public-facing program. It offers free of charge services to all professional drivers. The program allows drivers to earn points with each fuel purchase. Points are awarded by swiping a reward card when purchasing fuel from an ABC member location nationwide. One point is awarded for each gallon purchased. Free showers are also earned with a minimum 75-gallon diesel fuel purchase. Points can be used to purchase merchandise at member locations.
Problems faced by ABC Company
They already have a member portal which caters to the needs of the members who log in to it and do the needful. The current member portal allows for members to change their retail fuel price and to download certain ABC forms and it was fairly limited in its functionality providing to its members. ABC also used much different standalone software to fulfill their current work requirement but as they were not centralized it was a big problem to generate reports for higher management and fulfill member's expectations through the portal.
ABC face a lot problem to get the information updated from the member as from portal there was no such option to do so. Members desired to have access to a self-serve portal that allows them to gain more insight into their business and to provide an easier way to interface with the ABC processes. So, it was almost a manual process that took a lot of time.
There was no way to easily add a user, change passwords or remove a user from within the CRM system for the portal. Also, to implement security roles for members to limit what each role can see or do in the portal.
Currently, there was no way for members to sign up for the purchasing program by completing a form on the portal and submitting it. This process required to go through the manual process. Plus, the portal member wanted to have Report Card information available to then in the portal it’s like part of the Value Analysis report. ABC also wanted its members to submit their case request via the portal only. So other systems used for It can be avoided. In MS CRM part ABC wanted to integrate MS CRM with Power BI reporting so their higher manager can have a 360-degree view of different drill-down reports on business.
As the Members were able to change their retail price and fuel components. So, ABC wanted to get them to approve before they become effective but with the current portal, this feature was not present. Also, a real-time graphical map is desired to show in the portal for members.
In the portal, there was no required value analysis dashboard available for members and also no dedicated reporting section for members to see their monthly billing statements with drill down into the details of the components of the billing report.
Solutions ABC organization wanted
ABC organization wanted some solution by which they can cater to the requirement for their portal members so the above-stated problems can be addressed with a proper and feasible solution. The areas ABC was looking to improve were in the member portal, MS CRM customization, completely restructure reporting section and create required dashboard within MS CRM to give business insights.
Our Solution
Here XRM Labs suggested ABC to enhance its member portal by adding new features, functionality and enhancing the portal functionality through power apps by enabling the poral to send custom requests to CRM via multiple Power Automate flows (previously called MS Flows) which are crucial part of Power Apps. And for powerful reporting, we suggest using MS product Power BI within MS CRM.
By using power apps, it made possible to automate all below requirement stated which could not be completed only using out of the box functionality. Portal member can now connect their accounts, take advantage of pre-built templates created by us, and request reports on their emails based on a custom criteria that they can choose on the portal UI, the portal sends a custom XHR (XmlHttpRequest) to the Power Automate flow which connects to CRM and creates the request in the CRM for report generation.
PowerApps helped us a lot to connects to the cloud services and data sources we were already using, giving us the ability to quickly build apps that suit our client specific needs—without writing code or struggling with integration issues.
Usually users have different set of roles and responsibilities in any organization. To achieve the following requirement below we break the below requirement into multiple model driven apps based on the roles of the actual users in the CRM.
Following features were implemented to overcome their issues:
1. The member portal was updated to provide more value to its members. Members were provided with their desired access to a self-serve portal that allows them to gain more insight into their business and to provide an easier way to interface with the ABC processes.
2. Implemented the ability to easily add a user, change passwords or remove a user from within the CRM system.
3. Implemented security roles for members to limit what each role can see or do in the portal.
4. Added feature for a member to sign up for the purchasing program by completing a form on the portal and submitting it.
5. If no course is found after searching with last name, then system displays following message to the course member:“Please speak to the reception” with a “Ok” to be clicked by student.
6. Enabled the member report card information within the Member Portal as a part of the Value Analysis report.
7. Allowed members to submit their case request via the portal to ABC. This feature helped a lot to members to log their complaints/requests with ABC directly and keep track of those complaints/requests.
8. Integrated MS CRM with Power BI reporting and created the desired dashboard and reports for ABC business. Various Power BI reports and dashboards were exposed on the portal and were applied with account hierarchy.
9. Implemented the approval feature for ABC employees if fuel components are changed by the member from their portal, the changes should route to ABC for inspection before they become effective.
10. Gave the ability to the portal member to see their monthly billing statements with drill-down details of the components of the billing report.
11. A value analysis dashboard was created for portal members.
12. Maintained the directory with live CRM data. Now, the report can be generated to distribute and can be automatically viewed in the member portal.
13. Scheduled weekly emails to members of the portal.
Technologies Used
• MS CRM
• Power Apps
• Web Services
• HTML, CSS
• Power BI
• Dynamics365 Portal
Client Benefits-their improved statistics (Facts and Figures)
• Members of the portal experienced a lot of satisfaction as all their requirement was been catered.
• Increased the revenue of ABC thought the member portal.
• The new member portal is much more user-friendly and reduced the time taken off the tasks drastically.
• Better customer satisfaction.
• Reduced portal member process time by 80%
• ABC employee workload was reduced due to the automation of the Member portal.
• Through Power BI reporting tool, drilled down dashboards and reports were implemented which helped a lot of high-level managers to get better insights into the business.