Marlow White Uniforms – Organized Duplicate Customer records through Advance Customer Merge

Analysis

As business grew, it has become increasingly difficult for Marlow White Customer Service representatives to identify customers by location. In an industry-specific challenge, multiple customers reside at a single address – a military base. Sometimes employees found it necessary to sift through large numbers of records to locate a specific customer account.

This greatly frustrated customers placing orders by phone: “Why can’t you find me? I just gave you my credit card last week for an order.” Customer Service reps resorted to creating duplicate accounts because it was quicker and easier than finding the existing account. This ultimately resulted in more than 50,000 duplicate accounts in a database of 500,000 customers.

Dan Greer, Marlow White’s Chief Information Officer/Controller, reached out to Jeff Rivera, Alba Spectrum’s QA and Support Manager. “We have worked with Alba Spectrum for about ten years and have done several customizations with them”.

Companies with large numbers of customers often struggle with duplicated customer master records. If a company’s website transfers customer-created accounts to Dynamics GP, the result can be hundreds or thousands of duplicate Customer master records with fragmented transaction histories. After completing a requirements analysis with Dan, Jeff suggested Dan try the Alba360 Advanced Customer Merge software module, which had been developed for clients experiencing this problem.

Solution:

Alba Spectrum’s Advanced Customer Merge identifies, reviews and merges duplicate customer records and their associated sales transactions, allowing greater visibility into true customer sales history, contacts and notes, with more efficient customer service.

Advanced Customer Merge provides four functions not found in existing Dynamics GP customer merge tools:

• Customer Service reps can apply multiple filters to identify potentially duplicated customers and specify which record will serve as the primary customer account by creating ‘merge groups’.
• These merge groups are submitted to a supervisor for review and permanent merging.
• Merge groups can be processed on demand or placed in a batch list for processing in off-hours.
• If a sales order has been linked to the wrong customer (i.e., merge not required), a built-in Reallocation tool relinks the Order to the correct Customer.

Outcome

The Advanced Customer Merge system has enabled the Marlow White team to rapidly reduce the number of duplicate Customers, which has dramatically reduced the time needed to select and verify customer records. Customer Service no longer wades through the entire customer list every time a customer calls. And because the database size has shrunk substantially, Marlow White no longer stores information.

“For anyone who has a lot of customer records, it is helpful to not have to search through 200+ customers with the same name. This module from Alba Spectrum speeds up this process immensely,” said Greer.

If you are interested in learning more about Alba360 Advanced Customer Merge, or how Alba Spectrum can optimize the value of Microsoft Dynamics GP ERP systems, contact Luanne McPherson at lmcpherson@albaspectrum.com or 773-219-2377.

About Marlow White:

Marlow White is the Choice of the Professional Soldier since 1879, offering quality Army, Navy, and First Responder dress uniforms in a variety of fabrics and styles. From their first customers, soldiers of coastal artillery units stationed near Fort Pickens and sailors assigned to the naval aviation school in Pensacola, Florida, to the present day, Marlow White has been dedicated to helping our nation's best look their best by providing our military and first responders with the highest quality uniforms, the most exceptional tailoring and the outstanding service that they deserve.

About Alba Spectrum:

Alba Spectrum, a Silver Certified Microsoft Dynamics Partner, tailors Microsoft Dynamics GP to the needs of evolving organizations, with a range of products and industry leading customization services. Alba Spectrum has helped mid-range companies improve operational performance by streamlining everyday processes and optimizing functionality since 2004, working in partnership with GP reselling organizations.