About TaylorMade
In 1979, a former golf salesman, Gary Adams, took a loan on his home to start what has now become an industry leader for innovation in creating and selling quality golf clubs – the TaylorMade Golf Company.
Adams started the company with only three employees, a rented building, and one innovative product: a 12-degree driver cast of stainless steel. His idea was to give the true golfers the ideal, authentic golf club that performed better than the traditional wood club. By combining innovation with passion and authenticity, TaylorMade created the perfect product for passionate golf players.
At TaylorMade, the goal has always been to work hard and grow as a company that is continuously “exploring new frontiers, pushing the limits of product manufacturing, and constantly pursuing the next great breakthrough in golf.”
TaylorMade builds itself upon four values: competitiveness, passion, innovation, and authenticity.
About AlphaBOLD?
We are passionate about using technology to solve complex business problems. We created AlphaBOLD because we felt the need to redefine success in consulting. Now we are doing it one project at a time. We are not just building a successful business; we are building a community, a BOLDCommunity, that shares our passion for technology. At AlphaBOLD, we don’t settle for the ordinary, we strive for excellence, and we do it together with our partners, customers, and vendors.
OUR VALUES
- Accountability
- Drive
- Giveback
- Trust
Challenges Faced by TaylorMade
TaylorMade has grown to explore many different products over the years. They now sell a
range of items, including drivers, golf balls, apparel, and of course, their
custom golf clubs. TaylorMade has also successfully made an international
presence for itself, with its products being shipped worldwide.
Different Regional Approaches
With this massive growth came a few challenges for the company. For example, being a global organization, TaylorMade had to take on different regional approaches for its customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Some regions utilize the CRM, while others use customized tools that have nothing to do with CRM. TaylorMade needed to consolidate these disparate processes into a single, unified solution that ensures accuracy and efficiency.
Lack of Visibility
Another big challenge for the company was visibility – TaylorMade had many different data sources such as ERP, B2B, and B2C e-commerce sites, and other pieces of functionality related to their website. Collating all this data into one data house was not only proving cumbersome but resulted in disparate data siloes.
Customer Feedback
TaylorMade has had a lot of interaction with their customers via the telephone. However, TaylorMade did not have substantial means to track customer feedback via phone calls over time. For example, they did not have a proper approach to monitoring customer pain points or customer ratings of representatives. Moreover, TaylorMade tended to get a large volume of phone calls and thus was looking for a solution to streamline customer service efforts. TaylorMade Golf was a multinational company with a global clientele; they needed a solution to streamline their online queries, contacts, and communication.
Tracking KPIs
TaylorMade also lacked visibility when it came to key performance indicators (KPIs). They needed to find a way to measure company representatives’ response rate to cases, the volume of complaints, product reviews, product orders, complaint lifecycles, warranty cases, etc.
Convoluted Order Management
The sales support and customer service staff had to go into their ERP to manage records, which had proven to be time-consuming and inefficient as they could not do this over the web using their web browser. There was no efficient way to track order lifecycles or process credit holds. The overall order management needed improvement.
Therefore, TaylorMade was looking for a solution provider to help them achieve their overall competitiveness, passion, innovation, and authenticity by restructuring and simplifying their internal processes.
Overcoming Process Inefficiencies – Enter AlphaBOLD!
AlphaBOLD and TaylorMade worked together to address these challenges and achieve the company’s end-goal optimization.
Therefore, DC Dental was looking for a solution provider to help them simplify their internal processes by introducing new technological advancements that would help them gain more visibility into their warehouse management processes.
Uniting Regional Approaches
AlphaBOLD has partnered with TaylorMade to overcome the problems the company had with its different data approaches across regions. AlphaBOLD did this by rebuilding the external tools they used in CRM to process data. This has allowed TaylorMade to unite their regional approaches and to access their data more efficiently.
Integrating Data Sources
AlphaBOLD has worked a great deal to help TaylorMade overcome its problem of siloed data and lack of visibility regarding customer service, order management, and overall data management.
For example, to aggregate data coming in from their ERP and e-commerce sites, AlphaBOLD pulled data out of their data warehouse, transformed and mapped it to entities in CRM. This has allowed TaylorMade to integrate their data sources and gain additional visibility on their orders.
Streamlining Customer Service
Similarly, AlphaBOLD assisted TaylorMade in managing their high-volume phone calls by transitioning from a third-party tool to Microsoft’s Unified Service Desk. Furthermore, AlphaBOLD has provided TaylorMade with more visibility in tracking and monitoring how their customer service is doing.
AlphaBOLD partnered with TaylorMade to establish a solution that would enable the customer service team to solicit continuous customer feedback. The solution allowed them to evaluate which of their representatives were preferred by clients and assess overall customer pain points and reviews. This was primarily done by utilizing automated Forms Pro surveys sent out on phone calls and specific case resolutions. Once the customer provided their feedback, all the information was uploaded on custom dashboards. The TaylorMade customer services team can access those dashboards to track all customer feedback.
Improving Visibility
In terms of visibility, AlphaBOLD also worked with TaylorMade to ensure that they had more access and control over their KPIs. This included finding ways to monitor response rates to cases, track the volume and lifecycle of complaints, manage product reviews and orders, etc.
What made it truly challenging for AlphaBOLD was the fact that TaylorMade’s management of cases was complex. Every time some correspondence was sent from CRM regarding the case, the case would be closed. This meant that each case was opened and closed multiple times in the TaylorMade database throughout its lifecycle. However, with a lot of hard work and innovative thinking, our BOLDEnthusiasts utilized SLA’s to meet all of TaylorMade’s needs and provided them with visibility in their customer service endeavors.
Managing Orders Efficiently
The most impactful solution that we built for TaylorMade, however, is the order book management solution. TaylorMade has been utilizing CRM primarily for order visibility from their current ERP. AlphaBOLD’s experts have worked with TaylorMade to significantly improve the data structure and the speed and actionability of the orders coming in.
AlphaBOLD also helped restructure the way the sales support and customer service staff managed orders. Now they can action orders directly from CRM. This gives them more flexibility and saves up their time and effort. The team can also process credit holds through CRM and manage warranty cases electronically.
TaylorMade is continually adding new lines to their existing orders, and with their disparate data sources, it becomes hard to know the order status in terms of the overall lifecycle. AlphaBOLD has worked with its internal team to connect order status information to an API. The data can then be pulled directly into CRM in a visual format that shows a lot of detail in a user-friendly way. Furthermore, with AlphaBOLD’s expert help, TaylorMade efficiently captured visits for the sales representatives and document, email, and report their sales documents and reports easily, which greatly impacted their overall sales.
Additionally, TaylorMade also struggled due to slow data updates. If a field were changed in their ERP, it would take a lot of time to show up on CRM. TaylorMade is a company that is moving quickly, and such inefficiencies could have a toll on their end goals. TaylorMade was able to create a ‘real-time API’ that AlphaBOLD integrated into CRM. This allows users to perform on-demand data loads with this integration to speed up the process.
Hence, TaylorMade can easily manage order hiccups and address other related issues by this dramatic increase in visibility inside their order management and customer services.
"We decided to implement Dynamics 365 because we needed a platform to better service our customers and run our business more efficiently. With the help and hard work of AlphaBOLD, we have become empowered to better manage our data, from order management and delivery tracking to customer service workflows and performance metrics. Five of our largest business units around the world have seen major success from their work."
Read Microsoft customer success story here.
What’s next?
AlphaBOLD and TaylorMade have come a long way, but the journey is not over yet. Conforming to their innovation value, TaylorMade hopes to modernize its processes even further with AlphaBOLD’s help.
From Real-time to Asynchronous
They hope to encourage their customers to use less real-time communication methods and switch to an asynchronous communication approach. This will allow TaylorMade to keep track of all conversations easily and further enhance their customer support. They hope that these alternative forms of communication will enable customers to find the information they need instantly. FedEx and DHL Integration
AlphaBOLD and TaylorMade are hoping to further simplify internal processes by allowing users to directly create shipping labels from Dynamics. This will be achieved by integrating FedEx and DHL.
Dynamics 365 Portal for Customer Self-Service
AlphaBOLD is working on a portal for TaylorMade that will significantly improve customer service and focus on FAQs put forward by the client. It will also give users quick access to knowledge articles and cases.
"We needed tools that work fast and give us visibility into our internal processes, and needed our team to be able to access, manage, and review data easily. We also wanted to improve our order management and customer support, and that is exactly the reality we are living thanks to AlphaBOLD."