Lexmark makes lasting impressions with Dynamics 365

Lexmark is a global leader in innovative, cloud-enabled printing, imaging, and IoT products, software, solutions and services. With proven technologies and deep industry expertise, Lexmark has accelerated business transformation for customers worldwide, in sectors as diverse as manufacturing, retail, financial services, healthcare, education, and government. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports Lexmark in achieving its vision: To help customers make a lasting impression on their world.

Outstanding quality breeds frustrating complexity

Lexmark was founded in 1991 as a spinout of IBM. Today, the company, headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky, has more than 8,000 employees around the world, 2,000 of them in the US. Each one places a premium on deep connections forged with customers and reinforced by Lexmark’s culture of inquiry, collaboration, and responsiveness. Exceptional customer engagement is the reason that customer loyalty rates exceed 95% across the company’s worldwide managed services.

But the same unyielding commitment to quality that makes Lexmark outstanding in its field led to frustration with internal processes that were sometimes complex and not as efficient as they could be. Because Lexmark places such importance on meeting customers where they are, the company often tailors solutions to unique needs. The resulting complexity in its product offerings was reflected in its customer relationship management (CRM) and data solutions. Lexmark’s legacy service operations solutions used different data models, making it difficult to link information from its CRM tool with aftermarket service and support data. The lack of complete integration between platforms meant tracking customer journeys was inefficient. Customer expectations around speed and ease were changing too, spurring Lexmark to look for a solution that could provide standardization, automation, and flexibility to support customers in real time.

Lexmark set out on a sweeping digital transformation. Supplementing IoT solutions powered by Microsoft Azure, the company replaced its legacy Salesforce and Siebel solutions with cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Field Service. “Lexmark is a very diversified company when it comes to our productivity suite, cloud, and CRM systems,” explains Tim Yorkey, Lexmark’s Senior Director of IT Business/Partner/Customer Enablement. “So, we made a conscious decision to become a full-fledged Microsoft shop.”

With Lexmark’s migration to Dynamics 365, the company now has a unified, omnichannel platform that centered the customer experience, standardized service delivery systems, offered user-friendly interfaces, streamlined sales and account management and reporting, and increased efficiency.

Unified intelligent systems improve customer satisfaction

Transforming Lexmark’s service operations architecture was a vital and delicate undertaking. The existing systems and processes were critical to the business, supporting billions in revenue from customers worldwide. The Salesforce and Siebel solutions were highly customized, and they contained hundreds of thousands of datapoints that had to be harmonized, organized, and normalized as part of the migration.

With no playbook to follow, an executive steering committee focused on understanding the issues and removing barriers, empowering the implementation team to act swiftly as challenges arose. Remarkably, the company implemented the new solution—providing a true 360-degree view of customers and real-time data analysis for immediate decision-making, transparency, and long-term success for customers, partners, and Lexmark—without any customer disruption during the transition. In fact, there was a measurable improvement in customer satisfaction right from the start.

One reason for improved customer satisfaction was the move from the company’s old configure, price, quote (CPQ) tool. Now, Experlogix CPQ seamlessly integrates pricing data with Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling faster configurations, eliminating replication of quotes, and delivering streamlined reporting. Sales teams have full visibility of the customer journey, from lead through deployment. Sales cycles are compressed while revenue is accelerated, and improved order accuracy has reduced quote revisions by 43%.

Better forecasting has also been a big win for the company and its customers. The old process was time-consuming and required manual effort. Today, Dynamics 365 supports worldwide forecasting by putting much more accurate, real-time data into the hands of the experts—account managers. “When a sales representative updates their quote, they receive their forecast data immediately and can communicate it to their geography’s demand planning team, which finalizes the monthly forecast,” says Dawn Smith, Front Office Sales System Manager, Lexmark. With improved visibility of product availability, Lexmark meets customer needs with greater speed and precision.

It isn’t only customers who have benefited. Lexmark is better able to serve its partners, too. An integration between SAP S4/Hana and Dynamics 365 streamlines operations, ensuring that inventory levels are more accurately maintained. For example, if partners manage their own stock and use parts from their inventory for repairs, a replenishment order is generated automatically when the work order is completed.

Less stress leads to better service

With sales efficiency improving, Lexmark set its sights on service. Everything from opening a customer case, issuing a work order, and dispatching technicians to managing warranties and ordering parts is managed in Dynamics 365, uniting sales, marketing, break-fix service, and field service in the same system.

When it comes to customer service, first impressions are everything, and call center interactions often set the tone for a customer’s relationship with a company. Speeding up access to information with Dynamics 365 Customer Service reduced call times by an average of three minutes, for a 23% increase in call center productivity. The user-friendly interface allows agents to more quickly and easily route customers to the right department. With access to data beyond their day-to-day workload, including a knowledgebase and proven solutions, customer service representatives spend less time on calls and can support a wider range of issues. At Lexmark, hundreds of customer service agents field calls. That means the company is realizing time savings of around $1 million annually.

Lexmark has also expanded the ways in which customers can seek support. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service Workspace, Lexmark customers can engage in the communication channels they prefer, including chat and email all while reducing the applications agents must work in from three to one. Lexmark embeds Customer Service Workspace in each interaction to provide more support tools for agents, satisfaction surveys for customers, and actionable data from automatic case summarization to continuously ensure exceptional customer service.

Better service is faster, more efficient service

With Lexmark’s legacy system, the path to service delivery was sometimes bumpy. In-house technical support teams had to work through multiple systems with complex user interfaces, making response times slower than they could be and making it harder to train new agents.

In Dynamics 365 Field Service, agents and managers can view every piece of data that’s associated with delivering service, in real time, for customers at any scale, in any industry, by location, to provide service more effectively and efficiently. Dashboards and reports provide an at-a-glance view of customers’ devices and their environments and a complete accounting of a work order’s status, from the initial support call to dispatch and completion. Chris Sparrow, Senior Manager, Global Customer Support for Lexmark, says, “We have an extremely precise view. We can go granular and slice and dice the information to obtain a true evaluation of our performance with customers from all angles.”

Dynamics 365 improves Lexmark’s first-line workers’ experience with actionable insights that benefit customers and help scale operations for future growth. For instance, route planning—a critical component of service response—is automated and based on dynamic logic that considers the urgency of the issue, how long ago the service call was received, travel time and distance, the time of day and the day of the week, and customer-specific service-level agreements. The system also assesses whether it’s more efficient to dispatch a Lexmark technician or hand the call off to a third-party provider. Optimized schedules dramatically reduce transportation time.

In the field, technicians use the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app to view and process work orders and get insight into the support timeline. Technicians can update status, access service materials, receive parts recommendations, and close out the work order, all in the app. Thanks to automatic route planning and quick access to customer information on their mobile devices, field technicians are reporting a 20% improvement in productivity.

A better view of service improves sales

The legacy solution didn’t give Lexmark’s sales teams a full view of their accounts’ service actions. To get that information, they had to spend significant time consulting team members and aggregating data manually. Now, Dynamics 365 provides sales and service teams with complete visibility in real time into their accounts’ service engagement and activity, through Lexmark’s Customer Governance Portfolio (CGP) allowing for proactive and efficient management of time sensitive services like warranty extensions or product refreshes.

The CGP is an interactive, personalized analytics experience that synthesizes data from different systems and applications in robust Power BI reports that empower sales and service teams and customers. Customers have on-demand access to interactive, near-real-time reports. And users can make decisions based on real-time information, which strengthens customers’ trust in the solutions they propose.

All in on Dynamics 365

When the transition from Salesforce and Siebel is complete, sometime in 2026, Lexmark will have a comprehensive business operation fully managed in Dynamics 365. The work still to be done includes supplies fulfillment, billing methodologies, and asset management.

“There is magic in a single source of truth with standardized data. Data analytics, coupled with operational excellence, provides the level of service that only Lexmark can offer to customers, allowing real-time access to actionable data and insights to increase revenue generation and customer satisfaction,” said Billy G. Spears, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Delivery Officer for Lexmark.

The secret to success isn’t a secret

Strong executive sponsorship, close collaboration between business and IT teams, and a focus on training made this initiative a success. With the ease of use of Dynamics 365, virtual support (that historically required significant spend on global travel for onsite go-live support), and around-the-clock user support through Teams chat, calls, and meetings, Lexmark’s global employees, technical support centers, solution support centers, and third-party service provider partners were able to service customers without any disruption during the cutover.

The project offered a significant return for Lexmark, which has seen a 50% productivity improvement in support processes and a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction scores since the transition.

The effort has been so successful, in fact, that the company grew its internal development capabilities and became its own Dynamics 365 subject matter expert. It’s now helping other manufacturers of connected devices with their digital transformations.

Lexmark isn’t slowing down. The company plans to roll out several other Microsoft solutions to help grow and support its business. By using Dynamics 365 to optimize its customer service and sales processes, Lexmark is making a mark in the digital transformation space.