Property investors become customer-centric with Power Apps data integration

The challenge

Disparate customer data was hampering growth

Managing £5 billion worth of property assets requires fast and flawless coordination between sales, service, and back-office staff. And to make that happen you need complete, accurate, and easily accessible customer data.

For our client, this data included customer requirements documents, tenancy calendars, meeting calendars, and customer notes. However, the customer’s existing system required staff to search manually through multiple documents to find the data they needed. This disparate data was causing inefficiencies across the company’s sales, marketing, and finance teams.

In brief, the drawbacks of this unintegrated data were:

• no customer-centric view of customer data
• slow processes affecting customer satisfaction
• higher operating costs due to manual tasks

And there was another barrier: the customer data was in SharePoint 2013, which had reached the end of Microsoft support. Besides the cost of Microsoft extended support, the company also had to plan for SharePoint 2013 end of life in 2023. Another negative was the high cost of maintaining the on-premises SharePoint server.

For these reasons, it was clear that the company needed to migrate its customer data to an integrated modern platform.

The solution

SharePoint Power Apps data integration

Aware of our reputation as SharePoint experts, the client approached Influential to design a data integration and migration solution.

Our proposal was twofold:

1. to migrate data to SharePoint online, in the cloud — avoiding the need for upgrades or on-premises maintenance
2. to create a single page for each customer, displaying all data in an intuitive format, through Power Apps data integration

With the low-code Power Apps designer, this technology also meant we could develop the client’s integrations quickly and at low cost.

For the first part, we followed a three-phase process of discovery and design, CRM build, and data migration. This process worked as follows:

• Discovery and design: our SharePoint consultant worked to understand the client’s customer and inventory data model, and how we could transform it into a customer-centric UI
• Minimal viable product (MVP) build: we built a new CRM in SharePoint 365, where the client could test the functionality and prove its effectiveness
• Data migration: we tested and automated the data mappings and transformations to load the SharePoint 2013 data into the new model

At the same time, our digital integration experts were working on the SharePoint Power Apps data integration. The result was six Power Apps, one for each type of customer data. These six Power Apps were present on each customer page in the client’s SharePoint 365 system.

By designing the customer pages to act like a filter on the Power Apps, we made each app only show data relevant to that customer. In this way, the client’s staff could see all data for a particular customer on one page. And they could also interact with that data through the Power Apps. This meant that there was a single, always updated source of record for each customer.

The benefits

Building a customer-centric business in the cloud