How to Succeed with Salesforce

The Brief

A modular manufacturing company was missing a big opportunity to provide their customers with an optimal user experience. The company had invested in over 2,300 Salesforce Community Cloud licenses to support their front line field representatives, but these employees never logged into the system. Specializing in custom office space solutions, they had originally intended to use Salesforce as a software solution for implementing sales deals, launching marketing campaigns, and managing customer service. The problem was that the majority of the field reps continued to record their activities on paper rather than utilize digital means. Not only were they overspending on unused Salesforce licenses, but customer service issues kept arising from the long paper trail.

The Challenge

The business primarily wanted to curb the expenses for under-utilized licenses. They also lacked a streamlined approach for order tracking to keep the front line updated about shipments. By not using Salesforce properly, reps were losing vital information and inaccurately recording the sales history of customers.

They reached out to Apexon to have their current license assignments reconfigured for different users, and to implement a better system for tracking customer feedback, signatures, orders, and deliveries.

The Solution

Apexon’s proposed solution was to build a customer community portal for external users. This custom portal eliminated the paper trail and changed the process of creating, tracking, and updating service appointments into a digitized approach.

The Results

Through this effort, the company was able to convert external user licenses to customer community licenses, which skyrocketed their monthly cost savings.

The customer community portal is an easy to use application, similar to popular tracking portals like FedEx or UPS. Once signed in a user can look up personal account information, track service orders, and book appointments.

What sets this portal apart is the sense that users form a “virtual community”- complete with automated chat bots, support services, and personalized customer care. Customers can post their order queries and are immediately assisted on the fly, instead of having to wait for help like before. A knowledge base was also created to disseminate articles on how to deactivate accounts, track shipments, and troubleshoot common problems. Customers are able to share information and vote for best answers to foster community building over like-minded subject areas.