Not too long ago I visited a high value/high touch B2B call center in the automotive industry. Over the past year they've made monumental investments in consolidating all of their old records and data into the same system with their current data and making it accessible by any of their geographically separated divisions. Here are two of the biggest hurdles they faced:
- Getting old records out of their legacy systems
- Changing their workflow to the new system
You can guess by the title of this post that the system they chose was salesforce.com, which won on feature coverage and deployability. That's when the hard work started. They have been fanatical at moving data out of more than a dozen disparate systems. At the same time, they've enforced policy that got agents and other employees out of their old familiar systems, so that new records are natively created in salesforce.com.
Indeed that's a lot of work, but one that is definitely paying off. Agents used to toggle between seven or more applications to resolve every phone call. Now they are down to three, and many of the calls are handled using only salesforce.com. Handle times are way down, customer satisfaction is up and agent satisfaction with the system is positive for the first time in anyone's recollection.
From my own observations, they owe the success of this implementation to a handful of factors:
- Flexibility and deployability of the platform
- Unwavering commitment to assembling and aggregating records and data
- Willingness to modify existing workflow to the new system
- Top-down support from executive team
With the success of this customer, I expect to see more examples like this in the coming months. If you've had success with an integration of your own, please add your comment below.
