Story,industry_type,customer_name
"A stand mixer. A quilted comforter. A chair. These may seem like everyday household items, but to some, they’re treasures to carry from one stage of life to the next. As a teen goes to college or a new couple furnishes their first home, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., is there to meet them with high-quality products that serve their unique needs.
That’s the legacy Chuck Williams built when he opened the company’s first store in 1956. Today, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., delivers on Chuck’s vision of customer-centric business by serving up beauty and inspiration to the right people at the right time.
Each of Williams-Sonoma, Inc.’s nine brands, including Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, PBteen, West Elm, Williams Sonoma Home, Rejuvenation, Mark & Graham, and GreenRow, serves a different audience — and requires a tailored customer message. As a result, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., delivers millions of personalized emails to their loyal customers around the world on a daily basis.
With world-class, in-house technology as its foundation, the retailer turned to Salesforce Customer 360 for a platform it could trust during its busiest selling seasons, including Black Friday.
“We have always had a history of in-house innovation,” said Laura Alber, CEO. “However, bringing in Salesforce as a partner to help us augment that innovation and continually improve the connection to our customers made sense. They are not afraid to grow with us and help us scale our marketing email program, while sharing a core value of trust.”
Here’s how Williams-Sonoma, Inc., uses Salesforce to meet customers at the right moments while, building lasting relationships that create brand loyalists for generations to come.
Sameer Hassan, SVP, Technology
1. Triple consumer engagement using past purchase data to tailor emails and ads.
2. Contribute to email program growth of subscribers with intentional implementation and marketing guidance.
3. Sell to B2B customers and provide faster support with efficient sales and service.
4. Automate and centralize work, saving employees thousands of hours per year.
5. Explore the power of AI to scale business for the future.
Pottery Barn customers seek inspiration. GreenRow customers care deeply about sustainable design. With varying customer interests across brands and international sites, building email and SMS messages requires careful audience targeting and personalization.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc., houses a vast database of first-party data like online/offline transactions and browsing history, as well as third-party data. The company creates a 360-degree view of each customer, using Data Cloud to segment the data into niche audiences like college students or newlyweds. When the moment is right, Marketing Cloud then triggers email messages featuring dynamic images and content. For instance, when data shows customers may be ready to purchase a toddler bed based on their past crib purchase, tailored emails help them choose.
“Personalization is table stakes,” said Abby Teisch, SVP of Marketing. “We not only want to show you the product, we want to tell you how to use it, how to cook with it, and what it’ll look like in your home.”
Williams-Sonoma, Inc., also plans to explore Salesforce Einstein’s generative AI capabilities to deliver even more personalized communications, efficiently and at scale.
Marketing personalization, powered by AI, is inspiring customer relationships. In this e-book, you’ll discover the importance of personalization, and how you can create a strategy of your own, including how to:
Create personalized experiences across channels
Increase the ROI of every site visit
Build customer loyalty with trust

Williams-Sonoma, Inc., envisioned a marketing platform that could not only handle its massive sends, but provide more targeted and personalized customer journeys for long-term company growth. In under eight months, Salesforce Professional Services partnered with Williams-Sonoma, Inc., to implement Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud — typically a 12–18-month engagement.
The company also sought expert service to help scale its business and ensure security during peak seasons. Now, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., teams meet regularly with a technical account manager as part of the company’s Signature Success Plan. The partnership ensures maximized performance, maintains stability, and accelerates time to value. Already, the company’s successful adoption of Marketing Cloud has contributed to email program growth.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc., also serves B2B customers with furniture and home goods for places like offices, Airbnb properties, hotels, or coffee shops. Teams use Sales Cloud and Service Cloud for a more efficient end-to-end sales process from onboarding to support. Businesses can place bulk orders through a sales rep, using Salesforce for negotiations, approvals, discounts, and collaboration. From there, both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud help B2B teams analyze customer activity to create potential upsell opportunities.
Since Salesforce is integrated with the company’s order management system, sales reps receive proactive notifications when customers order products. Williams-Sonoma, Inc., also improves service efficiency with a chat integration, increasing first-contact resolution and decreasing handle times to support customers faster.
Serving millions of global customers can be challenging across brands and departments. To centralize knowledge and accelerate work, Williams-Sonoma, Inc.’s internal IT teams use Slack.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc., has completely transformed its processes without the need for heavy IT involvement. Through integrations with 27 third-party systems, the company can break down data silos, eliminate meetings, and drive productivity between teams, partners, and customers. Williams-Sonoma, Inc., also uses AI and automation to make workflows dramatically more efficient with Workflow Builder.
In fact, Williams-Sonoma, Inc.’s in-house technology teams have reduced meeting lengths and saved thousands of hours per year. That means teams can spend more time on strategic functions like product development.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc., isn’t stopping at large-scale personalization or automated selling. Following in the footsteps of its founder, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., is constantly looking for more ways to delight customers — this time with AI. Pairing its own internal innovation with Salesforce, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., plans to explore machine learning, generative AI, and automation to scale its marketing even further.
“AI helps our teams make more informed decisions,” said Alber. “It creates efficiencies within our business, and it allows us to be agile as we connect with millions of our customers around the world on a daily basis.”
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",Retail,"Williams-Sonoma, Inc."
"Sunnova connects data from internal and third-party data sources to generate quotes faster, automate business processes, and bring solar power to more homes.
What you need to know
Sunnova needed a solution to connect its dealer network with its in-house software and automate interactions with external platforms. Using MuleSoft, Sunnova built intelligent automations to personalize energy systems both on its software platform and with external applications, helping more customers generate their own renewable energy.
Why it matters
Residential solar has been steadily gaining traction over the past decade, offering numerous advantages. Not only does solar and battery storage benefit the environment and provide peace of mind during blackouts and natural disasters, but it can also offer customers more affordable power compared to traditional utility rates.
While there are approximately 100 million homeowners in the United States who have the potential to tap into the power of the sun, the current reality is that only 4 million are utilizing solar energy. Sunnova is on a mission to transform this landscape, with the goal of extending solar energy services to the remaining 96 million homeowners.
Srini Yeduru, Enterprise Architect
What the difference looks like
The cornerstone of Sunnova’s success is its ability to easily and safely share necessary data across its entire ecosystem in a way that’s consistent with its rigorous data privacy protections — across internal operations, with its dealers, and with local jurisdictions. Here’s what Sunnova’s success looks like with MuleSoft:
Generating quotes faster
Sales reps use data from homeowners and local jurisdictions to see which products a homeowner qualifies for. Then, reps can quickly generate personalized 3D models to show customers what the home will look like.
If a customer has preferences about where to place the panels, reps can make real-time updates on the model.
Sunnova streamlines the time from initial lead creation to contract signature, and can generate energy designs and contracts in less than 15 minutes.
Providing homeowners with powerful analytics
Sunnova makes it easy for customers to understand the long-term value of its products. MuleSoft helps connects homeowner data from the local utility and other sources in a single proposal, giving reps insight into how much energy a home will optimally produce over the next 25 years.
Enhancing the customer service experience with AI
Because Sunnova can easily see data from third-party systems like grid services and solar meter providers, Sunnova can easily track the performance of its hardware and then automatically create any necessary work orders in Service Cloud.
Service agents can resolve cases faster, thanks to predictive AI that recommends the right preventative maintenance for each homeowner.
Automating routine tasks to save employees time
Sunnova’s finance team uses MuleSoft RPA to automatically publish payment documents to portals, speeding up payment processing for employees — and for customers.
To receive renewable credits, Sunnova must share data with local jurisdictions. Many of those jurisdictions may have outdated technology that can make it difficult to share data easily. Now, Sunnova can integrate with any partner technology — regardless of how modern it is — thanks to MuleSoft RPA.
Powering the future with AI and automation
Sunnova plans to use AI to predict customer behavior and help balance home energy output and distribution so customers can save money.
The company will also expand how it uses RPA to automatically read and categorize hardware barcodes on installed solar panels rather than manually typing out serial numbers. With hundreds of installations daily, reducing even a few minutes on each barcode will save significant time.
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",Energy & Utilities,Sunnova
"Wonolo decreased average handle times 20% while improving agent efficiency, confidence, and consistency using AI-generated chat replies.
What you need to know
Wonolo, which stands for “Work Now Locally,” relies on positive human interactions to help workers (or “Wonolers”) thrive in jobs at customer locations. When customers need help promoting new jobs or Wonolers need assistance with paperwork, AI-generated chat dialogue helps agents increase efficiency and reduce handle times 20%. The prompts also make it easier for agents in other countries to confidently provide answers in English.
Why it matters
At Wonolo, AI enhances the human touch instead of suppressing it. Non-native English-speaking agents find generated prompts especially helpful in confirming the right replies for every situation. With added agent confidence, Wonolo can shorten training times, build a consistent brand voice, and reduce agent turnover.
Adam Ashworth, Senior Salesforce Admin
What the difference looks like
Managing transactions and job requests between Wonolo’s two audiences in a custom database was time consuming for engineers. The company needed a more efficient solution that could handle its data volume and customization needs.
Now, agents have a 360-degree view of customer data and the ability to resolve cases faster with Service Cloud.
Wonolo splits agents into two support groups based on their skillsets and the audience they serve. Omni-channel routing, queues, and case record types help agents serve both audiences more efficiently. Knowledge articles keep agents informed on topics like Wonolo’s trust and safety policies.
AI instills employee confidence
Human relationships are crucial in the job market. Wonolo sought a service platform that offered AI for greater agent efficiency, but didn’t feel robotic or unnatural. Wonolo found that Service Cloud Einstein provided the most human-like messages compared to other tools it evaluated. Plus, Einstein replies with three prompt options in two to three seconds, while other tools take five to 10 seconds for replies.
AI helps build agent confidence with situation-appropriate chat replies, especially among Wonolo’s Philippines-based teams. Despite being fluent in English, reps often felt self-conscious about their speaking skills. Now, generated text boosts agent confidence in every situation by ensuring customers receive a consistent, helpful response.
Wonolo has decreased chat handle times by 20% on initial implementation with newer agents. Among more senior agents, the tools decrease handle times 12%. Internal survey results even show new agents find the tool extremely impactful, especially at the beginning of their employment.
This also reduces the amount of time needed to train new agents, as managers don’t feel the need to oversee conversations. More confident agents also means less employee churn, which is especially helpful in a high-turnover field.
Customers now ask less to speak with a specific agent. Company leaders suspect this is due to the level of consistency Einstein Service replies provide regardless of which agent sends them.
More efficient across the business
Beyond support, other Wonolo teams use Salesforce to improve sales and operational efficiency:
With jobs across the U.S. and Canada, the sales cycle is even more complex with different job classifications and requirements for background checks. Wonolo reps previously tracked customer lead conversion in Google Sheets. Now, lead tracking in Sales Cloud allows Wonolo to nurture prospects and grow relationships throughout the customer journey.
Wonolo’s operations team uses Service Cloud to check on Wonolers and ask questions like “Did you complete your training?” or “Are you ready for your first day?” Likewise, the team uses Salesforce account tasks and activities to contact customers with reminders about new employees joining soon.
Behind the scenes
As a pilot customer of Einstein functionality, Wonolo receives regular implementation guidance from Salesforce Professional Services.
“One of the biggest advantages of Salesforce is how much the people running these programs care,” said Ashworth. “We consistently have access to everything we need, and that speaks broadly to how much more successful I truly believe Salesforce AI will be in comparison to other products.”
Going forward
Wonolo plans to test knowledge grounding, a way of arming agents with more educated responses using a collection of articles. Once AI begins pulling replies from the knowledge articles, agents will be able to provide more directives over conversational language. Instead of reading knowledge articles to form a response on their own, AI will process the content so agents can simply click to reply.
To test its effectiveness, Wonolo will provide half its agents with the knowledge base and leave half without.
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",Technology,Wonolo
"College enrollment is down 1.1% across the United States, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. At Arizona State University, it’s up. ASU’s fall 2022 enrollment was 146,804 students strong, an increase of 9.3% from 2021.
ASU isn’t immune to the pressures facing today’s colleges and universities. Costs are rising, graduation rates have stalled, and more students are asking “Is college really the best way for me to achieve my personal goals?” The university just addressed the skeptics head on, using technology.
With Salesforce, ASU is learning exactly what motivates its applicants and students, and using that data to personalize their application and student experiences. For example, an applicant interested in medicine might receive an email about a professor who won a Fulbright to study Alzheimer’s detection. An engineering student might receive an invite to a space career fair.
“From the student perspective, the admissions process can be overwhelming,” said Lisa Pershing, a member of the Admissions Services Information Team. “Our goal is to make sure we understand their needs and how we can best enhance their relationship with ASU and get them into the right interest area at a very early stage.”
Here are four ways ASU delivers results for students and administrators alike.
Frank Montoya, Senior Product Owner
1. Unify the recruitment process to gain new insights.
2. Create better connections with students from enrollment to graduation and beyond.
3. Improve the student experience and increase first-year retention by 86%.
4. Connect incoming ASU students with Devil2Devil and Slack.
ASU’s Admissions Services needed a way to unify its data, manage outreach, and boost engagement with prospective students. Sales Cloud helped admissions integrate graduate and undergraduate recruitment for its 16 colleges and schools.
ASU recruiters can now easily manage leads and nurture opportunities. With one place to view comprehensive prospect information, they can address needs on an individualized basis to deliver a seamless recruiting experience.
ASU manages more than 1.1 million leads in Salesforce. In a recent recruitment cycle, ASU had over 83,000 individual outreach recruitment calls and made more than 49,000 unique contacts.
To reach new enrollees and grow its presence in a highly competitive marketplace, ASU used Salesforce to launch online learning programs targeting undergraduates, lifelong learners, and private corporations with ASU Online and EdPlus. ASU Online has 61,572 students enrolled. These combined efforts have helped to boost enrollment 68% over 10 years.
“We use Salesforce as a rapid application development platform, and trying to tie in a CRM database, marketing efforts, and reporting on all of those efforts wouldn’t be possible with any other platform,” said Kaleb Anderson, Director, Salesforce Platform Solutions at EdPlus.
Dive into key findings from Forrester's newly commissioned report to uncover the benefits and ROI of Salesforce for Education.
Learn how to improve the student experience and drive a 15% increase in retention rate with Salesforce
Learn about the value of tool consolidation and solutions to reduce legacy software and support saving
Learn how Salesforce empowers administrative and academic teams to lift productivity by 12%

Due to siloed outreach from ASU’s colleges and schools, many constituents received inconsistent messages at different stages of their student lifecycle. ASU needed a unified platform to engage prospective students, personalize the experience to constituents, and deliver efficiencies and insights for 1,500 administrators. ASU streamlined its mass email systems from 13 to one with Marketing Cloud. Now 83% of all communication by ASU is done through the platform.
The recruitment teams can now deliver highly personalized communications to prospective students using shared prospect data. Automated and dynamic content can engage highly specific audiences with targeted messaging that speaks directly to their interests. Automated messaging and journeys with Marketing Cloud can send prospective nursing students an update on nursing field-related events on campus or easy enrollment options via email.
“Marketing Cloud allows us to work at scale, increasing the volume of communications we’re sending, but also allowing us to send highly segmented, personalized messages,” said Laura Vreeland, Associate Director, Academic Enterprise Communications.
ASU Online and EdPlus use Marketing Cloud to communicate with potential students worldwide. Salesforce’s level of speed, customization, and scalability allows EdPlus to deliver impactful targeted outreach campaigns. EdPlus can constantly test and measure performance and make adjustments based on the data it collects.
ASU Online also uses Salesforce to support student success through a unique Success Coaching program that helps online students connect to on-campus services. Salesforce allows ASU to send students to the resources they need, like financial aid services, advisors, or mental health counselors.
To centralize services from over 100 departments and business units, like IT and financial aid, ASU created Experience Center — using Service Cloud — to create, manage, and track more than 16 million cases within one platform.
Now students can ask questions 24/7, like “Why can’t I log into my student account” or “When will my next loan disbursement happen?” The staff appreciates the streamlined process, too.
With recent developments leveraging automation and predictive analytics, the Experience Center continues to add efficiencies, reduce time spent on manual tasks, and improve responsiveness to students’ needs. Staff think this connected experience can boost retention and improve the overall student experience.
“We’re in a much more innovative place than before — in a place where we can be more proactive than reactive,” said Jason Wiley, the Experience Center’s Operations Manager.
There’s a self-service option, too. “My ASU” offers access to 1,000+ knowledge bases and university services. The portal, built on Experience Cloud, allows students to search for answers, create cases, and provide direct assistance via chatbot.
The 24/7 accessible chatbot tool has hosted over 20,000 sessions and successfully handled 52% of the sessions alone. Through the chatbot tool, ASU has not only saved students time and energy, it has saved 1,700 hours of agent time.
ASU continually looks for opportunities to elevate teaching and learning for faculty and students. In 2019, ASU adopted Slack as its preferred real-time productivity tool.
From teaching assistants who are building online communities to faculty who are leading conversations for online courses, the need for Slack continues to grow with a reported 31 million messages sent in 2022.
“I love exploring new technology so it started with that, but it also came from necessity because I needed quicker communications with my TAs in the large online courses I teach,” Cara Sidman, Clinical Associate Professor, said. “That creates a connection as well, especially for online students.”
Incoming students can find their community using Devil2Devil. The private network, running via Slack, helps students acclimate before registering for their first class. Students are automatically added to channels with their fellow Sun Devils in their same academic major and campus location to find potential roommates, and receive updates and information about transitioning to ASU up to six months before their starting term.
ASU has also developed custom bots to prioritize personalized, student success. One chatbot was developed within Devil2Devil to answer questions, suggest communities, and make connections. Other chatbots are used to streamline the online students to match with their respective success coach and help drive students into the university’s learning management system.
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",Education,ASU
"At some point in recent history, most legacy brands have had to face the friction between how they’ve done business for decades and how they know they must do business now to keep up with quickly changing customer expectations.
At the beginning of 2022, iconic auto company Ford realized it was at such an “absolutely critical” juncture.
It knew the time to change was yesterday, and it pulled off an impressive adoption of new technology and new mindsets. Here is just some of what Ford did in four months to create best-in-class experiences for customers and more efficient ways of working:
Created real-time, more personalized updates for customers on the status of their order, eliminating 650 hours’ worth of “where’s my vehicle?” phone calls
Cut the number of approvers per email or text to customers from 21 to 2, bringing greater cost efficiency to customer interactions
Launched a new cloud platform that will enable Ford to unify all of its customer data
As you can see here, creating a better experience for customers also involves invaluable improvements to efficiency and bottom line.
Here’s a deeper look at how Ford is doing it with Salesforce Customer 360.
1. Bridge the gap between siloed teams with a shared view of customer data.
2. Assess how company culture and technology come together.
3. Build dynamic dashboards to make decisions in real time.
4. Spot new opportunities to help customers who run their businesses from the road.
5. Give customers proactive updates on the status of their order.
6. Let the car communicate and provide just what customers need.
In early 2022, Ford split itself into multiple business units: one focused on the combustion engine, one focused on electric vehicles, along with Ford Pro for commercial and government customers. But importantly, the company also took steps toward better uniting itself. For years, departments working in silos had separate versions of customer data. They lacked the single, shared view of Ford’s customers they needed to create more sustainable, meaningful relationships with customers.
“The company was organized around sales teams, service teams, call center teams, financing teams, and none of those suites of systems worked together,” said Ted Cannis, CEO of Ford Pro, which serves government and commercial customers. “There was no single source of data.”
In four months, Ford laid the foundation it will use to unify all of its customer data under one roof, the Salesforce Platform. Now, with Sales Cloud, Customer Data Platform, MuleSoft, Service Cloud, and CRM Analytics, Ford can activate data across every channel and match customers to engagement behavior.
Ford knows that simply applying new technology to old ways of doing things wouldn’t cut it. It knew it had to take the discussions beyond tech, systems, and processes, and engage in a true shift in its collective mindset.

To move from vision to value faster, the company engaged in a strategic partnership with Salesforce Professional Services, which embedded more than 140 people with the company.

Eloise Lidell, Integrated Marketing Communications Manager at Ford, said early sessions focused on how change happens at Ford, how employees felt about it, and how to get wider buy-in.

“We didn’t jump right into developing a system. We took the time to do things that would impact the culture. The experience got us out of our norm, got us positioned for and open to change, so that we would be more open to new technologies, new ideas, and new ways of doing things,” Lidell said. “Because a lot of times it’s not just about the technology – it’s how you get there and how you deliver.”

To get the personalized technical expertise it needed to pivot quickly, Ford chose the Signature Success Plan, which includes access to a designated technical expert. Signature also provides continuous system monitoring and makes Ford aware of any issues that could impact system performance. Minimizing disruptions means the Ford team can focus on running its business.
Many aspects of Ford’s transformation inherently make the company more efficient. But key to the entire shift is being able to measure, in real time, just how much more efficient Ford is becoming.

CRM Analytics will make it easier for Ford teams across sales, service, and marketing, and dealers to make data-driven decisions, with insights that are actionable right within the workflow. Using CRM Analytics, Ford built a dynamic dashboard to measure the business value of its transformation in areas such as customer engagement, status call deflection, and campaign management and maintenance.

After four months, the company could see that email click-through rates jumped by 48%, and that it’s taking four fewer days to maintain campaigns.
Sometimes rethinking your business opens your eyes to new opportunities. Ford saw a need for a new digital toolbox to help small business owners – such as plumbers, electricians, caterers, and landscapers – who are running their businesses from the road and need to reach their customers from anywhere.

Ford recently launched VIIZR, new field service management software built on Salesforce that offers tradespeople – even those that aren’t Ford customers – a complete solution for managing mobile workforces and providing onsite support. With real-time job scheduling, digital invoicing, and streamlined coordination of field technicians, VIIZR will help entrepreneurs boost their productivity, work more efficiently, and ultimately save money in this new, work-from-your-truck world.

“One of the things that was so important for us at Ford Pro was to create a one-stop shop of all these disjointed services,” Cannis said. “We wanted a tool for everybody, so they could stop with all the paperwork.”
Here’s a customer question you may have heard more and more through the supply chain crisis: “Where’s my order?” One of the first things Ford did with Salesforce was eliminate the need for customers to call and ask about the whereabouts of their new car. Using Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, Ford now proactively provides customers with real-time updates of where their vehicle is every step of the way, from reservation to delivery. Each update has personalized banners, a custom image of the vehicle they purchased, and their VIN number.

Previously, customers could receive these updates only by email, but using Marketing Cloud, Ford has also enabled customers to choose SMS or email, whichever they prefer.
See what’s on the minds of manufacturing marketers everywhere and discover the top trends as stated from over 800 manufacturing marketers worldwide. You’ll learn valuable insights around manufacturing marketers' goals to:
Prioritize metrics and co-own revenue generation
Elevate customer experience with a digital-first approach
Strengthen internal and external stakeholder collaboration

The order updates are just one step in Ford’s larger shift toward becoming a company that anticipates customer needs and interests and communicates with them in a more personal, proactive way. Imagine receiving, based on data from your current car, a notification on your FordPass app that you have an oil change due in 500 miles.

With Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, CRM Analytics, and MuleSoft, Ford now has the platform capabilities it needs to connect the customer experience across shopping through purchase, accessories, onboarding, and maintenance.

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",Automotive,Ford
"Named the most diverse university in Virginia, George Mason University hits record student satisfaction numbers by reimagining its student experience with Salesforce.
What you need to know
To better reach students from all backgrounds, George Mason University aimed to create a more efficient, student-centered experience with data and automation. The university used dashboards for real-time goal tracking and behavior-based models to scale up recruitment. Recruiters can now reach thousands of students instead of hundreds without extra cost.
Why it matters for students
This new experience increased student and staff satisfaction, allowing George Mason University to reach students in new ways and provide support to those who may not have accessed it in the past. It has also helped scale its recruitment and build personal relationships with thousands of prospective students – all with little or no increase to recruitment staff thanks to nudge-based communications and behavior-based modeling.
David Burge, Vice President for Enrollment Management
What the Salesforce difference looks like for students:
Before Salesforce enabled the creation of a one-stop shop for student services, students had four separate offices to look to for guidance when it came to solving financial aid, enrollment, or registration issues. Oftentimes, the staff would not have readily-available information, and the student would have to return or wait for next steps via email.
Here’s what help looks like now:
Using Service Cloud, George Mason University created a one-stop solution for student services. Data supports students throughout their lifecycle at the university, from registration to grad school.
Each student has their history available to staff, documenting the issues they’ve had in the past so anyone they approach has the background information needed to help.
Real-time data enables staff to support students at every step. The university can see those who are asking for help and students who are struggling but will not reach out.
CRM Analytics allows staff to see where problem points are forming in real time. They can direct resources to these issues to reduce wait times and student frustration.
Enrollment and recruitment saw gains as well:
Behavior-based modeling and nudge-based communication allow recruiters to scale their relationships to potential students, from hundreds of contacts to thousands of contacts.
Targeted strategies enable recruiters to reach individuals with personalized messages that address what they care about from higher education.
Real-time dashboard tracking allows updates of recruitment goals and live monitoring of territory strengths and weaknesses.
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",Education,university
"The John Lewis Partnership used Salesforce to centralise data across all its department stores and food shops. Now, the company can make precise customer demand predictions and better meet customer expectations.
What you need to know
Owned and operated by over 74,000 employees, which it calls Partners, the John Lewis Partnership is the U.K.’s largest employee-owned business. It consists of John Lewis department stores, Waitrose food shops and John Lewis Financial Services. 
For such a complex and diverse operation, simply having data is not enough — it must be accessible, user friendly, and up to date. Self-service dashboards built on Tableau allow Partners to make decisions on their own to better manage inventory, automate tasks, and predict customer needs.
Why it matters
Efficiency matters more than ever to meet consumers’ high expectations for personalised experiences and immediate customer service. With its data centralised in a single source for users across the company to easily access, the John Lewis Partnership can make faster decisions for each store location. Now, Partners spend their time where it matters most: providing the high level of customer service that today’s consumers demand.
Tableau Product Manager
How they did it
Working closely with the John Lewis Partnership, Tableau Professional Services developed a comprehensive strategy, set measurable goals, and trained its staff. In the first phase of implementation, the company successfully onboarded and trained 8,000 users, resulting in substantial business value amounting to millions of pounds.
What the difference looks like
John Lewis Partnership swapped manual spreadsheets for real-time data visualisations. Now, this centralised data enables partners to self-serve and focus on customer interactions. Here’s how:
Ten thousand Partners can independently explore their real-time sales and inventory data, and act on insights from a single source. They can then easily collaborate by sharing these visualisations in Slack, enabling teams across the business to make data-driven decisions from a shared view of their data.
Waitrose food shops are empowered with real-time, actionable insights to manage their floor inventory and better meet their customers’ expectations. Stores can anticipate the needs of their customers and ensure the right products are available at each location, contributing to the perfect order rate.
Data-science models built on Tableau predict what and how much Waitrose bakeries should produce, saving partners time, reducing waste, and maximising profits.
The company also uses Service Cloud to support both online and in-store shoppers. Users can create, review, or edit existing cases, which helps deflect calls to the contact centre. Einstein Bots provide fast, convenient answers for website users and those who write in from WhatsApp.
Virtual Remote Assistant provides clear and timely video communication between customers and agents. If a furniture delivery is damaged, John Lewis agents can determine how the damage was caused, resolving the matter faster for customers and eliminating the need to dispatch a field rep.
Together, both solutions have helped the company save an average of £1 million in call centre costs per year.
The John Lewis Partnership has also improved its marketing efficiency and engagement with automation from Marketing Cloud. With help from Salesforce Professional Services, the company migrated its marketing in-house from a managed services partner for greater self-sufficiency.
Now, the team can create and deploy email and SMS campaigns themselves with templated content and creative assets, leading to 75% faster production time. The John Lewis Partnership can even produce marketing campaigns in a single day, enabling much faster reactions to changing trade, market, and customer requirements.
",Retail,John Lewis Partnership
"Make-A-Wish centralized data from 58 chapters onto one platform to increase financial transparency, improve collaboration across the organization, and ultimately grant more wishes to children battling critical illnesses.
In a nutshell
In times of economic uncertainty, nonprofits are held to greater transparency and accountability standards by their boards, donors, and the public. But these times are also when nonprofits are needed most, and that makes data-driven decisions more imperative than ever. With Salesforce, Make-A-Wish has a single view of all activities across the organization, so it can track important metrics to drive its mission forward, like how frequently donors contribute and which volunteers assist in multiple chapters.
Why it matters
Behind every child’s wish is an operation involving volunteers, donors, and staff to make them come true. Whether it’s a magical evening at a theme park or signing a record label with their favorite artist, children are waiting for their wishes to be granted from every corner of the country. Make-A-Wish unified its data across every chapter. Now, the organization transfers wishes easily, identifies which chapters need assistance, and promotes cross-chapter collaboration. The result? The organization grants an average of 15,000 wishes per year, with aspirations for more.
Teresa Duran, Chief Information Officer
What the difference looks like
Before Salesforce, each chapter operated almost entirely independently with siloed data. Here’s what the employee experience looks like today:
Staff can now enter all their information through the portal built on Experience Cloud. This allows team members to track how many children want to visit a specific location, and helps coordinate their visits more efficiently. With each wish varying in level of complexity, simplifying communication provides more equity to children who may not have access to experience their dream locally.
Make-A-Wish previously sent thank-you messages to donors manually after they made a gift. Now, the organization automatically sends personalized thank-you messages after every contribution with Marketing Cloud.
Sensitive data, like health records, contact information, and the approval process, is stored securely in Sales Cloud. This is the backbone for all member and customer information and ensures the organization complies with privacy and security regulations.
Each chapter communicates more effectively with each other and the national office, promoting a level of collaboration it has never seen before. Larger chapters now provide marketing and financial resources to smaller ones, including chapters with only seven staff members and no marketing stack. Wish transfers are now automated, which means children who move during the wish process experience no delays. What was a long and manual process now only takes a few clicks.
Anytime Make-A-Wish has challenges or questions — whether around implementation, architecture, release management, or looking for niche vendors — it utilizes Premier Success to help on its journey and meet its mission.
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",Nonprofit,Make-A-Wish
"Premium beverage ecommerce leader ReserveBar needed greater ecommerce flexibility to merchandise and deliver millions of product variants for its 3,500 partners. Commerce Cloud allows ReserveBar to scale its business and offer on-demand delivery with real-time inventory and headless ecommerce.
What you need to know
ReserveBar partners with almost 3,500 retailers to sell roughly 150,000 products. But its previous ecommerce solution continually hindered ReserveBar growth due to limitations in catalog breadth, payment processing, merchandising, and customization. It also lacked the scalability necessary for major new product launches, associated traffic, and checkout. Today, Commerce Cloud provides real-time pricing, partner integrations, and page design efficiency while enabling regulatory compliance across 50 states.
Why it matters
Sharing your favorite alcoholic beverages with friends used to be as simple as filling a cooler. Today, there are thousands of beers, wines, and spirits to choose from — and purchasing online presents a number of challenges, from inventory synchronization, pricing, and availability to compliance fulfillment management. The company needed a more robust ecommerce solution to market, merchandise, and deliver 150,000 products across thousands of retailers, numerous platforms, and corresponding deployments. Now, ReserveBar can extend its services to help partners across industries, from retail to travel and hospitality, meeting consumers at their point of need across the digital landscape.
Derek Correia, CEO
What the difference looks like
When ReserveBar first came online in 2013, it used a disconnected ecommerce solution. ReserveBar was on a mission to transform the way consumers discover and shop premium alcohol online — but it had difficulty scaling to meet consumer demand. This caused continuous integration challenges between third-party applications, which ReserveBar had to build custom integrations for, costing the company time, money, and opportunities for growth.
Now, ReserveBar has ultimate flexibility and seamless integration through Commerce Cloud for unlimited growth.
Scaling to meet product variety and multisite brands
ReserveBar’s inventory and prices are updated across its partner stores every 10 to 60 minutes. Instead of populating price books (a catalog of list prices for multiple SKUs) every so often, ReserveBar can update regularly in Commerce Cloud. Now, ReserveBar has no roadblocks to offering real-time pricing, availability, and on-demand delivery, a crucial part of its business.
ReserveBar partners add 80 to 100 new products every week. Commerce Cloud makes it easier and faster to launch each one with custom page design, email and SMS integrations, and automated categorization.
When ReserveBar launched its craft beer and ready-to-drink cocktail platform GetStocked, Commerce Cloud’s multisite architecture allowed the company to build an entire site in just 30 days.
Delivering at the right moments        
For nearly a decade, ReserveBar could only ship its products to customers over several days — never the same day. With real-time inventory and pricing updates from Commerce Cloud, ReserveBar evolved its business to offer on-demand sales, delivering products in just 20 minutes to an hour or two.
ReserveBar’s luxury spirits pair well with many of life’s celebratory moments: Consumers may add a bottle of champagne to their Mother’s Day flower order or gift an engraved bottle of The Macallan to a friend. ReserveBar provides a seamless shopping experience for customers with Commerce Cloud.
ReserveBar’s previous ecommerce solution could not support a custom checkout experience for different brands. Now, using a series of APIs and software development kits (SDKs), partners like 1-800-Flowers.com can embed ReserveBar’s alcohol-selling technology on its website. In some instances, partners can begin selling wine, spirits, and/or beer on their site compliantly, within hours.
Behind the scenes
Many of ReserveBar’s partners, including Thanks and Alyce, use Salesforce CRM, which already integrates with Commerce Cloud. When these partners make a sale that includes alcohol, the system automatically sends ReserveBar the order for processing.
Going forward
ReserveBar is also exploring shoppable video through Salesforce partner Bambuser. When shoppers view videos on the site’s “Cocktail Lounge” page, “Add to Cart” buttons make it easy to purchase featured products as the video plays.
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",Retail,ReserveBar
"Customs declarations. Product labels. Shipping quotes. Trading internationally can be a big challenge — but it can also be a big opportunity.
“Businesses that trade internationally grow faster and create more jobs than those focused solely on domestic markets,” said John Carroll, Head of International and Transactional Banking for Santander UK’s Corporate and Commercial Banking division. “We want to make it easier for businesses big and small to unlock global growth opportunities.”
Small and medium-sized enterprises are vital to the U.K. economy, generating around $2.82 trillion of income and employing approximately 16.6 million people. Santander UK’s Corporate and Commercial Banking specialists have already helped more than 1,000 businesses find success in a new market. And the bank wants to share its expertise with an even wider audience.
To scale up its services, Santander UK used Salesforce to build a trailblazing digital subscription platform, called Santander Navigator, that provides personalized growth strategies and recommendations to businesses looking to expand internationally.
“Santander Navigator is a global first and will help subscribers save time and money,” said Carroll. “With Santander Navigator and Salesforce, we can help more businesses bring great British products to customers around the world.”
Read on to discover how Santander UK is creating new customer connections and unlocking new revenue opportunities with Salesforce Customer 360.
John Carroll, Head of International and Transactional Banking, Corporate and Commercial Banking
1. Boost competitive advantage with greater customer-centricity.
2. Scale existing services with personalized digital experiences.
3. Increase daily customer conversations by 4X.
4. Onboard customers in 15 minutes with integrated workflows.
5. Unlock insights into new customers and markets with AI.
The world of international trade can be incredibly complex — especially for smaller businesses. Yet, the desire to break into new markets has never been stronger. According to Santander UK’s Spring 2023 Trade Barometer, 38% of U.K. businesses cite growth in both new and existing international markets as a key driver of recovery from current challenges. And Santander wants to be the bank that helps make recovery a reality.
Santander UK’s Corporate and Commercial Banking division offers financial services products to businesses with gross revenue up to $641 million.
“Competition in our industry is getting tougher with price often seen as the only differentiator,” said Carroll. “We don’t want to be locked in a race to the bottom; we want our competitive advantage to be founded on customer-centricity.”
The Corporate and Commercial Banking team had already laid the foundation it needed to drive not only greater customer-centricity but also greater efficiency. By using Salesforce Customer 360 to capture every request, complaint, and opportunity in a central record, Santander UK has transformed how it manages relationships. This is reflected in the Savanta market research data where Santander UK achieved first place for NPS.
Salesforce Customer 360, which forms part of the division’s new digital ecosystem along with nCino and DocuSign, also provides the foundations needed to develop and launch innovative customer-facing solutions at speed. Santander Navigator went from idea to launch in less than a year.
Over 6,000 customers around the world share why they switch financial services providers, what they look for in digital and in-person experiences, and how they feel about technologies like artificial intelligence.

Santander UK already had a well-established ecosystem of international trade experts to support businesses on their journey to export success. But manual processes limited the bank’s potential to expand its reach.
The Corporate and Commercial Banking team worked with Salesforce and Accenture to explore the art of the possible.
“We didn’t want to just digitalize our existing proposition; we wanted to enrich it by empowering businesses with even sharper insights, richer experiences, and stronger connections,” said William John, Head of International Proposition Delivery, International and Transactional Banking for Santander UK’s Corporate and Commercial team.
Santander Navigator does all this — and more. As well as helping businesses identify growth opportunities and explore potential markets, the platform makes understanding regulations, accessing expertise, and optimizing logistics easier.
For example, an integration between Santander Navigator and the Freightos marketplace means businesses can now generate shipping quotes in minutes, enabling greater transparency and faster decision-making.
“Sourcing quotes manually can take up to two days, which can impact order fulfillment and go-to-market timelines,” said Carroll. “By harnessing the power of digital, we can help businesses achieve export success cost-effectively, time-efficiently, and profitably.”
Santander UK has always placed a strong emphasis on building and maintaining relationships. The digital platform helps the Corporate and Commercial Banking team take customer relationships to a new level. Registration and interaction data tailors the entire Santander Navigator experience — from growth strategies and partner connections to market insights and event invitations.
The data is captured on Salesforce in a central CRM record, which provides relationship managers with valuable insights into a company’s challenges and opportunities. For example, if a bike manufacturer shows an interest in trading in a new territory, a relationship manager can talk to them about how to reduce foreign exchange risk using the bank’s online trading portal.
“We can now offer personalized advice on complex trading factors, such as product labels and export licenses, based on a customer’s journey,” said Gemma Cassin, Head of Commercial Delivery, International and Transactional Banking, Santander UK Corporate and Commercial Banking. “We can also develop connections with stakeholders in different business departments — not just finance.”
Broader relationships and richer insights have contributed to a 4X increase in conversations with businesses per day within Corporate and Commercial Banking with Santander Navigator subscribers.
Customer insights also help the bank host more relevant events for Santander Navigator subscribers. Event invites and communications are distributed using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Since the launch of the platform, more than 2,100 businesses have attended 250+ events, all hosted and run on Santander Navigator.
Gemma Cassin, Head of Commercial Delivery, International and Transactional Banking, Santander UK Corporate and Commercial Banking
With Salesforce, new subscribers can register for Santander Navigator in as little as 15 minutes. The registration process is powered by Experience Cloud, which is integrated with apps from Salesforce AppExchange to streamline due diligence and compliance checks as well as the management of subscriptions and payments.
“Our fees are normally linked to specific banking products,” said John. “Salesforce helped to simplify and de-risk our adoption of a subscription model for the first time.”
If a subscriber needs assistance or wants to talk to an expert, they can engage with the Santander Navigator team via live chat, which is powered by Service Cloud Live Agent. Cases and new business contacts are automatically created in Service Cloud, which streamlines other key tasks with its intelligent workflows.
Businesses can also engage in real time with relationship managers, international trade experts, and peers via the Santander Navigator community forum, which is hosted on Experience Cloud. By integrating Experience Cloud with Sales Cloud, Santander UK can automatically trigger new opportunities and tasks for relationship managers.
The bank also uses Salesforce to connect businesses with a network of 300+ specialist providers. Approved Santander Navigator providers register using a self-service workflow in Experience Cloud, which captures the information needed to enable personalized connections.
“We can automatically match the right providers with the right customers, which helps to accelerate expansion into new territories,” said Cassin.
William John, Head of International Proposition Delivery, International and Transactional Banking, Santander UK Corporate and Commercial Banking
With U.K. businesses citing international markets as the single biggest opportunity for economic recovery, the Corporate and Commercial Banking team knew Santander Navigator would need to scale — and they were right. Around 70% of Santander Navigator subscribers have not previously engaged with the bank.
As the volume of subscribers and interactions increases, Santander UK needs an easy way to share customer and market intelligence.
“With CRM Analytics, we can use AI to visualize international trade trends and customer insights in real time,” said Phil Bennett, Senior Project and Process Simplification Manager for Santander UK’s Corporate and Commercial Banking division. For example, the bank has developed dashboards that track the most popular Santander Navigator articles and international markets.
AI will also help the bank scale the platform by automatically generating personalized recommendations based on customer data, which relationship directors can share quickly and easily with their contacts.
Santander Navigator is not just a pioneering initiative for the bank but for the entire financial services industry.
“We have built a platform that can be scaled and enhanced quickly and easily,” said Carroll. “We have big ambitions in the U.K. and across the Santander Group and Trade Club Alliance.”
The Santander Navigator team already has numerous enhancements in the pipeline. For example, the team plans to use Commerce Cloud to offer even more personalized recommendations based on a subscriber’s browsing history and “lookalike” businesses. Santander UK also wants to establish an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating system on the platform, which will provide scores for specific processes, such as packaging and personalized ESG action plans.
Santander Navigator already enables businesses to select different shipping options based on their carbon footprint.
“Boosting sustainability is key to succeeding internationally, but businesses often lack sufficient resources,” said Carroll. “Santander Navigator is a fantastic example of how we’re harnessing digital technologies to make businesses’ lives easier.”
If you're in one of the eligible sectors, you can access Santander Navigator for free today. Santander Navigator is a personalized platform that helps you navigate international growth. Whether you’re an experienced exporter or taking the first step, Santander Navigator will help you simplify it. Sign up today at www.SantanderNavigator.co.uk.
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",Financial Services,Santander UK
"With high energy prices and the global impact of climate change, energy challenges have become relevant to every consumer and business on the planet.
Schneider Electric, the leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, aims to be part of the solution. The company’s power distribution products and energy management solutions are installed in about half the buildings in all major cities around the world. In doing so, the company aim to help its customers save or avoid 800 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2025.
As part of its mission to deliver a more sustainable future, Schneider Electric helps companies through its products and solutions to optimize energy management in homes, office buildings, infrastructure installations, and industrial operations. In addition to selling physical products, the company also provides services and remote monitoring solutions.
As Schneider Electric Chairman and CEO Jean-Pascal Tricoire said: We used to just do energy distribution. Now we can prevent issues. We can tackle building efficiency and bring predictive maintenance capabilities, so our customers don’t have to suffer problems.
To help deliver its advanced solutions, Schneider Electric relies on many partners, including Salesforce. And over the last decade, the company has put digital at the heart of its business — marketing, sales, service, commerce, and customer support.
Achieving this has required a long-term transformation — a journey that continues to this day with new digital initiatives. Given the ambitious scale of its goals, Schneider Electric recognized that it couldn’t go it alone. And who better to turn to than Salesforce’s own experts?
Here’s how Schneider Electric has worked with Salesforce Customer Success to extract maximum value from its Salesforce Customer 360 platform.
1. Enhance your CRM platform with AI tools to identify and convert sales opportunities.
2. Extract more value from Salesforce with personalized, proactive expertise.
3. Consult experts for complex data integration issues.
4. Best practices for a successful CRM Analytics implementation.
Schneider Electric’s Salesforce journey started with its “One Schneider” strategy, an initiative to replace multiple vendors with a single solution shared by all employees. That has involved implementing various Salesforce solutions, including Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, which were connected to give its sales and service teams a 360-degree view of customers.
Schneider Electric has since enhanced its customer relationship management (CRM) platform with AI tools that ensure its global sales teams are laser-focused on the best opportunities.
The company used CRM Analytics to build what it calls its “digital opportunity factory.” The tool ingests data from a wide range of sources — including accounts, orders, customer assets, and even Internet of Things (IoT) data from those assets — to identify clients that may need to upgrade, modernize, or replace their systems.
Einstein Discovery analyzes that data to create predictive scores on the likelihood of converting those opportunities into sales. The tool automatically routes leads to the right people and even provides recommendations on how to progress the opportunities. As a result, sales teams have reduced their time to close by 30%.
Technical Architect Analytics, Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric has leaned on Salesforce Customer Success to achieve its goals faster and maximize its Salesforce investment. For example, program architects and strategic experts from Salesforce Professional Services have assisted on several initiatives, providing expert guidance and implementation best practices.
With access to this unrivaled Salesforce expertise, they are also tapping into the Professional Services team's 20-plus years of experience working with thousands of customers, enabling Schneider Electric to continue to confidently build upon Salesforce's latest technology.
The team also opted for personalized, proactive expertise with the Salesforce Signature Success Plan. Signature includes a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM), dedicated skilled Support Engineers, personalized data-driven insights, technical health reviews, proactive monitoring, and the fastest response times from Salesforce’s most skilled support engineers.
Technical Architect Analytics, Schneider Electric
The company’s CRM Analytics  implementation ingests external data from legacy sources and consolidates it with Salesforce data. However, the legacy data had grown complex and unwieldy, taking days to process and delaying the generation of new sales opportunities, sometimes up to a week.
Akila’s team needed a solution to achieve the company’s goal of providing the sales team with the latest data insights every five to seven hours throughout the day. With help from her Technical Account Manager and other Salesforce product team experts, the team was able to come up with a solution.
The solution to the data integration challenge involved breaking down the lengthy, single process into smaller, more manageable data flows. That included creating data prep “recipes” for the flows, running and monitoring the flows, and continually optimizing the recipes to reduce total processing time.
In addition, this solution allowed the company to leverage parallel processing capabilities, accelerating the overall process, while preventing a single flow from blocking other flows.
The result? The team reduced the run time of the end-to-end process from 40-plus hours to 5.5 hours.
Now, when sales reps get online in the morning, they are working with the latest data and insights, and targeting the most promising opportunities. And Schneider Electric can continue its mission to enable people and organizations around the globe to embrace clean, renewable energy solutions.
Akila and her team took away the following lessons from the project:
Do not treat CRM Analytics as a data lake. Split lengthy data ingestion processes into multiple smaller flows.
Use only the relevant data in a data prep recipe to avoid unnecessary processing.
Reduce maintenance overheads by promoting reusability, such as using a single dataset for a specific type of data.
Review end-to-end designs for all implementations.
Monitor data prep recipes to understand the impact of recipe changes and then continually optimize flows.
Surround yourself with the Salesforce and internal experts you need to get the job done.
Technical Architect Analytics, Schneider Electric
",Energy & Utilities,Schneider Electric
"Your takeout food arrives, but your friend’s burger is missing. The restaurant tries to fix the problem, but there’s chaos behind the scenes. Service agents attempt to track down your order details, communicate with the restaurant owner, and process a refund — across about 30 different global systems.
It’s a scenario that kept Uber Eats’ IT and service teams up at night until they did something about it. Today, integrations automatically pull case data from all those global systems into one view so agents spend less time triaging.
“With data in a single platform, we can see what the experience was for the end consumer, what questions are coming our way, and how we can support our merchants fast,” said Parul Saini, Head of IT, Uber.
Salesforce Customer 360 is the secret sauce that connects Uber Eats’ service operations. With a shared view of merchants, end consumer data, and uber-fast response times, the company can keep 25 million restaurateurs and their customers happy to achieve global growth. Here’s how.
Parul Saini, Head of IT, Uber
Step 1. Increase agent efficiency with one customer view instead of 30.
Step 2. Resolve disputes and refund customers faster.
Step 3. Automate agent tasks to onboard more merchants and scale operations in less time.
Step 4. Replicate workflows across the business to spur growth for everyone.
Every Uber Eats support case is unique, from onboarding new merchants to settling consumer disputes about missing food. Previously, the company’s service data was spread across 30+ systems in each of its global locations. As a result, agents spent precious minutes fetching user, order, and refund data from hundreds of service tools just to understand the customer’s need.
“It took a lot of time and manual steps, resulting in a poor agent experience and increasing handle times — all relating back to a poor customer experience,” said Neela Penmetsa, Senior Salesforce Administrator.
Today, MuleSoft automatically unifies data from across the Uber Eats ecosystem onto one screen in Service Cloud. The platform fetches data from external systems for everything from payment details to legal and compliance information. Now, if a restaurant needs to make an update like changing its ownership in the Uber Eats system, agents can quickly make it across every system in real time.
In just seconds, MuleSoft maps all API responses so agents have all the data they need to make swifter decisions and resolve cases faster.
Connect with more customers, deliver quality support faster, and get to the heart of service with intelligent workflow automation from Service Cloud.
Watch the demo to see how you can:
Make self-service easier with embedded business processes across channels
Empower agents and service operations teams with workflow automation and AI
Streamline processes with clicks, not code

Sometimes, consumer orders arrive without the fries they ordered. Other times, the entire delivery goes missing. When this happens, Uber Eats immediately issues a refund, charging the merchant for the cost.
But the fault may lie with a courier or someone who mistakenly picked up the order, resulting in lower customer satisfaction for the merchant. Merchants may then open a support case to dispute the charges, prompting agents to act fast.
Previously, agents spent up to two minutes searching across systems for relevant data to assess the claim, including:
Order details
Consumer communications
Refund amounts and recommendations
A few minutes adds up across hundreds of cases each day. Now, Einstein can serve up data from integrated systems and even predict classification like case priority level, significantly reducing triage times.
“By the time the triage team escalates the case, the agent has all the information they need to make a decision on whether to pay the merchant or not,” said Penmetsa.
The majority of Uber Eats’ merchant customers are small business owners, not tech-savvy developers. Previously, new merchant onboarding required lengthy conversations with agents to provide restaurant details and sign user agreements.
To save time and give new merchants a way to serve themselves online, Uber Eats used Salesforce Flow to build automated workflows without writing code. Merchants can conveniently sign up for the platform, upload menus, and share food photography. Agents can then track merchant progress and use Digital Engagement to connect with merchants on their preferred channel — from chat to SMS and WhatsApp — to steadily urge them along.
Einstein Bots also gives merchants 24/7 support and faster answers to common questions like “Where’s my refund?” or “How can I add another location?” This enables Uber Eats to efficiently scale service, freeing up agents to focus on more complex, higher value issues.
Plus, automated routing intelligently assigns the right work to the right agent based on their skill set, availability, or capacity, boosting productivity.
Uber Eats serves merchants and consumers in 6,000 cities across the globe. Things can get complicated fast when you need to adapt to local regulations and languages. With Salesforce, Uber Eats can apply the same sales and support workflows in different regions and departments — from ridesharing to grocery delivery — to grow the business.
For instance, lead and contract management tools from Sales Cloud allow sales reps to build quotes faster and visualize their entire pipeline. This way, they can convert more new merchants and offer flexible pricing in different regions.
Uber Eats agents can also help grow merchants’ businesses with insight into performance data. With Tableau, sales operations can track order volume trends and proactively contact merchants with recommendations to increase orders and grow the business.
“These merchants are not big brands. They’re local mom-and-pop restaurants who are putting their sweat and blood into their business,” said Ravi Shedge, Senior Staff Solutions Architect.
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",Technology,Uber Eats
"Vitality is a leading insurance business offering health, life, and car insurance, as well as investment products. As part of Vitality’s shared value model (what is good for our members, us and society), their Vitality programme is an evidenced based behaviour science approach that uses the power of rewards to encourage members to make positive health choices and take steps to become more physically active.
With a distribution model that includes selling directly to customers and also through a network of insurance brokers and financial advisors, Vitality’s distribution team recognized that it needed a single, scalable customer relationship management (CRM) platform that all of its internal team members and franchisees could use.
By uniting its teams around a shared view of the customer, Vitality would be able to improve visibility over data, streamline organizational processes, increase overall productivity, and make it easier for account managers to engage with brokers.
With Vitality already using Salesforce across selected distribution teams, expanding its usage across its acquisition and retention teams was a simple decision. To help its development team get up to speed with the solution faster, the company used technical support and guidance provided by Salesforce’s specialized support team.
Here are four tips from Vitality's CRM Director Mike Williams, which may help you maximize the value from your digital investment faster.
1. Choose partners who can provide expert guidance and fill skill gaps
2. Roll out features iteratively to ensure results can be seen quickly
3. Develop internal capability by leveraging opportunities to learn
4. Ensure productivity stays on track with 24/7 technical support
Having recently welcomed several team members who hadn’t worked with Salesforce before, Williams recognized his team might need support to achieve its objective of uniting its teams on a single, shared platform.
To ensure that the team hit the ground running, Vitality drew on the expert guidance and support included with a Premier Success Plan.
This included having a trusted Salesforce advisor dedicated to Vitality, who worked closely with the team to fine-tune Vitality’s digital roadmap, help it determine the best way to achieve the company’s objectives, and iron out problems that arose throughout the implementation.
Regular meetings with its expert advisor enabled the team to better anticipate challenges and receive the support needed to solve them.
“It's been fantastic to have a point of contact we know we can speak to about pretty much anything at Salesforce,” said Williams. “For example, when we were trying to enable single sign-on, the team that works on our cloud computing platform hadn't done much with Salesforce before. Kam (our Success Manager) was able to find the right contacts at Salesforce to connect the two together. Straight away, people came back to us, connected the dots, and within a matter of a few days, had everything sorted.”
CRM Director
Having laid a solid foundation for innovation, the development team recognized that it needed a roadmap of next steps to enable it to maintain its momentum.
By working iteratively to deploy features available on Vitality’s sales and customer service solutions, the team was able to deliver significant improvements to the user experience for its employees and the network of franchisees working with local brokers to sell Vitality products.
A key priority for the company was to improve franchisees’ ability to manage their schedules and increase visibility over their engagement with the brokers they work with. This not only gives franchisees a better understanding of which brokers they should be targeting and when, but how engagement and sales correlate. Account managers also now have a central place to store notes relating to their engagement activities.
Vitality has also automated calculating and applying discounts to a renewal, making it simpler and faster for retention agents to apply discounts. Retention agents are also able to see which rewards and benefits associated with an insurance product a customer is using, and how often. This makes agents more effective throughout renewal conversations.
Current projects include building a suite of recommendations for franchisees based on engagement, which Vitality will deliver via a social networking and collaboration solution.
CRM Director
With digital skill shortages an issue globally, developing internal capabilities is critical.
Members of Vitality’s development team were able to access expert coaching sessions and training opportunities on relevant topics as part of the company’s support plan.
These sessions allow team members to build their expertise in core areas and develop their understanding of how to use the solution. They are also useful for reassuring the team that they are addressing a particular task or challenge the right way.
“As the manager of the team, it is reassuring for me to know the option is there,” said Williams. “If someone gets stuck or we get stuck as a team, I know we can lean on that resource if we need to. That gives me the confidence to push our roadmap back to the business.”
Access to round-the-clock technical support can help minimize downtime during implementation and testing phases.
To mitigate disruption from technical issues, Vitality’s development team took advantage of the 24/7 technical support included in its support plan. This allowed the team to log a ticket about a critical issue online and receive a response in as little as one hour.
In those instances when a technician didn’t immediately know the answer to a problem, they worked with the development team to find a solution. Developers were also on hand throughout the project to troubleshoot code to fix or avoid problems.
“When we log a ticket, the speed of the turnaround has always been brilliant,” said Williams. “In one recent example, the login flow we were building broke. It wasn't showing anything, but because it was assigned to all the system admin profiles, none of us could get into the system to turn the flow off. We logged a ticket at 4:30 p.m. U.K. time, and when we came back the next morning, at 8:00 a.m., the flow had been disabled and we were back in.”
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",Financial Services,Vitality
"AAA become a household name by being a reliable, lifelong partner who shows up no matter what. The company’s growing member network of more than 60 million relies on the group's products and services to help during life’s toughest moments. More than 13 million of those members reside in The Auto Club Group’s region, which spans 14 U.S. states, the province of Quebec, and two U.S. territories.
With increasing expectations for faster and more accurate results, AAA - The Auto Club Group needed to deliver efficient, personalized service at scale. Now, it has access to real-time data to quote arrival times accurately, automate fleet deployment, and create a 360-degree view of customers’ needs. Whether in everyday moments or trying times, AAA - The Auto Club Group can provide first-class service to all its members.
Looking for a world-class technology solution, AAA - The Auto Club Group turned to Salesforce to upgrade its digital capabilities. Here’s how the company used automation and personalized service to achieve total digital transformation.
Scott VerBracken
VP, Automotive Services
1. Automate roadside assistance to decrease response times by up to 10%.
2. Deflect 30% of cases using self-service capabilities.
3. Create a single, 360-degree view of members by consolidating multiple lines of business.
4. Build a scalable digital foundation for member-centric innovation.
5. Plan for the future with generative AI.
Calling AAA Roadside Assistance from a busy highway requires different service than accidently locking your keys in your car. With more than 32 million roadside events per year, AAA - The Auto Club Group knew it needed to provide specialized service wherever and whenever members needed it.
“Being able to differentiate between a real-time emergency and an event where a member is safe at home allows us to reevaluate the capacity we have on the roadways and send a resource more promptly to a member in crisis,” said Scott VerBracken, VP, Automotive Services.
Using Service Cloud’s field service capabilities, reps can provide personalized service to members in crisis and quickly connect them to dispatch. From there, dispatchers can easily assign the case to a nearby service tech with the right tools and skills using Appointment Assistant. Service techs can seamlessly manage the entire experience, ranging from work order notifications to safety checklists, on the field service mobile app.
The best part? The entire process is automated, allowing the team to be more productive. This has allowed AAA - The Auto Club Group to decrease response times by up to 10%.
This approach has even helped the company reduce gas costs with more efficient scheduling that connects the closest and best qualified service tech to the right member. Plus, the team has optimized fleet management to ensure the right truck gets to the right service event, eliminating large truck costs for smaller or simpler requests.
With so many challenges to contend with today, your field service team must be built around agility, safety, and efficiency. Sound complicated? We've got you covered. With Salesforce Field Service, you’ll be able to deliver the trusted, on-time support your customers need. Check out the demo to see how these digital tools can help you:
Dynamically schedule and optimize resources
Streamline complex processes to improve asset performance
Leverage AI to help frontline workers complete work safely on time — every time
Members that need help in a noncrisis situation like unlocking a door at home can self-service using the group's automated system. Once just a fraction of engagements, self-service now represents over 30% of member service events, saving both agents and members time.
Self-service also gives AAA - The Auto Club Group an easier way to differentiate between real-time emergencies and at-home appointment requests. In the past, all cases requested the same service through the same journey. Now, members are in the driver’s seat. They can visit the AAA - The Auto Club Group site or app to schedule noncrisis services at a time that works for them.
Since AAA - The Auto Club Group serves multiple lines of business, from travel to insurance to finance, it had limited visibility into how members used and connected each product. With Financial Services Cloud, every employee across all departments can now see a complete profile of every member.
“As an organization, we offer a lot of different services to our members — including travel support, home and auto insurance, life insurance, and banking — and we needed a customer platform that aligned with our entire business,” said Madhu Nandagiri, VP, Infrastructure and Digital IT.
As a result, the entire organization can deliver personalized offerings across all lines of business. Specifically, all products and services owned by a member are now visible to sales and service agents, informing them how to better serve customer needs. This includes bundling products to help reduce annual insurance premiums, vacation packages, and competitive home and auto loans.
AAA - The Auto Club Group can even plan for external unknowns like extreme weather. Using standard APIs and out-of-the-box Salesforce dashboards, the group integrates external data like weather and big events, visualizes the information, and uses it to staff teams accordingly. Planning ahead and anticipating member needs allows the organization to offer the highest quality service 24/7/365.
“We understand the impact weather can have on motorists. But understanding the impact is only a part of the equation,” said VerBracken. “Whether it’s rain, snow, or extreme temperatures, we want to ensure we have the right resources and skill sets allocated and ready to go whenever our members need us.”
AAA - The Auto Club Group also plans to make it even easier for agents to provide the right support to customers with Einstein. Insurance policies can vary and often contain complex information agents need to sift through. Einstein will automatically pull the necessary content and then draft an appropriate response for the customer based on the information it already has.
The result? Faster support for customers and increased productivity for agents.
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",Automotive,AAA - The Auto Club Group
"The world can change — and change fast. As catastrophic as it has been, COVID-19 has also shown us what’s possible when the need is urgent. Governments ramped up medical services and financial support. Companies adapted their supply chains and business models. Individuals changed the way they worked and consumed goods.
And you know what also happened? Carbon emissions dropped to a level not seen since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008.
The question is: How much of this change will be lasting? Global energy player ENGIE is doing everything it can to ensure that the sudden correction to carbon emissions will provide the impetus the world needs for a greener future.
The group ENGIE is a global reference in low-carbon energy and services. With their 170,000 employees, customers, partners and stakeholders, ENGIE are committed to accelerate the transition towards a carbon-neutral world, through reduced energy consumption and more environmentally-friendly solutions. Inspired by their purpose, ENGIE reconcile economic performance with a positive impact on people and the planet, building on our key businesses (gas, renewable energy, services) to offer competitive solutions to customers.
ENGIE more than ever needed a way to connect its many teams around the world and provide them with insights to better understand customers. It wanted to provide great experiences to its employees so they in turn could deliver amazing customer experiences. And it needed to do all this on a global scale.
The solution? ENGIE used Salesforce Customer 360 to unite data across sales, service and IT teams and provide a single, shared view of every customer from anywhere in the world. With this in place, the company could grow customer relationships through a new business model that provides tailored, zero-carbon solutions as a service.
Here are five lessons from ENGIE’s transformation.
Executive Vice President
in charge of Digital & Information Systems

1. Unify data to build tailored services for each customer.
2. Deliver digital-first personalized engagement.
3. Reimagine sales and service processes to bring more focus on the customer.
4. Skill up your entire organization from anywhere.
5. Improve mobile workforce productivity to resolve customers’ issues faster and gain their trust.
How do you unite an enterprise that has four Global Business Units and operates at an international level? ENGIE’s solution was to provide a single, shared view of customers’ data.
As a result, the company’s sales, service, and marketing teams across the globe have a shared workspace, with the specific tools each team member needs. ENGIE also added analytics to the platform to provide employees with actionable insights, in context. Its people are now more productive and collaborative, and laser-focused on building stronger customer relationships.
Crucially, the solution gives team members insights into how customers engage with ENGIE products and services. This makes it far easier and quicker for team members to arrive at solutions faster, and tailor the company’s carbon-reducing services to customers’ needs.
“The zero-carbon journey is different for each customer,” said Yves Le Gélard, Executive Vice President in charge of Digital and Information Systems at ENGIE. “Their energy solution has to be tailor-made, based on market and customer intelligence.”

It’s difficult to drive change across an organization with fragmented, time-consuming processes. And by adopting an agile, platform-based solution designed for the energy and utilities sector, ENGIE has been able to streamline many of its processes and reduce human error. This has helped the company to “add value behind the meter” for its customers and employees, provide digital-first, personalized experiences, and capitalize on opportunities as they arise.
For example, ENGIE Electrabel (Belgium) is using prebuilt guided selling processes enforced by eligibility and product rules to help its partners optimize sales. Meanwhile, ENGIE in Spain uses a fully guided selling acquisition process to guide team members through the sales process, from identifying opportunities to quoting and generating documentation.
Team members were able to adopt the new tools within four days with great results. In France, the company was able to decrease the time required to train agents by 50%. ENGIE in France and Belgium were also able to use the solution’s library of prebuilt processes to reduce the amount of coding they anticipated they would need by 50%.
Becoming a more customer-focused organization requires change. For ENGIE, that meant reorganizing its sales structure and introducing new ways of working to improve collaboration and efficiency across teams.
With the help of collaboration tools integrated into its CRM, ENGIE has been able to improve coordination between its account teams, promote information sharing, and increase productivity. This helps to ensure that clients’ needs are addressed with “one voice.”
ENGIE has also standardized its account management processes across its sales teams and business units using the platform’s account planning tools. Sales team members now have access to valuable insights to close new deals, build stronger relationships with customers, and grow existing accounts.
Since implementing its account management tools, the company has seen a 1.7 times increase in opportunities created — even during COVID-19.
ENGIE’s business-to-business sales teams spend most of their time on the road, meeting with clients. So, like other field sales teams, the pandemic all but brought their work to a halt.
ENGIE was able to turn this challenge into an opportunity for growth by using a digital skilling platform to create a tailored learning program for team members, in partnership with Accenture.
The six-week program was designed to help sales representatives remain engaged with the company during the lockdown period, grow their digital skills, and become better prepared to get back to work after the lockdown was lifted.
ENGIE continues to use the digital skilling platform to help team members adapt to evolving conditions and remain productive from anywhere.
Running field service teams is a complex job often made more challenging by fragmented IT systems, manual dispatch processes, unpredictable workloads, and limited resources. At ENGIE, these challenges resulted in a number of issues, such as long delays in gathering the data needed to create invoices.
Using an integrated customer service platform in tandem with optimization tools for field service teams, ENGIE has been able to improve both the employee and customer experience.
 
Executive Vice President
in charge of Digital & Information Systems

The field service solution intelligently prioritizes essential jobs by automatically assigning the right workers to the right projects based on skills, location, and business rules. Built-in analytics gives managers and dispatchers easy, real-time visibility into operational performance and key performance indicators.
Field technicians can access customer data and knowledge articles to resolve jobs faster, identify assets and parts instantly, and complete paperwork while they’re in the field — even when they’re offline. This empowers mobile workers to become trusted advisors to the customers they work with.
“The power of the cloud connects our people,” said Yves Le Gélard. “They're able to share a lot about the technologies they're using. If you talk to a field technician who operates a Siemens turbine in Chile, for example, you’ll find that he shares a lot of information with his Singaporean colleague who operates the same sort of turbine in Singapore.”
",Energy & Utilities,ENGIE
"Over 100 years ago, D.J. De Pree founded Herman Miller to push the standards of office and home furnishing design. From ergonomic chairs to sustainably made products, the company pioneered industry classics that are synonymous with modern design.
Today as MillerKnoll, a collective of design brands including Herman Miller and Knoll, there are two threads that run through every decision the company makes:
Be good stewards of the earth’s resources.
Ensure each product and experience is exceptionally designed.
“What I do at MillerKnoll is look at the choices we make through the lens of sustainability and ask, ‘Have we made the best choice possible?’” said Gabe Wing, Director of Sustainability. “My job is to help make the world a better place through the design of our products, our processes, and our places.”
But a company can’t know where it’s going if it doesn’t know where it is. That’s why data fuels every decision, from materials used in products to electricity consumption at each global location.
MillerKnoll uses Salesforce Customer 360 to share carbon emissions data with its commerce, marketing, and service departments, so the whole company can work toward shared sustainability goals. Let’s take a look at how Wing and team are putting this data at the center of every business decision. 
Step 1: Swap spreadsheets for real-time carbon emission views.
Step 2: Make ecommerce experiences as well-designed as products.
Step 3: Engage customers beyond the purchase.
In this video [3:37], hear how MillerKnoll went from managing its environmental footprint on spreadsheets to creating real-time energy and carbon emissions reports it can act on across the business.
By 2030, MillerKnoll plans to reduce its carbon footprint by 50%, eliminate single-use plastic, reduce all waste, and use 50% or more recycled content in its products.
At first, the company tracked its footprint through disjointed Excel spreadsheets that were thousands of rows long. Wing’s small team input everything it could get its hands on, including utility bills, distribution invoices, expense reports, and even spreadsheets from other departments.
MillerKnoll also knew the SEC may one day require publicly traded companies to provide comprehensive, up-to-the-minute reporting on their carbon emissions data. The company’s manual tracking method wouldn’t be able to scale.
With that in mind, MillerKnoll implemented Net Zero Cloud, which works behind the scenes to convert spend data into total carbon dioxide output (tCO2) to track and manage carbon emissions. This means that instead of ballpark estimates, the company can quantify how each chair or desk directly impacts carbon output.
“At the push of a button, we have our annual carbon footprint, so at any given time of the year, we can know where we’re at compared to our goals,” said Wing.
Advice from MillerKnoll’s Gabe Wing
Start small. Determine where you are today and what you can control.
Assemble the right team. Let people know what you’re doing and harness their passion.
Adopt the right tools. Use your data to create actionable insights, not another database.
Share wins. Tell success stories internally and externally to gain momentum and scale.
The company can now track sustainability data faster and at global scale, which is especially handy for troubleshooting. When emissions data for one of its 15 global locations suddenly seems high, the company can quickly throw red flags and investigate further. Is the carbon footprint rising because of increased production volume? Or is equipment malfunctioning?

MillerKnoll brands prioritize eco-friendly materials in their entire product portfolio. The company even uses an ""environmental calculator"" that allows customers to see the exact breakdown of every product. With so many products to choose from across such brands as Herman Miller, Design Within Reach, and HAY, it's important to make the shopping experience across sites as seamless as possible.

That’s why the company shifted gears when it discovered its online shopping experience didn’t match the high-quality design of the products it sells.

With help from Commerce Cloud and partner expert Capgemini, MillerKnoll built a scalable solution that has helped launch multiple sites. The partnership has also helped MillerKnoll accelerate B2C experiences with clickable images for direct purchase, redesigned checkout flows, and tailored recommendations. Apps like Klarna and Affirm help enhance the ecommerce experience even further with automated chat and payment solutions, while 6sense and Bynder’s DAM app drive team efficiency by providing sales intelligence and an easy way to manage ecommerce product imagery.

Together, these partner apps have helped enhance the MillerKnoll ecosystem, resulting in:
When ecommerce demand suddenly grew 313% in 2020 because of the pandemic, MillerKnoll was ready with a faster site that showed off its modern designs.
""The pandemic really allowed us to push innovation, especially through our digital experiences,"" said Kristen DeLap, Director of Digital Product.
Now, MillerKnoll can wow customers from the first moment of design inspiration to the digital storefront and beyond. When shoppers across its brands express interest, MillerKnoll easily markets and communicates with them across geographies multiple times per day. Whether through email or SMS, MillerKnoll tracks and nurtures buyers along complex customer journeys.
Just three years ago, MillerKnoll ran merchandising operations manually, which took extra time to sort products and continually rebuild customer interactions. Now, MillerKnoll uses in-depth customer insights and AI to build personalized emails and recommendations the company can improve with regular testing of which copy performs best.

Even after purchase, MillerKnoll continues to engage customers and build loyalty with helpful support across channels. Now, marketing, commerce, and service can access customer data in a single source of truth. That way, agents have the foresight to resolve customer cases quickly, inform new marketing journeys based on service interactions, and uncover new cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
“Imagine if the customer service rep has all the information about the customer,” said Neeraja Venkatasubramanian, Manager of Digital Product Portfolio. “It makes that interaction much more seamless.”
The company even extends website support with live chat, so shoppers can easily connect with a design expert if they need inspiration. And Customer 360 gives MillerKnoll the framework to deliver on customers’ expectations for fast, personal, and responsive shopping.
But people now expect more than impeccable sales and service. They want their money to support brands that champion social justice and environmental responsibility, too. To meet these expectations, Wing believes companies must find where their values intersect with customers’ values.
“The better we understand where our clients want to go from a sustainability perspective, the better we can enable our clients to achieve their goals,” he said.
With sustainability, commerce, and service data under one roof, MillerKnoll can rally its customers and partners to champion responsibly designed products that benefit the planet.
",Manufacturing,MillerKnoll
"Humana differentiated itself from competitors in a major way: It became an insurance company that people actually like to hear from.

Over its 60-year history, the major U.S. public health insurer has navigated many industry disruptions, from national health crises to the rise of telehealth. Today, Humana is well into the next chapter of its evolution into a health and wellness company that drives people toward the healthcare system, instead of away.

“The industry as a whole is laden with confusion and options,” said Chris Walker, Associate Vice President, Engagement Marketing. “And that’s the challenge — how do you build trusting relationships at scale?”

Building trusting relationships that encourage member engagement requires the technical infrastructure and strategic guidance to make it happen. That’s why the company chose Salesforce to unite teams, partners, and caregivers around a shared view of member data. With a single source of truth for member profiles, interactions have gone from simple claim processing to personalized support throughout each member’s wellness journey.

“Everybody has their own unique journey and healthcare needs,” said Walker. “And it's so important to be able to treat individuals as individuals.”

Humana makes the path to wellness easier with tailored messaging, service, and care coordination that keeps these members at home — instead of the hospital. In fact, the company now delivers care three to four times faster and saves $6 million in information security costs in the process.

Let’s see how Walker and his team create exceptional care experiences with the power of empathy and connected data with Salesforce Customer 360.
AVP, Engagement Marketing
Step 1: Send proactive messages to get members’ health back on track.
Step 2: Deliver care four times faster by connecting member data.
Step 3: Improve outcomes by coordinating specialist care around a 360-degree view of the member.
Step 4: Deliver unparalleled convenience with a HIPAA-compliant digital pharmacy.
Step 5: Evolve the business of health with strategic guidance at every step of the journey.
Getting people to make their health a priority goes beyond reminding them to go to the doctor. If a member receives a life-altering diagnosis like Type 2 diabetes, for example, the company proactively reaches out with clinical and emotional support.

“I want our customers to feel like they’re cared for as human beings and that we delivered on our brand promise of human care,” said Walker. “That means consistently showing up in the meaningful moments.”

Humana is doing that with Marketing Cloud tools for member engagement. Following a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis, for instance, the member receives email tips for managing the disease or a list of answers to frequently asked questions about insulin administration. They can also receive text alerts that a care provider will call them in a few hours.

“Marketing Cloud makes it a lot easier for us to stay in touch with our customers,” said Walker. “It really allows us to hone into that moment, in their preferred channel, and deliver something that's relevant for them.”

On the other side of these interactions, Humana knows which channels members engage with these messages. If text works better than email, the company will engage members there as well.

Humana’s sales teams also use Marketing Cloud to customize 60 different prospect journeys, yielding 1,000 interested employer leads per year. Marketing Cloud Intelligence, powered by Datorama, has improved sales outcomes by helping the company identify more business customers and reach out with personalized messaging.
To create these opportunities, Humana engages group agents who haven’t sold in a while with communications that speak to their unique needs. Re-engaging these agents has resulted in more deals closed and a boost in cross-selling efforts, including automated cross-selling upon renewal.

From health records to service interactions, Humana collects an enormous amount of member data. This is as challenging as it is beneficial, especially if the data lives in different places.

MuleSoft’s API-led integration capabilities connect data from legacy systems to Salesforce. This creates the full view of member data that care teams need to provide exceptional healthcare experiences — up to four times faster.
“Data tells each customer’s story, and that data is super rich when you bring it together to create that 360-degree view of the customer,” said Walker.

For instance, if a member requires extensive post-op care after a knee replacement, their care team already has a shared view of their medical history, relevant lifestyle information, and future appointments. This lets the member focus on recovery instead of personally updating every clinician they see.

“Whatever they’ve received a diagnosis for,” said Brian Cahill, Vice President, Pharmacy Segment CIO. “We’re going to partner with their doctor to make sure that they’re properly treated and that they have the right programs surrounding them.”
Humana’s mission to put the patient at the center of the healthcare experience is about more than responding to an industry trend. It’s a matter of helping members live happier, healthier lives.

If a member is diagnosed with a severe illness such as breast cancer, the care team — a dozen specialists spanning surgery, radiation, and genetic counseling — needs a 360-degree view of the member’s health data to quickly put a plan into action.

Humana’s Enterprise Clinical Operating Model (ECOM), powered by Health Cloud, gives care teams the agility they need to deliver comprehensive and compassionate care. This integrated platform lets clinicians access a full view of each patient’s medical history, medications, and lifestyle information while simplifying clinical workflows.

For example, doctors and care teams can view a cancer patient’s most recent lab results, plan next steps for care, and coordinate home services from a single place. If an oncologist needs to make changes to the patient’s medications, the pharmacist, at-home caregiver, and behavioral health specialist on the team get updated immediately.

But sharing this much patient data requires a scalable security solution integrated into each platform. Built on the Salesforce Platform, Shield keeps each member’s information safe on Humana’s website with data encryption and other best-in-class security requirements. So far, Humana has saved $6 million in security-related costs.
“Our ultimate goal is that members see us as a trusted partner who can provide the services they need in a very timely manner,” said Cahill.
Customer 360 for Health Scale experiences, increase efficiencies, and deliver better care and service with a single, holistic view of every patient, member, provider, and partner.
Lower costs and automate health team workflows
Personalize health experiences throughout care journeys
Deliver individualized care and service in real time, from anywhere

To ensure that its members receive their prescriptions on time and without hassle, Humana built its first-ever HIPAA-compliant digital pharmacy on Commerce Cloud — the CenterWell Pharmacy.

This digital pharmacy lets members refill prescriptions, check order statuses, and even send prescriptions to different pharmacies. If members on medication for osteoporosis want to spend the summer in another state, for instance, they can send their prescriptions to a closer pharmacy in Humana’s network. They can also reach out via chatbot if they have questions for the pharmacy team.

“Our aim is to make sure we’re getting those life-saving medications to our customers so that they can achieve their healthiest lives,” said Cahill.

But how does a digital pharmacy meet HIPAA standards? That’s where Shield comes into play. Shield provides an airtight security solution by encrypting sensitive health data and only allowing authorized users to access it. This way, members can use the CenterWell pharmacy with the confidence that their information remains in trusted hands.
VP, Pharmacy Segment CIO
Evolving from insurer to trusted healthcare partner takes more than choosing the right technologies. It takes strategic guidance from experts dedicated to bringing your vision to life.

That’s why Humana chose Salesforce Professional Services for implementation oversight and best practices on how to build for long-term success and maximize value from its Salesforce ecosystem. By aligning on a vision, the team of experts designed a solution to help the company reach its goals faster, ensure a seamless transition to Health Cloud, and launch its first-ever HIPAA-compliant digital pharmacy on Commerce Cloud.

“Salesforce Professional Services has been a great partner on this journey with us, making sure we get the most of our investment, and we’re seeing value fast,” said Walker.

Given the high stakes of Humana’s operations, even a few minutes of downtime can have a huge impact. To minimize downtime and disruptions, Humana relies on the Signature Success Plan to monitor performance, errors, and platform limits. This helps inform the company of any potential risks before they impact system performance. The Signature team also delivers proactive, personalized expertise to help Humana reduce technical debt, innovate faster, and eliminate security risks.

With Salesforce Professional Services and the Signature Success Plan, Humana can confidently deliver more personalized member experiences at scale.
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",Healthcare & Life Sciences,Humana
"In a business the size of IBM, the flow of work has the power to affect everything from employee productivity to partner relationships to customer experiences. But IBM is used to big impact. Since 1911, the tech giant has helped pioneer the information age, developing new machines and processes to make business systems (and life) easier.
Today, the company has grown to hundreds of thousands of employees and customers worldwide, driving progress through its cloud, SaaS, global business, and technology services, as well as its flagship AI solution IBM Watson. And to make the IBM machine work, impeccable service and truly connected experiences are crucial.
A 30-year IBM veteran with roles in Watson, Hybrid Cloud, information management, and cognitive software, Arvind Krishna became the company’s Chairman and CEO at the start of 2020 — a crucial time for supporting employees and customers alike as the future of work began changing.
With Salesforce Customer 360, one integrated platform, channel-based communication and swift decision-making is finally possible. And as a global strategic partner for Salesforce and the world’s largest Slack customer, IBM is yet again leading the way by transforming business and work. Let’s take a look at how Arvind and the entire IBM organization are transforming employee workflow, service, and sales with Salesforce.
Step 1. Accelerate work internally and externally with channel-based communication.
Step 2. Let customers choose their preferred service channel.
Step 3. Increase sales velocity with a unified seller experience.
One of the world’s largest technology companies, IBM has more than 250,000 employees (or “IBMers”) spanning 170 global offices. To keep them all connected, IBM was an early adopter of Slack, launching among just 70 engineers in 2016. Just two years later, more than 100,000 employees were using the app.
Slack has allowed IBM to transform how it has traditionally worked, accelerating communication and business, even eliminating internal email to share company announcements. On Arvind’s first day as CEO, the first thing he did was send a message to all employees on Slack. To further drive transparency and alignment from the top down, he began conducting executive question and answer sessions or “Ask Me Anything” communities (AMAs) for employees to interact with him and other IBM leaders.
Keeping IBMers connected has been even more important over the past year, as employees have sought to connect about, discuss, and understand social injustice in the U.S. and around the world. Slack has helped employees find like-minded individuals and allies to converse with through forums where they can learn from one another and decide on actions to take.
Slack not only powers IBM’s internal collaboration, but external relationships as well. Slack Connect allows IBM to incorporate the right team members into ongoing conversations, circumvent inbox clutter, and connect with partners in a more human way. By sharing channels across orgs, IBM enables sales to move faster, accelerating deal cycles by speaking directly with partners and customers. Plus, services can use Slack to “swarm” critical cases, collaborating in real time to arrive at a faster solution instead of escalating to another team.

IBM has transformed its service organization across 10 business units, swapping out disjointed experiences for incredible customer service and self-service alike. Customers can choose to engage on their preferred channel like the IBM support community, live chat, email, phone, or via Watson chatbot. Agents can then use Slack in critical situations where time is of the essence.
For instance, when a large global brand’s system is down, IBM teams across multiple product areas can easily swarm the problem. Using Slack, support agents bring in other team members to collaborate end to end on the inquiry, easily conversing in real time, diagnosing the situation, and fixing it faster instead of escalating elsewhere. Plus, IBM creates a hypercare Slack channel for new service agent onboarding and training for Service Cloud, dispatch, and field service where they can ask questions and problem solve in real time.
Self-service options like chatbots and customer support communities allow customers to seek answers on their own terms. Communities allow customers to open or check on the status of their cases through digital channels like bots or community forums. And with the combined intelligence of Salesforce Einstein and IBM Watson, customers can receive faster, more accurate answers, pointing them to helpful resources to help with case deflection. Arvind believes self-service options will eventually become ubiquitous among customer, team, and partner experiences alike.
“As consumers, we want to interact when we want to, how we want to,” he said. “We expect that someone has thought about all the data that might be relevant to us.”
To deliver even more capabilities and self-service innovation, IBM integrates with AppExchange ISV partner Copado. Copado’s automated development features prevent downtime, not only internally as IBM’s service and sales production orgs work together, but also externally for customers. These automated activities ultimately allow IBM’s production teams to build better and faster in a less manual way. And rather than making a customer wait for updates, new front-end functionality can be rolled out immediately in a customer community while Copado helps ensure the process is smooth and effective.
Hearing directly from customers is crucial in both service and sales. With Slack, sellers can communicate inside and outside the organization, hearing directly from customers to accelerate deal cycles.
“It's important for us to understand some of the nuances that are taking place real time within a client,” said Jennifer Kady, VP & GM IBM Security Sales. “And Slack affords us that ability. Whether I'm speaking with our delivering deployment teams or working with end users that are performing with one of our platforms, I have the ability to break those conversations into pieces. And I can do that securely with the Slack platform.""
Plus, with Customer 360, sellers can leverage Slack together with sales data to take client ideas, access the people and information they need, discuss how IBM can assist the client, and build the solution straight into subsequent actions that help the customer move forward.
Unifying teams with a single view also accelerates velocity and decision-making capabilities for sales. Previously, much of IBM’s sales processes occurred off the platform in spreadsheets and presentations. Siloed line items meant sellers were unsure whose numbers were correct, causing confusion when attempting to forecast an entire account. Now, teams can get on the same page with built-in templates for community-based collaboration that scale business processes like account planning. And with AI, IBM can automate sales processes and better predict account outcomes.
“I don’t have to have all of our sellers go through a great deal of transformational training and enablement,” said Jennifer. “You can come onto this platform and glean quite a bit of information just from the initial dashboards.”
With Salesforce and Slack, IBM has a clearer picture of what challenges its customers are facing and how it can lead them toward better solutions. With its global teams unified around a single source of truth, IBM has not only improved employee productivity and created a more vibrant, community-based culture, but enhanced seller and partner transparency. And when work flows, revenue, customer satisfaction, and loyalty grow with it.
",Technology,IBM
"Throughout its history, L’Oréal has always combined the best of beauty and technology to deliver exceptional products and services. Today, the world’s number one beauty company is taking its consumer experience to the next level by undergoing a complete digital transformation.
Before L’Oréal even had a name, the beauty giant was disrupting its industry. It began in 1909 when a Parisian chemist and entrepreneur invented the first safe hair dye. Today, the company is pioneering the YSL Rouge Sur Mesure, a smart device that uses artificial intelligence to create custom lipsticks. It can even tailor shades to complement your outfit.
“Beauty is about individuality,” said Nicolas Hieronimus, CEO. “Therefore, we have to cater every solution and every product to an individual’s needs — the color of their skin, the shape of their brow, or their hair color.”
From the Age Perfect Midnight Serum by L’Oréal Paris, to the Curl Manifesto collection by Kérastase, to YSL’s Rouge Sur Mesure, L’Oréal’s product variety covers almost every consumer need imaginable. But the global beauty market is changing. Not only are new brands constantly appearing, but consumers are looking for more innovations, deeper connections with brands, and more exciting, personalized beauty experiences.
So how does the world’s number one beauty company, with 35 global brands selling six billion products per year, design millions of unique beauty journeys at scale?
By reinventing the beauty experience itself — embarking on a “Beauty Tech” transformation.
To L’Oréal, this means using technology to help consumers realize the potential of their own unique beauty. Yet, delivering a truly individualized experience requires connecting data from each touchpoint into a single source of truth about each consumer while respecting data privacy. That’s where Salesforce comes in.
Here’s an inside look at how Hieronimus and the team at L’Oréal use Salesforce Customer 360 to forge deeper relationships with consumers on a global scale.
Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO
Step 1. Strengthen consumer relationships by personalizing every interaction.
Step 2. Boost direct-to-consumer revenue with unique shopping experiences.
Step 3. Improve agent satisfaction by 70% while elevating consumer care.
Step 4. Recreate in-store interactions virtually — and boost Beauty Tech adoption by 336%.
Step 5. Drive B2B revenue by helping sales reps accomplish more in less time.
Step 6. Use the power of Beauty Tech to become more inclusive and sustainable.
In this video (2:37), hear how L'Oréal uses Beauty Tech and data to deliver ultra-personalized consumer experiences on a global scale.
L’Oréal’s 35 brands, including iconic names like L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline New York, YSL Beauté, and La Roche-Posay, are as diverse and unique as the consumers they serve. To bring the best of these brands to consumers around the world, L’Oréal has to create beauty journeys tailor-made to each consumer’s taste, budget, and shopping habits.
“Our growth comes from attracting new consumers and increasing the lifetime value of these consumers,” said Hieronimus. “It’s about making each consumer happy and satisfied with the products and services we deliver, each time they come into contact with L’Oréal.”
To make every consumer experience as relevant and personalized as possible, the company implemented Marketing Cloud, currently live across 13 brands. With Marketing Cloud Personalization, L’Oréal builds individual consumer journeys, delivered through preferred channels such as email and social media, from real-time and historical data. This allows the company to send consumers tailored product recommendations, beauty advice, or special offers automatically — wherever they prefer to shop.
For instance, when consumers use the skin diagnosis service on Lancôme’s mobile site, the company can email them their results and continue the engagement by recommending tailored regimens and products. If their shopping journey gets disturbed by a phone call or an urgent text message, the engagement doesn’t have to end there. Using Journey Builder, Lancôme can send consumers automated abandoned cart emails so they can pick up exactly where they left off.
‘‘Messaging based on shopping habits and use of Salesforce services powers our quest to bring greater personalization, relevance, and satisfaction to our consumers in this ever-evolving and complex beauty consumer journey,” said Asmita Dubey, Chief Digital & Marketing Officer.
L’Oréal wants to drive consumer engagement and loyalty across its brands. To achieve this goal, there’s only one place to start: designing consistent, integrated shopping experiences tailored to each consumer.
Commerce Cloud provides the foundation for connected online shopping across more than 200 of L’Oréal’s D2C websites. Einstein Product Recommendations delivers AI-powered product recommendations based on a consumer's browsing or purchase history. For example, if you add lightweight sunscreen to your cart, Einstein may recommend SPF lip-balms or moisturizers at checkout.
“We use Einstein because it allows us to analyze the shopping habits of our consumers,” said Dubey. “Then we can make predictive product recommendations. This technology has generated 15% to 20% of sales for one of our B2C brands.”
So far, L’Oréal has seen double-digit increases in average order value (AOV) from its B2C websites.
But shopping habits aren’t the only thing that L’Oréal analyzes online. Some of its brands, like Kiehl’s, can analyze your skin, too.
Through the Kiehl’s website’s “Healthy Skin Hub,” you can use the Instant Skin Reader to find the right skin care products for you. The Instant Skin Reader uses AI to scan your face, identify your skin type and conditions, and use an algorithm to recommend personalized next steps and the right product regimen to achieve healthy skin. You can even talk to a skincare consultant via chat, or stop by your local Kiehl’s store if you prefer an in-person consultation. And whether you do the consultation online or offline, your personal data is always secure.
Read the second edition State of Commerce report.

Learn about:
Executives’ push to bridge online and offline commerce
First-party data's role in light of changing regulations
Seller reactions to rising customer expectations

Despite millions of consumer interactions taking place online, having data dispersed across different systems prevented L’Oréal’s service teams from delivering the ultimate personalized care consumers wanted. Now the company uses Service Cloud to consolidate data across brands and channels, such as SMS, chat, and email, into a single view of each consumer. From a single dashboard, agents can pull up consumers’ service and purchase history, view the status of their orders, and even see activity updates in real time.
For instance, a consumer may order the YSL Rouge Sur Mesure online. Due to supply chain issues, the order triggers a “process exception — fulfillment issue” error, which automatically creates and routes a case to an agent. With the product and shipment information already in the system, the agent can proactively submit a “reship” order before the consumer even knows about the issue. This lets brands ensure that products will get to their consumers in a timely manner — without them having to reach out or follow up.
The employee experience is also better. In L’Oréal’s North American region, Einstein chatbots deflect basic cases and show agents options to personalize messages. Einstein automatically classifies email cases, too, which reduces busywork and gives agents more time to connect with consumers. As a result, agent satisfaction scores are up by 70%.
“Service Cloud reduces case processing time because agents don't have to struggle with so many different systems,” said Dubey. “This allows us to better care for our consumers, and therefore drive better consumer satisfaction.”
L’Oréal’s motto is Saisir ce qui commence — or “Seize what is starting.” So when augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) quietly entered the industry in the early 2010s, the company jumped on the opportunity to innovate once again, becoming the first cosmetics company to implement virtual try-on technology at scale.
Nicolas Hieronimus, CEO
Today, L’Oréal’s AI-powered Virtual Try On tool lets you “try on” products wherever you are — keeping your information safe with built-in data privacy features. Using a smartphone or computer, you can use a live video feature or simply upload a selfie to create a virtual beauty station where you can test hundreds of lipsticks, eyeshadows, foundations, mascaras, and more. To date, the company has seen over one billion virtual try-ons across its portfolio of brands.
If you’d like personal assistance creating a new look, you can also start a virtual beauty consultation right from live chat. Using AppExchange partner app SightCall, the company enables video chat consultations for its L’Oréal Paris hair color, where you can use the Virtual Try On feature to experiment with different hair colors and choose the right shade for you.
Since launching its virtual consultation service, the company has seen a 336% increase in the number of virtual try-ons for its L’Oréal Paris hair dye.
As L’Oréal deepens its relationships with consumers through Beauty Tech innovations and personalized experiences, it has also set its sights on another customer base: beauty professionals.
Using B2B Commerce Cloud, L’Oréal plans to elevate the relationship it has with professional customers, such as salons and independent stylists. This will allow the company to become a true one-stop-shop for beauty professionals, who will be able to find everything they need in a virtual marketplace to serve their clients — from luxury hair masks to eco-friendly salon tools.
L’Oréal is also investing in its relationships with retailers and the sales teams that serve them. Consumer Goods Cloud helps sales reps ensure that retailers, like pharmacies and grocery stores, are stocked with the right products so that consumers can always find what they want.
Consumer Goods Cloud helps L'Oréal manage trade promotion, plan store visits, optimize field execution, automate in-store tasks, and even train store associates. If a store is missing a certain shade of foundation, for example, visiting sales reps can place an order or check pricing accuracy directly from their tablet, regardless of connectivity. They can also pull up store performance data to review with management, view diagrams of where products should be placed on shelves, and check inventory levels for other products, all while keeping each customer’s data secure.
Like innovation, diversity and inclusivity are in L’Oréal’s DNA. This has led the company to create increasingly personalized products and services with the power of Beauty Tech.
For example, Le Teint Particulier from Lancôme is an in-store service that creates custom foundations. It begins with an in-store beauty advisor scanning your face. From there, a patented algorithm analyzes the data and determines your ideal shade and formulates a personalized foundation in 20 minutes. In addition to the shade, you can also choose your preferred level of coverage and hydration. In total, this service offers 72,000 different combinations.
L’Oréal is also committed to the beauty of the planet by reducing its environmental footprint and fighting climate change, deforestation, and water scarcity. In 2021, the company partnered with Swiss environmental start-up Gjosa to develop the L’Oréal Professional Water Saver, a new technology that helps reduce water consumption by 60%. Named in TIME’s 100 Best Inventions of 2021, this specially designed showerhead creates water droplets that are 10 times smaller while increasing the pressure for more efficient hair rinsing. This cuts water use by 60% compared with standard rinsing. This new system is expected to be in 10,000 salons in the next few years, potentially saving billions of liters of water every year.
With science, technology, and customer-centricity working together, L’Oréal can move the world one magical beauty journey at a time.
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",Consumer Goods,L'Oréal
"First, the founders of Mercedes-Benz invented the car. Then, the company spent another century obsessing over the finer points. Innovations came in the form of engineering feats like the anti-lock braking system or trendsetting designs like the gull-wing door. Now, there’s a new company focus, one every bit as important as its vehicles: its customers.
In a massive transformation for a company of its size and heritage, Mercedes-Benz is bringing its legendary attention to detail to everything its customers see, hear, and feel. According to CEO Ola Källenius, this starts from the moment customers begin searching for cars online and continues through all the years they’ll spend driving them.
Källenius said the idea is to give every customer a true Mercedes experience — not just in the car, but in every touchpoint with the brand.
“You can never forget why we are doing this. We’re doing it for the customer,” Källenius said. “We’re doing it for the Mercedes-Benz fans. And that’s why we are now taking that customer-centric approach into a new dimension.”
Källenius likes to say he works for a startup 135 years in the making. It was in 1886 that Carl Benz introduced the world’s first automobile, the Motorwagen, which had three spoked wheels and a top speed of 10 miles per hour. Today, innovation at Mercedes-Benz looks a little different.
CEO
Take the all-new, all-electric EQS for example. The car is part of the company’s push to go all-electric.
The inside of a Mercedes-Benz – which was historically viewed as a sanctuary from the world – is now more connected than ever, with in-car technology. The 56-inch Hyperscreen dash inside the EQS can, for example, suggest an in-seat massage at the precise moment when the driver is most likely to want one, based on the person’s history of using that feature.
But the brand journey starts long before a customer can sink into the seat of his or her new Mercedes. The company’s personal touch begins on its website, where customers who choose their ideal EQS color and voluntarily share their email address return a few days later to a Mercedes-Benz homepage featuring the car in that color.
That’s where Salesforce comes in.
Mercedes-Benz and Salesforce have become strategic partners, using a management process that has been key to Salesforce’s growth: the V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures). That process led to the companies jointly adopting shared guiding principles that included “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable,” eliminating “meta work” (work about work), and engaging in a good dose of #bemorepirate rule-breaking to end entrenched inefficiencies and adopt new ways of working.
Mercedes-Benz is beginning to use Salesforce Customer 360 to unite its marketing, sales, dealer, and service teams around a shared view of each customer. Among the early results: a 160% year-over-year increase in email click-through rates.
Here are some key takeaways you can apply to your business.
1. Connected customer journeys lead to more efficient marketing.
2. Personalization will increase brand loyalty.
3. Digital innovation delights drivers and customers.
4. A company culture shift fuels technological advancements.
In this video (2:22), see how Mercedes-Benz is innovating to address climate change and deliver more personalized, connected experiences for customers to create more drivers for life.
Part of the vision the companies laid out in the V2MOM reads, “Together we innovate unique direct-to-consumer and omni-channel journeys.” That’s a reflection of a sea change in car shopping: 80% of customers now use online sources at key moments in their car-buying journey. To better understand those customers, Mercedes implemented Marketing Cloud, using data to personalize its communication and its approach.
Mercedes-Benz identified these motivations and adapted its marketing accordingly with Marketing Cloud Personalization, a real-time customization and interaction management solution that enables companies to deliver contextually relevant experiences across their channels.
Manager, Digital Marketing

Fifty-four percent of customers switched carmakers in 2019. To boost brand loyalty, Mercedes-Benz supports its drivers with personalization, even after they’ve made a purchase.
Britta Seeger, a member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG responsible for Mercedes-Benz Cars Marketing and Sales, said the key is data. With Salesforce’s Customer 360, multiple departments at Mercedes-Benz – such as marketing, sales, and service – will be able to access shared car data, allowing the team to serve customers in the right way at the right time. For instance, once implemented, Service Cloud can help Mercedes-Benz not only detect when a car is due for a tire change, but also email its owner with a link to make an appointment at the service center that’s closest. At the same time, privacy and data protection play a very important role at Mercedes-Benz. The decision about which data to share and which service to use always lies with the customer.
“We anticipate customers’ wishes and needs,” Seeger said.
No matter how much time customers spend online, 70% of their final purchasing decisions are still driven by the dealership experience. Mercedes-Benz is using Experience Cloud to build a stronger bridge between the online and offline worlds. So when a customer shows up for a test drive, the dealer already knows they’re especially interested in, say, the car’s design and can tailor the conversation accordingly.
“The customer will feel that this dealer knows me – it’s not somebody I’ve never met before,” said Laura Kirndorfer, a data-driven marketing expert at Mercedes-Benz.
One key to that effort is getting Mercedes dealerships on a single CRM, a customer relationship management system. Another is training. Mercedes-Benz is using myTrailhead, Salesforce’s online learning platform, to show retailers how to use Salesforce technology to drive business growth.
Expert Data Driven Marketing
When customers call Mercedes-Benz with a question about their car, they will no longer be asked for their car’s registration number. Their information and service history will be immediately visible to the agent, who can focus on serving the customer’s needs.
With Salesforce Professional Services and Salesforce Partners, Mercedes-Benz is also creating a fully connected customer experience, starting by transforming its global Customer Assistance Center (CAC).
The transformation is as much cultural as it is technological. Mercedes-Benz and the Professional Services team adopted the #bemorepirate mantra to encourage employees to discard old ways of thinking and bring a sense of fun to reimagining the internal processes that lead to luxurious service.
Manager, Product & Process Management
",Automotive,Mercedes-Benz
"If delivering 100 billion hours of content to 700 million people every year wasn’t enough, NBCUniversal is simultaneously building the ultimate digital fan experience for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
For fans, data-driven personalization will enable them to follow their favorite events and athletes while consuming content in their channels of choice.
For advertisers, LA28 provides an unmatched opportunity to reach new audiences. The Games are the latest enhancement to the company’s product portfolio, which revolutionized the industry with a single, scaled advertising offering. With greater visibility and productivity, NBCUniversal’s 1,500-person ad sales division works across departments to customize ad solutions and gain valuable insights into audience behavior, helping it generate $12 billion in annual revenue.
The change-maker behind the scenes of NBCUniversal’s revenue engine is Linda Yaccarino, Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships. One of the most powerful women in TV, according to Adweek, Yaccarino was the first chief in network history to combine broadcast, cable, and digital assets into one unified organization, dubbed “One Portfolio,” an approach that has become an industry-wide standard.
Here are seven ways Yaccarino and team use Salesforce Customer 360 to create a single view of their advertising customers, transform how sales and marketing work together, and lay the groundwork for a sustainable, unrivaled experience for Team USA fans.
Chairman, Global Advertising & Partnerships

Step 1: Unify data so sales teams work from one version of the truth.
Step 2: Personalize targeted client communications to improve open rates 100%.
Step 3: Improve ad sales by aligning business goals for a faster path to value.
Step 4: Slash RFP turnaround times with one integrated platform.
Step 5: Optimize ad performance and impressions with AI-powered analytics.
Step 6: Deliver the ultimate Olympics fan experience using data-driven personalization.
Step 7: Simplify carbon emissions tracking across multiple corporate entities.
In this video (1:55), Linda Yaccarino shares how all the NBCUniversal content you love is powered by strategic advertising decisions using smarter data with Customer 360.
Today, NBCUniversal’s global advertising and partnerships division easily connects advertisers of all types with their target viewers. This requires sales teams to create customized ad packages across a large product portfolio — from sports and news to affiliate cable channels, as well as the organization’s Peacock streaming service.
To deliver this single, scaled advertising offering, NBCUniversal had to:
Unify disparate internal teams and improve visibility into client data.
The company implemented an integrated sales CRM solution to provide a 360-degree view of advertisers’ activity across the organization. As a result, sales teams can now manage advertising spend and performance more effectively.
Customize the ad platform with low-code tools to improve productivity.
This includes unifying sales and revenue management systems to efficiently capture estimated and actual revenue in local currencies, enhancing collaboration between the sales and finance divisions.
Salespeople will soon be able to consolidate important account data, including account plans, close plans, opportunity strategy, and meeting notes, into each CRM account record using a shared collaboration tool.
“This single source of trusted value and truth is the cornerstone of everything we do,"" said Yaccarino.
Flexibility and digital transformation
Automation for faster time to value
Improved sales operations and a more strategic approach

To keep up with audiences, advertisers must move fast. To keep up with advertisers, NBCUniversal needed B2B marketing automation that would keep marketing and sales aligned to the same goals.
Working from a unified platform:
Allows marketing teams to quickly create automated, personalized email campaigns for potential leads based on interactions like page visits or email opens.
Intelligently notifies sales reps to follow up once a lead hits a certain threshold of engagement.
Personalizes the next interaction using insights from an account’s buying activity.
Personalized messages have improved open rates by an incredible 100%, which helps the company build a stronger sales pipeline and close more deals.
“With Salesforce, we’re building a unified information source to help us reimagine collaboration across our entire platform,” said Yaccarino. “This will enable NBCUniversal to continue delivering the highest level of transparency, insights, and results for our customers.”

As new media platforms come online and audience preferences for consuming content evolve, it’s crucial for NBCUniversal to provide advertisers with innovative options that meet their needs. But these shifting trends also mean NBCUniversal needed a partner to help it define priority outcomes and a future-state vision for its digital transformation.
The company engaged Salesforce Professional Services for a strategic planning exercise to align on business goals and push the boundaries of its technology. Embracing The Salesforce Way and its core principle of human centricity, NBCUniversal has been able to boost platform adoption by 29% in 10 months, in addition to transforming ad sales and improving Salesforce end-user experiences.
The company has even created a “change champion” network that provides early visibility to feature releases, communicates benefits, and gathers regular feedback. Plus, NBCUniversal can manage adoption performance with dashboards and scorecards that identify successes and areas for improvement.
NBCUniversal has also improved its sales and marketing just by bringing trade marketing campaigns and data together in a single source of truth. Already, users have decreased effort to create email campaigns by 50%. More consistent and automated lead generation processes across multiple channels have also doubled email open rates and produced more than 1,200 leads in seven months. And by revamping deal workflows, NBCUniversal teams enjoy more efficient processes with a 60% reduction in clicks.
Chairman, Global Advertising & Partnerships
Today, ad agencies and publishers do business out of separate, disconnected order management systems. Coordinating between them requires emails, phone calls, chats, and endless busywork.
NBCUniversal knows the future of advertising will require even greater automation and the ability to converge workflows to process all deal types together. That’s why the company is making its platform even more interoperable with the day-to-day systems agency partners already use.
With expert guidance from Salesforce Professional Services and partner expert, Silverline, NBCUniversal is:
Partnering with media tech leaders to create a new automation layer between publisher and agency order management systems. With Salesforce Media Cloud, NBCUniversal can completely reimagine the entire workflow process, including RFPs.
Transforming the RFP process forever through an integration with omnichannel advertising platform Mediaocean. Instead of asking platform buyers to submit RFPs via email, they will submit through NBCUniversal’s One Platform proposal pipeline within seconds.
Significantly reducing RFP turnaround times so NBCUniversal sellers can respond to buyers faster and reduce manual data re-entry into multiple systems. This way, advertisers’ linear and digital campaigns can begin sooner — and they can spend more time focused on the customer.
NBCUniversal’s agency partners also rely on data to make decisions. To serve them and optimize campaigns across divisions and channels, NBCUniversal has adopted an AI-powered marketing intelligence platform. This will allow both internal teams and the company’s agency partners to easily track ad delivery and campaign performance.
The company also plans to use a data analytics and visualization tool to analyze data across different business systems and make insights more accessible to employees.
Having a greater understanding of how ads perform unites team members around common goals to optimize impressions through targeted or broad-reach advertising campaigns.
Traditional sponsorships create brand recognition by slapping a company logo on a product or television screen. By deepening relationships with its advertising customers and viewers, NBCUniversal can now connect advertisers and fans through more authentic, personalized experiences.
Here’s how:
NBCUniversal gathers data across multiple touchpoints to customize digital experiences for Team USA fans. This way, fans can more easily follow their favorite events and athletes and consume content in their channels of choice.
The company further personalizes content and delivers it across multiple platforms to help connect fans — including those of a newer, younger demographic — with the Team USA athletes.
This will create deeper engagement with fans in the lead-up to and during the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic games, while allowing advertisers to control their narratives.
Chairman, Global Advertising & Partnerships
Meeting fan expectations also means prioritizing sustainability across all NBCUniversal properties. The company has made a commitment to become carbon neutral by 2035.
Yet, tracking carbon emissions across news stations, TV production sites, fleet vehicles, offices, theme parks, and events like LA28 is highly complex — especially for a two-person team.
Instead of using spreadsheets to manually track energy, waste, and recycling across all NBCUniversal properties, the company is implementing Net Zero Cloud with expert guidance from Salesforce Professional Services to:
Improve carbon tracking efficiency
Easily pull reports to send to its parent company, Comcast
Accelerate its path to net neutrality
NBCUniversal is focusing on its Scope 1 and 2 historical data first to scale back carbon emissions within its immediate reach (e.g., heating and cooling, transportation), with a plan to input Scope 3 data (e.g., vendor/partner emissions) soon after.
Using the Climate Action Dashboard, NBCUniversal’s sustainability team can make quicker, smarter decisions, track usage and trends, and report to its parent company, Comcast, in an effort to drive down emissions.
With intelligent tech and simplified processes that make it easier for partners to advertise, NBCUniversal can meet fans with more than generic ads. It can delight them with personalized content that improves every experience, from LA28 to their favorite shows and beyond.
",Technology,NBCUniversal
"Schneider Electric is putting efficiency and sustainability at the core of its purpose and mission. Since 2018, the company has helped its customers save and avoid 347 million tons of CO2 emissions by providing digital energy efficiency solutions for buildings, data centers, infrastructure, and industries.
From homeowners to grid operators and manufacturing giants, thousands of customers in more than 100 countries rely on Schneider Electric to help them use energy and resources more efficiently — a need underscored by recent energy and supply chain crises, as well as the imperative to slow down climate change. Power distribution, smart grid, and software-driven automation solutions are just a few ways the company helps customers achieve ambitious efficiency and sustainability goals in uncertain times.
But enabling energy efficiency depends on efficiency behind the scenes.
“We used to just do energy distribution. Now we can prevent issues,” said Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman and CEO. “We can tackle building efficiency and bring predictive maintenance capabilities so our customers don’t have to suffer problems.”
Using its 10-year partnership with Salesforce, Schneider Electric makes it easier for customers and partners to solve energy efficiency and industrial automation challenges by giving its 40,000 frontline employees a 360-degree view of the customer and technology to work more efficiently.
Let’s see how Tricoire and team use Salesforce Customer 360 to provide energy stability to customers and distributors in an unpredictable world.
VP, Sales Management & Support
Step 1: Generate 500 sales opportunities in a day.
Step 2: Decrease time to quote from days to minutes.
Step 3: Give teams and managers a single view of data.
Step 4: Rally teams to deliver innovative — and reliable — products.
Step 5: Serve people instead of tracking numbers.
Digital innovation is transforming the world of energy. As businesses around the world embark on their journey to net zero, they turn to intelligent, integrated solutions that enable energy monitoring, optimization of consumption, and integration of renewables in the electricity mix. But the only way to get these innovations quickly into customers’ hands is to sell them as efficiently as possible.
Schneider Electric’s sales reps can now each generate up to 500 opportunities a day — a task that previously took three weeks.
Using Sales Cloud and CRM Analytics, the company created a Digital Opportunity Factory that uses AI to find sales prospects who have an unmet need, or “white space” opportunities that Schneider specializes in serving.
How it works:
White space opportunities are identified and classified
Opportunities are then assigned to the appropriate sales professional
Einstein Discovery scores opportunities throughout each sales stage
Sales reps see AI-generated recommendations for progressing each opportunity
“Today, Sales Cloud covers the full opportunity lifecycle,” said Irina Zubova, Vice President, Sales Management and Support. “Every step of this journey is followed within Sales Cloud.”
Since building the Digital Opportunity Factory, Schneider Electric reduced time to close by 30% and earned a 15%–20% success rate from lead to order — up from 2% in past campaigns.
If you want to learn more, check out the links to the right. For an even deeper dive, take a trail or two on our online learning platform, Trailhead.
Learn how to scale faster, at a larger scale
Automate complex sales tasks
Bring more value to your customer relationships

Each year, Schneider Electric fulfills thousands of customer requests for innovative energy management solutions. Some requests, especially those from distributors, contain massive and highly complex orders that resulted in lengthy quoting and fulfillment processes.
Now, sales and project teams need as little as 15 minutes to complete the quote-to-order process for orders of the same scale.
Used in the company’s North American region, a new automated quoting system, built on the Salesforce Platform, saves sales reps hours of precious time while reducing human error.
How it works:
A sales rep completes a proposal in Sales Cloud
AppExchange partner FinancialForce matches the proposal to an existing project
MuleSoft transfers the proposal data to an open source database
Heroku processes the data — up to 5,000 records at once — and sends it back to Sales Cloud
Once quoting is complete, Salesforce Flow saves teams even more time by automating order fulfillment. With a more efficient quoting system and faster order fulfillment, Schneider Electric can make customers and distributors happier.
While sales reps need data visualization at a granular level, others, like executive leadership, prefer a bird’s eye view.
“Leadership needs to have a consolidated view of the organization, down to the entity,” said Zubova. “This is what we can provide with CRM analytics dashboards — the business intelligence we have today.”
CRM Analytics gives leaders real-time visibility into global sales operations, commercial performance, compliance, and more with AI-powered analytics and intelligent insights. From a single dashboard, executives view the company’s most important metrics in detail and share comprehensive business plans and service recommendations with stakeholders.
“Our CRM Analytics portfolio covers the full scope of Salesforce functionalities today,” said Cem Yöndem, Vice President of End-to-End Digital Customer Relationships, IT Platforms. “This includes Sales Management, Customer Support, Quality, and Services domains for more than 15,000 users worldwide.”
The company builds low-code apps with the Salesforce Platform to speed up case resolution and boost employee productivity. One app, called issue-to-prevention (I2P), helps sales and service teams collaborate with research and development to solve cases in real time.
For example, if multiple industrial customers who’ve purchased smart factory software receive the same error message, service and quality teams can batch those cases into a single issue. This not only prevents duplicate case resolution efforts, but notifies development teams of a potential problem with a particular product.
The I2P app also builds intelligent models from historical data to predict product issues before they become problems for customers. This way, Schneider Electric can take proactive measures to ensure its energy management solutions remain reliable and, most importantly, customers are satisfied.
VP, End-to-End Digital Customer Relationships, IT Platforms
Schneider Electric partners with Salesforce Professional Services for expert guidance and implementation best practices. The team of strategic experts ensures that Schneider Electric maximizes its Salesforce technology by:
Embracing a platform mindset to optimize solutions and limit customizations
Providing direct access to innovation to influence product releases
Designing a roadmap that takes the company from vision to value, faster
With Schneider Electric’s customer base spanning a wide range of countries and industries, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for customer support. To tailor service to customers’ unique needs, the company empowers Customer Care Center agents with Service Cloud.
Customer Care Center agents are ready to respond to customer outreach with a 360-degree view of the customer’s data. If a customer’s shipment of lighting control components gets delayed, the agent can pull up the customer’s account and order information without having to ask for the order or tracking number. With this information, the agent provides an updated ETA or expedites a request through a custom workflow.
“We have around 8 million interactions coming to customer support per year,” said Zubova. “The Customer Care Center is the first line of support for our customers, however they prefer to contact us — phone, email, or digital channels.”
Customers can book a call or video chat appointment with technical support agents via Scheduler. Or, they can take advantage of self-service resources, such as knowledge articles and tutorials, for quick answers to commonly asked questions. Self-service options like these deflect cases, allowing the Customer Support Center to distribute its workload more evenly and free up service reps to focus on more complex cases.
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",Energy & Utilities,Schneider Electric
"In 2013, T-Mobile US disrupted the wireless industry with a major shift: giving customers exactly what they wanted.
Unlike its competitors at the time, T-Mobile dropped annual service contracts, overage fees, and roaming fees, and focused on improving customer service and delivering more value. And today, T-Mobile’s 5G network is the largest, fastest, and most-awarded 5G network in the country.*
Because of its shift toward radical customer centricity, T-Mobile experienced year-over-year growth that compelled other major carriers to follow suit – or lose customers for good.
But before this journey started, T-Mobile faced significant growing pains. Around 2009, the company was struggling to provide sufficient coverage outside of major U.S. cities, diminishing its perceived value.
Addressing this challenge required a twofold solution. First, T-Mobile had to distinguish itself from the wireless status quo, which was unpopular at the time. Second, the company needed the product and service innovation to turn this refocused mission into reality. That’s when it launched its Un-carrier campaign.
“We are a people-first company, and that’s what makes us the Un-carrier,” said Poppy Coutinho, Senior Manager of Product & Technology.
Becoming the Un-carrier meant embracing massive change, beginning with understanding customer wants and needs. These included flexible plans, transparent pricing, and personalized service – factors the industry was historically slow to act on. Then, the company unlearned outdated business practices, created an unconventional new business model that put customers first, and simplified sales and service.
“One of the things we are absolutely passionate about is that we are customer-focused,” said Marti Walsh, Senior Marketing Manager. “Everything that T-Mobile does is based on the customer.”
But T-Mobile’s journey didn’t stop with its customers. To ensure great customer service, the company needed to prioritize its employee experience. That’s when T-Mobile began its journey to unify its sales, service, marketing, and IT departments around a shared view of customer information with Salesforce Customer 360, one integrated CRM platform.
Let’s take a look at how Coutinho, Walsh, and the rest of the T-Mobile team use Salesforce Customer 360 to digitally transform the employee and customer experience.
CMO

Step 1: Understand every customer through connected data.
Step 2: Empower sales reps to deliver streamlined and personalized customer service.
Step 3: Deliver better and faster customer care with low-code apps.
Step 4: Scale the business by optimizing lead segmentation and marketing strategy.
Step 5: Keep teams connected and engaged while working from home.
To serve customers more effectively, T-Mobile needed to create a full picture of each B2B and B2C customer. The company already had success implementing Salesforce initiatives around service and customer care in partnership with IBM. However, delivering on its Un-carrier mission required adopting a new series of CRM features.
This was especially true when it came to T-Mobile for Business. When millions of potential buyers started conversations in stores, T-Mobile lacked the technology to capture that information and move it across digital channels. Sales representatives were also limited in follow-up opportunities after these conversations.
To streamline sales and service processes across more than 5,000 stores nationwide, T-Mobile equipped its in-store employees with sales tools they needed to serve customers faster. Through a custom app, sales representatives can capture in-store consultation data to create a unique profile for each prospect. With this single source of truth, other T-Mobile teams can reference and update this data as prospects move through the sales funnel.
Customers can also schedule retail appointments through T-Mobile’s website or its custom welcome app. When customers arrive at their local T-Mobile store, sales representatives are ready to greet them with a full picture of their account history.
“The biggest advantage of Salesforce is that it keeps all of the customer data in one place,” Coutinho said. “It provides a single view of the customer that allows us to cater to customer needs and meet them wherever they are.”
By connecting prospective customer data across in-store and online touchpoints, sales representatives can focus on delivering more personalized retail experiences – wherever customers start their journey.
Transforming the T-Mobile customer experience required a similar transformation internally. To increase sales representative and service agent efficiency, T-Mobile built integrated apps that improve its employee – and ultimately customer – experience using Communications Cloud and the Salesforce Platform.
Communications Cloud provides the industry-specific CPQ and contract lifecycle management functions sales teams need to generate quotes and contracts faster and with more accuracy. For example, in-store sales representatives can quickly process a customer’s credit from their tablets with a custom, Salesforce Platform-powered app. So far, T-Mobile has seen a 93% reduction in clicks throughout the sales process, resulting in an 85% faster renewal process – plus a seven-hour reduction in weekly work effort.
Communications Cloud’s impact extends across T-Mobile’s business with the built-in flexibility and integration capabilities of the Salesforce Platform. By optimizing service around a single view of the customer, teams can reduce duplicate data entry and busywork, giving employees more time for personalized customer support.
Learn how IT execs are extending automation strategies to accelerate operations and work smarter.

With a more connected picture of its customers, T-Mobile had to put this data into action. The company used the Salesforce Platform’s custom app-building features to help employees serve customers more efficiently. For instance, sales representatives can now aggregate leads and deliver more personalized customer care inside and outside of the store.
“We’ve leveraged the low-code aspect to build secure and powerful products, which increases agility,” Coutinho said. “For example, we’ve used the out-of-the-box approval process to enable auto approvals. And the UI for our products is built using Salesforce App Builder, which significantly reduces development time. We also used screen flows to create a guided user experience for key business processes.”
The ability to build low-code and no-code workflows has transformed internal operations for sales and service teams. For example, customer service agents can use Slack’s Workflow Builder function to easily access shared documents, while managers can gain better visibility into customer support operations. Additionally, teams can create automated workflows to request status updates, share peer recognition, and more.
Senior Manager of Product & Technology

Low-code and no-code apps enhance the customer experience as well. With the Heroku app-building integration, customers can take control of their retail experience for appointment and wait time management. T-Mobile also uses Heroku Connect to sync over 180 million rows of data across orgs and build new apps as needed. Additionally, Heroku Customer Experience better equips stores to handle walk-in traffic and manage customer wait times.
During the sales and onboarding process, T-Mobile uses CRM Analytics to guide sales representatives to high-probability opportunities while flagging at-risk accounts. The Customer Care team can also accelerate call center demand forecasting so agents can help customers faster.
T-Mobile uses Experience Cloud to manage partner and employee experiences within its Metro-by-T-Mobile division. Now, the company can orchestrate tracking, workflows, and approvals for all indirect procurement all from one digital experience platform. T-Mobile conducts all of its dealer management processes on Experience Cloud.
As T-Mobile’s network grew, the business needed the right tools to optimize its marketing strategy. To accommodate rapid growth while maintaining excellent customer service, T-Mobile implemented custom marketing automation and lead nurturing features in August 2020 amid concurrent challenges – navigating COVID-19 and finalizing a merger with Sprint.
Rather than adding to business challenges, expanding marketing capabilities proved instrumental in progressing the merger. For instance, T-Mobile was able to migrate a massive volume of Sprint data to T-Mobile while streamlining use cases from Sprint’s marketing automation integration.
The company can also automate lead management processes, allowing sales representatives to spend less time on manual tasks and more time building quality relationships with prospective customers. As a result, sales teams can generate more pipeline and close deals faster.
T-Mobile now uses Marketing Cloud to expand and manage newer service offerings within the company’s home internet division and deploy tools for sales process optimization, which will include journey builders and API calling.
The pandemic brought massive change to all areas of T-Mobile. Aside from closing its merger with Sprint, the company had only two weeks to transition its workforce to being fully remote. But with Communications Cloud already implemented, T-Mobile was positioned to act quickly while continuing to deliver uninterrupted customer service.
For instance, sales reps rely on the platform to nurture customer relationships. From a single dashboard, they can prioritize daily tasks, determine who they talk to next, and keep a pulse on current customer conversations from anywhere — which is critical to supporting customers in times.
To embrace flexibility and keep employees engaged with their teams from home, the T-Mobile Care team moved more than 12,000 call center agents to virtual work. T-Mobile implemented Slack as its digital HQ, powering communication for thousands of users across the company.
The company also used Slack to share important COVID-19 information with employees in real time. Store managers received answers to location-specific questions in an average of two minutes, enabling them to quickly disseminate proper guidelines.
Slack also aided the onboarding of more than 73,000 Sprint employees to complete the merger. To facilitate a smooth transition, T-Mobile created a virtual command center on Slack to break down silos and support communication between about 200 T-Mobile and Sprint employees.
As part of its response to COVID-19, T-Mobile launched a low-code co-browsing pilot through AppExchange partner Glance. This feature enabled real-time screen sharing between customers and service agents, allowing for fast, contactless case resolution. Adding this feature also eased the burden of call centers handling pandemic-driven spikes in case volumes.
Prioritizing sales and service experiences kept T-Mobile adaptable and resilient through a concurrent merger and pandemic. With Customer 360, the company continues to propel innovations built around a unified view of customer – and employee – needs.
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",Communications,T-Mobile
"Growing your business while reducing costs may seem like a tall order. But with the right tools and strategies, you can see results as eye-catching as ADT’s — a 62% decrease in maintenance and development costs, plus 1 million truck rolls avoided in a year.
ADT has been a pioneer in the security industry since 1874, beginning with a telegraph-based call box connected to a few dozen homes. Today, it’s traded call boxes for smart home security systems that detect, score, and report common household threats like fire, carbon monoxide, flood and intrusion automatically.
Customer preferences have changed too. They expect fast service, especially for small issues, like “My window sensor isn’t working properly.” ADT responded with an innovative way to help customers troubleshoot issues or install new products quickly and on their own: the Virtual Assistance Program.
Virtual assistance helped ADT to:
Shift approximately 40% of service volume to virtual channels
Resolve 80% of virtual service appointments without dispatching a truck
“Within the first year of the program, we avoided 1 million truck rolls,” Don Young, ADT Chief Operating Officer, said. “The customers love being satisfied instantly with that virtual experience, and they love being empowered to solve problems themselves.”
Behind the scenes, Young and his teams use Salesforce to help power these experiences. Here’s a closer look at the strategy the company has used for its accomplishments so far.
1. Save customer time and improve satisfaction by shifting approximately 40% of service volume to virtual channels.
2. Reduce costs and emissions by eliminating 1 million truck rolls.
3. Enhance the employee experience with automation and self-service.
4. Grow your subscriber base by customizing your sales pitch.
5. Reduce costs and empower employees with connected systems.
 
SVP & CIO
 
Whenever customers called about a problem with their smart home security system, service agents would have to schedule a four-hour window for a technician to visit their home. If the problem required part replacements, it could take multiple days — and truck rolls — for their system to resume normal function.
Today, there are simpler solutions. Powered by Service Cloud Visual Remote Assistant (VRA), ADT Virtual Assistance lets customers troubleshoot issues or install new products in as little as 30 minutes with live video guidance. Here’s how it works:
A customer receives a new doorbell camera from ADT
Through the ADT app on their smartphone, the customer schedules a 30-minute virtual installation appointment
When it’s time for the appointment, a security advisor walks the customer through installation steps using two-way video
The security advisor lets the customer know of relevant product offers and upgrades before closing the case
If the customer request requires a field service technician, ADT uses the information gathered from the virtual appointment to ensure the technician has the right knowledge and equipment to solve the problem in a single visit. So far, 40% of all service appointments have become virtual — that’s around 4,000 per day. Approximately 80% of those cases are resolved without dispatching a truck.
“We found that first-time resolution became higher because we had the right part at the right time,” said Sam Jaddi, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer. “The initial virtual appointment allowed us to know exactly where the challenge was.”
   
Learn how top-performing businesses use field service management to:
Drive more revenue
Operate more efficiently while reducing costs
Deliver better customer outcomes
Serve customers from anywhere.

Another advantage of moving 40% of service appointments virtual is reducing the number of trucks on the road. Before ADT Virtual Assistance, the company would dispatch as many as 10,000 trucks per day, upping the total cost of fleet maintenance, labor, and related expenses.
But with virtual service solutions in place, ADT has been able to dramatically reduce truck rolls and associated costs. In fact, the company was able to reduce daily service visits by 40%, resulting in fewer truck rolls.
EVP & COO
 
With fewer trucks on the road, the company leaves a smaller carbon footprint, too. The reduction in truck rolls helps ADT reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by using substantially less fuel — equating to a reduction of over 14,000 tons of GHG emissions within the first year of launching the Virtual Assistance Program.
 
While customers troubleshoot and install products on their own, service teams have more time to dedicate to complex cases — now made easier with new service tools and a 360-degree view of each customer.
Previously, service agents had to toggle between several different applications to resolve a case. Now, these systems are seamlessly connected with an API-led integration layer. This lets agents pull up a unified profile of every customer they interact with, no matter which system or product they call about.
For example, a customer who recently called about a smart thermostat install may call again about installing a new smoke detector. Since both products appear on the customer’s profile, the service agent can address the customer’s concerns without asking a list of clarifying questions. Additionally, the agent can follow up on the thermostat’s performance or recommend a product upgrade.
Visual Remote Assistant simplifies case resolution for customers and agents.
ADT also uses chatbots and self-service resources to help customers find answers without involving an agent, giving agents more time to focus on complex cases. If customers require additional assistance with self-service options, their question automatically goes to an agent equipped to answer it.
Keeping a pulse on service team performance is simpler, too. Using Tableau, leadership can view agent performance data and other metrics in colorful dashboards that display chatbot deflection rates, lead times, and call resolution efficiency.
Sellers want to spend their time connecting with leads, not on administrative tasks. Using automated workflows in Sales Cloud, they can automatically qualify leads, configure quotes, and schedule appointments from any device, like their mobile phone.
Thanks to data connected with Mulesoft, sellers can customize offers based on regional information, such as crime spikes or natural disasters. For instance, a seller may receive an alert that a resident of California’s Riverside County is at high risk for wildfire activity. With this information, the seller can then offer residents a discounted smart smoke alarm system to complete their security package.
Customer risk analysis happens even faster in direct channel sales. By integrating its Salesforce instances with partner apps like Invoca, ADT analyzes important customer variables, such as demographic and financial data, in real time. Plus, colorful dashboards let sales leaders scenario plan and realign resources with confidence.
To help its teams continue to deliver exceptional customer experiences, ADT has key strategic partnerships to help keep its systems running at peak performance.
ADT implemented MuleSoft to institutionalize common services from all systems using API-led integration. This allows customer-facing teams, like sales and service, as well as internal business customers to access a single source of customer information wherever they are. So far, ADT has built over 150 APIs that handle roughly 20 million transactions a month.
 
With a unified, scalable platform and guidance from Copado, the company can also launch new features faster and at a much lower cost. In fact, ADT has reduced development and maintenance costs by 62% since implementing MuleSoft.
To keep its platform running at peak performance, the company relies on the Signature Success Plan for issue prevention and proactive recommendations, such as identifying unused or underperforming apps. In the past year alone, the Signature Success team helped ADT improve its platform health and stability, resolving 225 support cases before they resulted in system errors.
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",Technology,ADT
"Consumers have more choice in where to spend their money than ever. But when budgets get tight, they’ll flock to the businesses they know will deliver the most value. How, then, can you ensure that you’re attracting as many repeat customers as possible?
For Casey’s General Stores, the answer is simple: Give customers more of what they want, when they want it.
Casey’s, the third largest convenience chain in the U.S., engages millions of customers each year with fast and friendly service across more than 2,400 stores. But to retain loyal customers, the company needed to deliver exceptional experiences outside of the store, too.
As customers demanded more convenient and personalized digital experiences, Casey’s shifted its digital strategy by:
Delivering more relevant offers and promotions based on purchase history
Providing more convenient ordering options
Giving customers more personalized rewards for their loyalty
Leading the charge toward a more customer-centric Casey’s, Art Sebastian, Vice President of Digital Experience, used Salesforce to bring this vision to life. In just a few years, Sebastian and his team were able to turn data from billions of customer interactions into hyperpersonalized experiences that kept customers coming back.
For instance, with real time data activation, Casey’s can create personalized email segments 30 times faster than before. Plus, API-led integration lets the company meet customer needs and introduce new services four times faster — among other remarkable results.
“Consumers are changing how they shop, how they decide to spend their time, and the role of technology in their lives,” Sebastian said. “So we decided to modernize our brand, and our digital experience would be the first expression of a more contemporary Casey’s.”
Here’s an inside look at how Casey’s uses Salesforce Customer 360 to build customer loyalty through more efficient marketing practices.
Step 1: Boost conversion rates by 16% with relevant messaging.
Step 2: Make every touchpoint count with the help of AI.
Step 3: Serve customers four times faster by connecting data across the business.
Art Sebastian, VP, Digital Experiences
Before Casey’s began its digital transformation, its marketing department was sending customers over 300,000 batch and blast emails per month. With no personalization or optimized send schedules, many of these messages were falling flat. Today, Casey’s sends approximately 170 million personalized messages across channels, including email, SMS, and app, with Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud — implemented with the help of Salesforce consulting partner Deloitte Digital.
“Part of the journey of modernizing our brand involves ensuring that we form a human connection with every customer,” said Sebastian. “We call our customers by name in emails, add their favorite store in messages to make ordering even easier, and we even celebrate their birthdays with a free donut.”
To create these personalized journeys, Casey’s segments customer data into unique groups based on online and in-store interactions and activates that data in real time. For example, the company can tailor offers based on the type and quantity of goods bought. If a customer typically purchases one pizza at a time, Casey’s can send an SMS offer for free breadsticks with a single pizza purchase.
With Data Cloud, the company can create unique segments 30 times faster than before. Because of hyper-personalized marketing capabilities, Casey’s has seen a 16% increase in conversion rates for pizza alone.
Casey’s tailors promotional emails to customers’ purchase history, too, by connecting data across in-store, web, and mobile interactions. For instance, if a customer purchases a breakfast pizza, Casey’s will display an image of that pizza in a promotional email the next day, incentivizing a repeat purchase.
Learn how you can deliver marketing success now by:
Gaining a single view of your customers with unified, real time data across your business
Understanding your customer with AI-driven insights and analytics
Activating data across any engagement platform at scale and in real time
Saving time and money by optimizing performance and spend

Content was only part of the messaging puzzle the company needed to solve. Timing was just as important.
Using Data Cloud, Casey’s can activate audience segments with AI and send messages when customers are most likely to act on them.
“Everything we know about a customer is unified in Data Cloud,” said Sebastian. “If we see groups of customers shopping in the mornings, we can tag them as ‘breakfast shoppers,’ making it very easy for marketers to create segments and communicate a value proposition.”
Instead of sending mass promotional content at random times, Casey’s can adapt send times to customer behavior. For example, if a customer who normally orders pizza around 6:00 p.m. on a Friday doesn’t, Casey’s can send a reminder with a promo code through the customer’s app that same evening.
The company can also optimize its website content based on time of day. Customers browsing the homepage in the morning will see breakfast specials, while evening visitors will see the latest deals for whole pizzas or sweet treats.
Additionally, Casey’s continues to fine-tune its behavior-based marketing with expert coaching sessions, like “Help Setting Up Social Studio” and “CDP Mobile/Web Technical Guidance,” from its Premier Success Plan. With tailored guidance from Salesforce experts, the company can learn from habits across channels and deliver increasingly personalized customer experiences.
Art Sebastian, VP, Digital Experiences
Ten years ago, most customers discovered new convenience stores by walking through the front door. Today, that front door is digital.
To make it easier for customers to begin their journeys online, Casey’s had to connect data across multiple disparate systems and third-party apps. The company now uses MuleSoft as its API-led integration layer between data sources. Now, authorized users see a full view of customer accounts, including past purchases, rewards history, and customer service requests, on a single screen. This gives service teams, for example, all of the information they need to resolve cases faster. Plus, service leaders use AppExchange partner app Medallia to deliver great customer experiences by analyzing customer feedback across channels, such as phone, app, and email.
API-led integration lets Casey’s meet customer needs and introduce innovative new services four times faster than before. Of the 150 APIs the company has developed, 50% of them are reused, saving development teams time and resources.
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",Retail,Casey's General Stores
"When self-driving vehicle company Cruise, which is majority owned by General Motors, launched its all-electric, driverless rideshare service in San Francisco in January 2022, customer experience was front of mind.

“We are an innovative company trying to disrupt transportation,” said Radha Penekelapati, Cruise’s Vice President of Customer Success. “It’s important that we understand what our customers want and what they are happy and unhappy about, and implement changes based on that.”

But how do you provide the personalized experiences customers expect when there is no driver? How do you manage the everyday interactions a passenger might normally have with a rideshare service? And how do you provide proactive customer experience that both anticipates customers’ needs and prevents issues from arising?

To deliver the superior and personalized experience its customers deserved, the startup recognized that it first needed to give its service agents a unified 360-degree view of customers. The company also needed to consolidate multiple fragmented systems, which hampered the ability to resolve customers’ problems easily and with empathy. At the same time, largely manual processes made it difficult for team members to provide consistently high-quality service. With most of the company’s technical resources focused on perfecting its autonomous vehicle technology, Cruise needed a scalable solution and strategic partner it could rely on.
It chose to work with Salesforce, which shares many of the car company’s core values, including sustainability, innovation through its fully electric, zero-emission autonomous vehicles, and customer success through its commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences. This meant partnering with Salesforce Professional Services to efficiently and effectively implement a unified customer service platform.

Working with Salesforce has allowed the company to build the strong foundation needed for a more scalable service delivery model as it looks to launch its rideshare service across other cities.

“We have audacious goals,” said Penekelapati. “We’re hoping to expand to thousands of cars and hit $1 billion in revenue in 2025. We need to prepare for that ‘hockey stick’ of growth with a solution that will enable us to scale.”

Here are five lessons from Cruise’s digital transformation that could help your organization accelerate time to value, reduce complexity for team members, boost real-time collaboration between teams, and drive cost savings.
VP, Customer Success, Cruise
1. Accelerate time to value with Salesforce Professional Services.
2. Provide empathetic customer support with unified tools and data.
3. Allow anytime collaboration with channel-based messaging.
4. Keep costs low with the right partners and tools.
5. Maintain momentum with a roadmap for digital change.
To unlock a 360-degree view of its customers and move from vision to value faster, Cruise partnered with Salesforce Professional Services.

By working with the team of Salesforce experts, Cruise gained access to years of proven knowledge and experience delivering outcome-driven strategies. The team helped co-create a faster path to value for Cruise’s transformation, including designing use cases, deploying the solution, performing user acceptance testing, and optimization after go-live.

As product, industry, and implementation experts, Salesforce Professional Services provided architectural guidance throughout the implementation that not only met Cruise’s short-term needs, but also catered for the long-term evolution of the company’s Salesforce platform. This included implementing best practices to boost productivity across queue management and escalations, privacy and security, and useability. It was also given direct access to the latest innovations and product roadmaps to maximize the full power of its Salesforce investment.

“As a lean startup, we don’t have the resources to start a heavy enterprise IT project of this kind and do the entire design and implementation ourselves,” says Nathan Leddy, Cruise’s Strategy and Operations Manager. “Salesforce Professional Services was able to fill the gap and provide us with the expert guidance we needed.”

Collaborating with the team of Salesforce experts enabled the company to successfully design and implement a Service Cloud solution in just four months, keeping costs low and limiting the need for too many internal resources. The ability to launch a minimum viable product that delivered value so quickly gave the project a great deal of credibility with the company’s executive team and other internal stakeholders.

As Cruise continues to scale its business, Salesforce Professional Services’ ongoing expert guidance and best practices are helping Cruise to become self-sufficient by ensuring they have the expertise they need to thrive. Salesforce’s experts have also set Cruise up for long-term, efficient growth by upskilling Cruise’s own team members.

“We could not have done it without Salesforce Professional Services,” said Penekelapati.
With Cruise’s customer support team using multiple tools to resolve customers’ queries, Cruise knew it had to do something to reduce the complexity and make it easier for its team members to find the information they needed.

Using Service Cloud, Cruise has united six of its systems into one platform. This allows agents to take a straight path from issue to resolution, improving efficiency and giving them more time to build strong customer relationships. In addition, Cruise leverages its instance of Slack with Service Cloud to swarm customer service issues and streamline internal communication around vehicle and customer incidents.

The solution has also enabled Cruise to introduce guided workflows for complex service processes. For example, the company can now consolidate customer interactions (regardless of how they are received — for example, by email, text message, or phone call) into a single customer view, instead of treating each email or call about a customer as disparate records. This ensures customers deal with fully informed customer service agents, reducing customer frustration and saving time.

Having a 360-degree view of its customers has greatly improved the quality of Cruise’s service.

“This allows us to deliver much more informed and empathetic support when we’re interacting with our customers,” said Leddy.

Cruise has been able to use Service Cloud’s analytics capabilities to consolidate its customer and support data into a single system. This enables team members to access contact rate reporting 10 times faster than before. The platform also shares insights directly with the engineering team, which they can use to improve customer experiences.

“The voice of the customer program is a big one,” he said. “We’re creating a feedback loop of customer issues driving back into product and engineering to get them fixed — but also looking at things like our contact rate and our contact drivers over time.”
Hear from Radha Penekelapati, VP of Customer Success at Cruise. Watch this short video [1:01] to learn how Cruise has transformed with the help of Salesforce Professional Services.
Slack is elemental to Cruise’s tech stack, empowering everything from software and hardware development to sales and customer experience.

With speed of utmost importance to the company’s Service Cloud implementation, Cruise used Slack Connect to collaborate seamlessly in real time with Salesforce Professional Services’ experts. Slack’s secure channel-based messaging meant Cruise’s project team was able to reach out to Salesforce whenever it needed to.

“Having the Salesforce Professional Services team available on Slack was really helpful,” said Leddy. “We could reach them at any time to jump into a huddle, ask questions, and align key design decisions.”

The company now uses Slack as a Digital HQ for its employees, allowing team members to stay connected to the company from wherever they happen to be working. This includes having dedicated channels for communicating company news, weekly and monthly metrics, and customer insights.

Employees can also access a variety of Employee Resource Group channels, such as the company’s Empowering Women of Cruise channel and social channels where team members can build connections with their peers.
For startups and other organizations with limited resources, every dollar counts. By partnering with Salesforce Professional Services for its implementation, Cruise gained access to unrivaled Salesforce expertise that enabled a faster rollout. This reduced short-term costs for Cruise, and Leddy also believes switching to Service Cloud is likely to deliver significant cost savings over time as productivity increases.

“We know it will impact our KPIs,” he said. “And it impacts the cost of operations because we can train our employees faster and move through cases faster. But it is only now that we have Service Cloud that we can measure some of these things for the first time.”

The company is already starting to see positive results that help reduce costs and increase productivity. A report that used to take up to two days to generate manually is now done automatically in a matter of seconds. Leddy also credits a 15% cost reduction to confidence around metrics, increased productivity, and efficiency driven by Service Cloud.

Greater visibility over data and the ability to generate valuable customer insights also enables Cruise to identify opportunities to reduce ongoing operating expenses.
While working with Salesforce Professional Services, Cruise adopted the principle of continuous innovation, a core principle of The Salesforce Way. By embracing the mindset of continuous progress, Cruise embedded new, agile ways of working across its entire organization. This new approach to continuous improvement and innovation allowed it to maintain the momentum of its digital transformation and develop a roadmap that focuses on a steady stream of innovation and improvement for its customers.

To strategize how technology can enable its vision of creating delightful customer experiences, the company partnered with Salesforce experts and rolled out Knowledge Base to drive quick case resolution with recommended articles and optimized article search. This tool enables agents to quickly find the information they need to help customers whenever and wherever they are.

As Cruise scales, it will continue to look for additional opportunities to partner with Salesforce to drive growth and safely connect people to the places, things, and experiences they care about with the world’s most advanced self-driving vehicles.
Strategy & Operations Manager, Cruise
",Technology,Cruise
"If you’re like other customer-centric companies, you want to get close to customers. If you’re like GE Appliances, you want to be so close, there’s “zero distance” between you.

That’s the thinking behind the household appliance giant’s treatment of customers, whom its employees call “owners.” The company’s “zero distance” philosophy embodies its commitment to grow closer to owners to provide products and services that deliver an outstanding experience. 

Once focused primarily on protecting the brand founded by Thomas Edison, GE Appliances, a Haier company, has swapped transactional experiences for service-oriented ones that build owner trust. 

“We believe when we are close to owners, we better understand their needs and wants, which puts us in a much better position to produce products that make them feel good about the brand, even if they do have a problem with their appliance,” said Jim Gothard, Executive Director, Call Center.

Prior to its digital transformation just before the pandemic, disjointed legacy systems prevented the company from seeing the full picture of its customer relationships and realizing impactful ROI. GE Appliances turned to Salesforce to bring consistency across every touchpoint, from customer support calls to field technician visits to email check-ins.

With a single place for its 1,700 call center agents and 1,000 field service technicians to turn for the most up-to-date customer data, GE Appliances was ready for the wave of orders and customer inquiries that flooded its gates as consumers began spending more time at home. 

If you’re working to close the gap between internal teams and customers, learn how GE Appliances uses Salesforce Customer 360 to delight owners with proactive service that builds lifetime loyalty.
Chief Digital Officer
1. Resolve more calls the first time, decreasing handle times by up to 12%.
2. Make technicians more proactive with complete owner visibility.
3. Deflect 10%–15% of truck dispatches by assisting owners virtually.
4. Build a lifetime journey with owners through personalized moments.
In this video [02:55], learn how GE Appliances is there for customers in their everyday moments of life with connected, proactive service.
Owners call GE Appliances for a variety of reasons, from making a warranty claim to requesting a replacement fridge part. Whether they’re a first- or fourth-time caller, it’s the service team’s job to know who they are and what they need. Yet, with disparate systems to solve various issues, agents had a hard time grasping customers’ needs while switching between applications. 

With Service Cloud, agents have a single source of truth to clearly see where customers are in their ownership journey. Plus, the company can handle more calls at less cost by pairing Service Cloud Voice with partner telephony from Amazon Connect, increasing first-call resolution and decreasing handle times by up to 12%. GE Appliances refers to this complete visibility as “Owner 360,” helping the company close the gap to “zero distance.”
“That 360-degree view is the enabler for our zero distance philosophy,” said Angie Corbett, Senior Manager of Ecommerce Sales and Digital Engagement. “The magic that happens once we have that view is the owner doesn’t have to repeat themselves throughout the various processes to let us know their experience.”

No matter how many times owners have called in or who they’ve spoken to, each agent has full visibility of their case to speak knowledgeably with a consistent brand voice.

MuleSoft plays a huge role in building a 360-degree customer view, enabling GE Appliances to quickly connect any system across the enterprise. Instead of switching between legacy systems, the company can unlock and orchestrate data using API-led connectivity. This means integrations can be reused for future projects, creating business agility and fostering collaboration across teams. GE Appliances has already achieved 69% reusability across 18 APIs. For instance, service teams can see who the owner has already spoken to and which technicians they’ve already seen. With tools like natively embedded voice and omni-channel routing, agents can route calls more effectively and assign more complicated cases to senior technicians.

“The return on investment for the technology we’ve employed is really agent efficiency and the ability to connect with the owner and create that human experience,” said Corbett. “That’s priceless.”

Plus, agents and customers alike can self-serve with a knowledge center of articles they can search whenever they want. GE Appliances can even automate replies featuring article recommendations in response to real-time voice transcriptions.

“Salesforce allows us to leverage all those touchpoints to improve the owner experience and let them know we really care who they are and what their needs are,” said Corbett.
Part of achieving “zero distance” between GE Appliances and owners is doing more to proactively meet their needs. Out in the field, technicians have the perfect opportunity to assess owners’ needs and go the extra mile in meeting them.

This means cleaning filters, pairing owner phones with smart appliances, helping them download the brand’s app — and even vacuuming behind the fridge without being asked. If it means spending more time with owners, GE Appliances is all in.

Yet, with about 10 house calls to make per day, technicians didn’t always have time to spare at each location. 

With Salesforce, technicians can look ahead at their schedule to see what appliance models owners have, plan for potentially complex cases, and ask engineers for assistance before they’re even dispatched. 

“They’re more productive and that gives them more time to do those things for the owners that really make a difference,” said Chuck Weaver, Director of Program Management.
With Salesforce Field Service and Visual Remote Assistant, you have the tools you need to:
Give field service techs real-time, expert guidance
Quickly see and solve field service issues
Increase cost savings and customer satisfaction

Pre-COVID, the only option for in-home repairs was to dispatch a technician, which required owners to cancel plans or even take off work to accommodate the half-day service window.

Going forward, visual remote assistance will give GE Appliances another option for putting technicians in the home, which is a big win for saving both technician’s and owner’s time.

When owners need simpler warranty repairs, for example, a technician can virtually coach them through it with the ability to see the setup on the screen. If the owner’s situation does eventually call for in-person assistance, technicians will have the visibility to better diagnose the need before visiting the home.

And because GE Appliances measures technicians on first-time resolution, diagnosing the problem early on will eliminate the need for repeat visits. Technicians are so excited for the technology, they want to know when they’re next to receive it.
“The biggest capital every organization has is human capital,” said Viren Shah, Chief Digital Officer. “The ability to scale human capital and make them efficient every day is going to be critical.”

Sometimes an owner may decide it’s time to replace the appliance instead of repairing it. Using historical data, GE Appliances can predict the best time to suggest its personal shopper program. Owners can schedule a time to “meet” with a shopper via the visual remote assistant, browse products, and purchase directly from the manufacturer through its owner loyalty store.
The beauty of GE Appliances’ Owner 360 vision is there are no longer separate systems for service agents, technicians, or even other team members like marketers.

Once consumers become GE Appliances owners, they receive a series of communications to start building their lifetime journey with the brand. Marketing Cloud gives GE Appliances a way to personalize communications with owner data to send welcome emails, regular tips and tricks on using products, and maintenance emails at six months and beyond.

“Personalization is everything,” said Corbett. “Can you really create zero distance without that personalized experience? I don’t think you can.”

Because Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud are connected in one platform, agents can see which communications have already been sent. This way, agents, techs, and marketers alike can better understand what customers have already received and where they are in their ownership journey.

When consumers are ready to buy, GE Appliances also has the technology to ensure the right products are in stock at the right channel partners. Sales reps can manage leads and follow marketing campaigns to confirm the product continues to meet brand standards in the last leg of its journey to customers.
As customer needs change, GE Appliances can serve them with cross-team visibility of their owner journey. And with tools for remote service, the company can come even closer to achieving zero-distance customer experiences with proactive service that anticipates their needs — today and in the future.
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",Consumer Goods,GE Appliances
"Guess wants to do more than just grow its iconic brand; it wants to leave a legacy. And it wants this legacy to be founded on exceptional lifestyle products as well as exceptional customer experiences. As a global business, this means Guess must be able to engage seamlessly across multiple channels in multiple countries – from its stores and websites to its customer care teams and social platforms.
Thanks to its investment in digital transformation, Guess is not only enriching the experience for millions of customers around the world but also driving sustainable growth. The lifestyle brand, which has 1,600 stores in 100 countries as well as a flourishing wholesale business, is on track to hit its operating margin target of 10% two years ahead of schedule.
The transformation of Guess began in 2019 with the arrival of new CEO Carlos Alberini, who set out his ambitious vision for the company, which includes targeting an increase in operating profit of approximately $150 million and a rise in sales of around $250 million by 2025.
To make this vision a reality, Guess needed to do more than just deploy new digital technologies. It needed to unite its teams, processes, and datasets to deliver richer experiences, unlock sharper insights, and drive stronger ecommerce sales.
We talked to Carlos and the team at Guess about how they are using Salesforce Customer 360 to achieve their growth and omnichannel goals.
CEO
1. Drive ecommerce growth with richer experiences and analytics. 
2. Create stronger customer connections with 360-degree visibility.
3. Boost marketing ROI with greater automation and personalization.
4. Empower employees with smarter insights.
5. Elevate brand reputation with ongoing innovation.

Guess has always provided an exceptional in-store experience, but it needed to find a way to bring the same quality and style to a growing number of ecommerce customers. This need intensified with the advent of COVID-19 and the closure of Guess stores around the world.
To fast-track its ecommerce ambitions, Guess needed to migrate from its homegrown solution to an agile and scalable platform that could support multiple languages and currencies. “Although we were collecting a lot of customer data, we were unable to use it in a meaningful way,” said Carlos. “We needed to not only transform the front-end ecommerce experience but also our approach to CRM.”
In one year, Guess deployed Commerce Cloud across 48 European countries with the support of Salesforce Professional Services. Guess saw an immediate uptick in website speed and reliability with a 72% reduction in home page loading times.
Guess uses insights from Einstein, Salesforce’s AI solution, to personalize the ecommerce experience by promoting different products to different customers, which helps to increase conversion rates.
By the first quarter of 2021, ecommerce revenue had compensated for losses at its physical stores, with online conversion rates soaring by 60%.
Guess expects ecommerce to account for 23% of its overall revenues compared with 18% prior to the Commerce Cloud implementation. “With Commerce Cloud, we can respond more rapidly and flexibly to customer behaviors and market trends,” said Patrizia Lazzaro, Guess Vice President for Ecommerce for the company’s operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).
VP, Global E-commerce
With omnichannel engagements set to increase, Guess needed to ensure customers records were captured and updated centrally.
“Customer centricity starts with data centricity,” said Miguel Requejo, Chief Digital Officer at Guess. “We’ve always had lots of great data, but it was not connected.”
With Salesforce, Guess is breaking down its information silos and opening up new opportunities to engage with its customers. It uses Service Cloud to combine the rich data captured in Commerce Cloud with information from other physical and digital channels. For example, Guess colleagues can now see a customer’s previous purchases, online interactions with the brand, as well as their product preferences.
“With a single customer view, we can empower our people to make smarter decisions and provide richer experiences,” said Carlos.
A 360-degree view is particularly powerful for agents when responding to customer queries.
“The time and effort needed to fix a problem is now significantly lower,” explained Miguel. “On top of that, because we can see exactly what our customers’ preferences are, we have opportunities to cross and upsell. The customer service team is starting to actually make sales. It’s really exciting.”
For instance, if a customer calls to exchange a pair of jeans, the agent can look at their purchase history to suggest an alternative product.
With more than 16 million followers on Guess’ Facebook and Instagram accounts, social networks are key to not only brand awareness but also customer service. By integrating Social Studio with Service Cloud, Guess can track social interactions and respond more easily to customer posts and queries. This not only helps to accelerate the resolution of cases but also provides Guess with a wealth of information to create more personalized customer journeys.

With a diverse customer base, creating personalized communications without the help of automation was incredibly complicated and time-consuming. To reach the right customer at the right time with the right content, Guess uses the Marketing Cloud suite.
“We have created specific journeys to match customer moments, such as welcoming them to Guess or sending birthday greetings,” explained Patrizia. “Managing this across 48 countries and 10 languages would be impossible without Marketing Cloud.”
The team uses the solution to carry out A/B testing and track campaign results, which increases engagement rates.
“Marketing Cloud has been a real game-changer; we started to see results on day one,” said Dario Cardamone, EMEA Marketing Director at Guess.
By making greater use of automation, Guess can better coordinate its marketing communications and campaigns across different channels. This enables Guess to identify which channels are the most effective for each customer and prevents people from being contacted multiple times.
“We are spending a lot of money on marketing, so it’s absolutely critical that we’re spending it on the right things,” said Miguel. “With Marketing Cloud, we can personalize communications based on customers’ digital interactions and drive a much greater return on investment.”
VP, Global Marketing
To ensure it maximizes the value of the 3.5 million customer records, Guess wants to harness the power of analytics. With Tableau, it can unlock richer customer insights and drive greater operational efficiencies.
“By embracing analytics, we can look at a customer’s purchase history to suggest alternative products when they want to make an exchange,” said Miguel. “We can also spot trends in the data to identify issues within our operations.”
Analytics are proving equally beneficial for Guess marketeers. With Tableau, they can apply a smarter approach to segmentation when developing campaigns and communications.
By letting customers connect to Wi-Fi in its stores, Guess will be able to unlock even more insights into shopping behaviors to enrich its marketing campaigns and loyalty program.
“We’re moving from a channel-driven mindset to a customer-driven business, and we’re confident it will deliver a big return on investment,” said Dario.
Since it first implemented Commerce Cloud in 2019, Guess has been adding new capabilities to empower its teams and optimize its processes. To further connect its in-store and digital customer experience, Guess plans to develop a mobile app, which will include features such as showing the availability of store fitting rooms and pushing out location-based promotions.
Guess also wants to unlock greater supply chain visibility by deploying Commerce Cloud Order Management and developing an online community for its 8,000 wholesale partners in Europe with Experience Cloud.
“We are committed to building a successful business for the next 40 years and beyond, not just the next quarter,” said Carlos. “With Salesforce, we can make millions of customers feel truly special. It is pivotal to everything that we do.”
The Salesforce Professional Services team will continue to support Guess on its digitalization journey.
“We’ve formed a really strong partnership; the team understands how we work,” said Miguel. “Salesforce Professional Services challenge us to think about working in different ways.” Guess also uses Salesforce Accelerators to help optimize the time to value of new features and products.
Every new digital initiative at Guess is aligned to the company’s customer centricity goals.
“By getting closer to our customers, we can understand our business better, which impacts everything – from product design and merchandising to sourcing to allocating resources,” said Miguel.
As a result, Guess will be able to not only develop deeper customer relationships but also drive greater brand loyalty and higher repeat sales.
“When we first implemented Salesforce, we saw it as an opportunity to leapfrog the competition; empowering our teams with 360 visibility is another leapfrog opportunity,” said Carlos. “With Salesforce, we can make our iconic brand even stronger with richer business insights and richer customer experiences.”
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",Retail,Guess
"Rushing through a busy airport can feel stressful. Rushing through an airport that serves 200+ destinations, operates 1,000+ flights a day, and welcomes 70M+ passengers a year, can feel overwhelming. But not at Heathrow Airport. Luckily for travelers, it is committed to giving every passenger the best airport service in the world.
Heathrow uses Salesforce Customer 360 to empower partners and employees with a single view of its customers. This means passengers can access the right airport services at the right time – from buying a new handbag 30 minutes before they board their plane to booking a parking space months in advance. Now, millions of passengers can truly sit back, relax, and enjoy the entire travel experience.
“Heathrow is one of the biggest airports in the world. We also want to be one of the best airports in the world,” said CEO John Holland-Kaye. “Salesforce Customer 360 helps us make every journey better for millions of passengers.”
Better journeys mean happier customers and stronger business outcomes. Heathrow, which operates with the support of around 75,000 people, is now Europe’s busiest airport and second in the world for international travel. Greater integration, automation, and personalization have also helped the airport boost digital revenue by 30% since 2019.
Here are some key takeaways from Heathrow’s digital journey that can help you unlock greater value for your business.
John Holland-Kaye, CEO
1. Increase customer satisfaction with seamless digital experiences.
2. Connected customer data unlocks richer insights.
3. Boost customer spend with greater personalisation.
4. Deeper ecommerce integration helps increase digital revenue by 30%.
5. Guide passengers at each step of their journey with efficient customer service.
An airport terminal might mark the start of a customer’s journey, but it’s not the start of a customer’s experience. It begins much earlier when a passenger books an overnight stay to catch an early flight or checks transport links. “How customers engage with airport services has completely changed,” said Kylie Andrews, Heathrow’s Head of Digital. “Around 90% of passengers now use websites and apps as part of their overall journey.” With 14 websites and 45 backend systems, Heathrow Airport was struggling to keep pace with this shift in behavior. “Our digital services were very disjointed,” said Bob Stickland, Head of Technology for Commercial and Digital Platforms at Heathrow. “We needed to focus more on the customer experience and less on our internal processes.” With Salesforce Customer 360, shopping, parking, support services, and customer communications now all run on the same platform, which means passengers get the seamless experience they expect. Now, a daughter can call the customer service team from the train to check airport security rules for her mom’s favorite loose leaf tea, and place an order online to collect when she reaches the terminal.
“Our customers are demanding more from our digital experiences, and Salesforce is helping us meet their expectations,” said Andrews. Satisfaction ratings for the overall airport experience are higher when a passenger has engaged with a digital service, such as reserving a parking space. And the volume of these interactions is constantly increasing: the digital channel share has grown by around 25% since 2019.
Map every customer moment. In this in-depth guide, you’ll get:
Five sample customer journeys for growth, onboarding, engagement, retention, and support
Use cases from marketing leaders
Insights from the latest industry research

A honeymoon. A family reunion. A business trip. People go to airports for lots of different reasons. Heathrow wants to ensure it provides the right services to the right customers – all 70 million of them. “There’s no point telling a traveler flying home to New York about short-term parking at the airport when they’ve just jumped on the Heathrow Express,” said Peter Burns, Marketing and Digital Director at Heathrow.
With Data Cloud, Heathrow can capture passenger interactions from multiple channels in a single place and share this data in real time with different teams. “We have one of the most diverse customer bases on the planet,” said Stickland. “With Salesforce, we can tap into new insights and offer new experiences that make passengers feel special. It gives us a single golden thread.”
By connecting customer service, marketing, and ecommerce interactions in Data Cloud, Heathrow will be able to anticipate what a passenger needs before their next visit to the airport. For example, it could see that a business traveler always buys the same products in duty free and remind them to place a click & collect order. 
The customer data platform, which was implemented with support from Salesforce Professional Services and Acxiom, will become the central point for all passenger records. By centralizing its data and simplifying its tech stack, Heathrow has also been able to boost agility and security. “When you are switching between different systems, there’s a risk you will expose data. It also takes longer to spot customer trends,” said Leanne Lynch, Technology and Cyber Defence Director at Heathrow. “With a single customer platform, we can stay one step ahead of what passengers want.”
Bob Stickland, Head of Technology for Commercial and Digital Platforms
With a single customer view, the sky’s the limit for personalization at Heathrow. It uses Marketing Cloud to send targeted communications at key points before, during, and after a customer’s journey. For example, an email recommending last-minute holiday purchases or passenger lounge options can be triggered as soon as a customer pulls into a Heathrow car park.
“We can now understand and segment our customers better, which means we can share relevant offers that enrich their experience and drive revenue,” said Meenal Varsani, Head of Marketing and Customer Engagement for Heathrow Airport. “We’ve already seen an increase in average transaction value and spend per visit for customers that have opted to receive marketing communications.”
As Heathrow embraces more digital channels and creates more content, the marketing team needs to ensure it is delivering maximum value. Marketing Cloud Intelligence connects 30+ data sources to provide a unified view of performance. This helps the team focus on the right campaigns and communications to increase the return on investment from marketing.
Peter Burns, Director of Marketing and Digital
Heathrow is not only transforming its own digital services; it’s enabling new connections between customers and hundreds of partners. Retail and catering concessions account for around 10% of the airport’s annual revenue – and Heathrow wants to make it easier for customers to connect with these brands.
Heathrow has launched a Retail Reserve & Collect service that enables people to make purchases online before they reach the airport. “With Commerce Cloud, we can provide passengers with more physical and digital shopping options – even if their favorite brand doesn’t have a presence in the terminal,” said Andrews.
By integrating its ecommerce platform with customer service and marketing tools, Heathrow can update passengers on their orders, like that sleep mask they bought, and recommend a set of earplugs to go with it.
Heathrow has also transformed how it processes online quotes and purchases for its parking services, which has helped to increase conversion rates. “Within a month of migrating our parking services to Commerce Cloud, we achieved our highest ever revenue and online Net Promoter Score,” said Burns.
The airport’s overall digital revenue has increased by 30% despite a 20% fall in passengers following the COVID-19 pandemic. “Salesforce makes up-selling and cross-selling much easier. And that helps make our team more efficient,” said Andrews.
Kylie Andrews, Head of Digital
On a busy day, over 200,000 passengers pass through Heathrow. And they all expect great customer service. But how do you deliver this efficiently and cost-effectively on such a massive scale?
From online forms to knowledge articles and chatbots, the airport is empowering its customers and colleagues to answer queries faster and smarter. For example, if a passenger is running late for a connecting flight, they can start a live chat on their phone as soon as they disembark the plane to check the quickest route to the departure gate.
With Service Cloud, Heathrow can make sure these types of time-sensitive questions are answered quickly. It has created automated rules that help to categorize and prioritize cases on different channels.
Heathrow uses Service Cloud to log every interaction on every channel, which gives its customer service agents a 360-degree view. By capturing this data on a single platform, team leaders can also identify opportunities to further improve service quality and efficiency. For example, Heathrow has used Service Cloud to create knowledge articles that answer common parking questions, which means passengers no longer have to contact the customer service team.
Einstein chatbots have also helped to significantly reduce call volumes and free up agent time. “With Salesforce, we can provide anytime, anywhere support more easily and effectively,” said Varsani.
Meenal Varsani, Head of Marketing and Customer Engagement
",Travel Transportation & Hospitality,Heathrow Airport
"KRAFT Sports + Entertainment (KSE) connected all the customer data across its brands — the New England Patriots, the New England Revolution, Gillette Stadium, and Patriot Place shopping center — creating more personalized sales and service experiences.
What you need to know
A new season is underway at KSE. This time, the company is competing for the best fan experience in sports. It’s also breaking down data silos across departments to improve efficiency for its employees.
Why it matters for fans
KSE is a world champion on the field. Off the field, fans are the MVPs. Now, KSE can personalize fan interactions that happen across its brands — from ticketing and parking to product purchases and emails — in one system. Fan-facing staff can even use data to personalize sales and service actions like securing business partner contracts, collecting survey feedback, monitoring event attendance, and handling customer service inquiries.
For employees, connected data means building proposals 64% faster to woo in-game advertisers.
Chairman and CEO
What the difference looks like
Before Salesforce, KSE’s sales and service teams lacked a single, shared view of customer data across its multiple divisions and departments, making it difficult to provide the meaningful experiences today’s fans expect.
Here’s how KSE's teams became more productive.
Previously, a business like Dunkin’ looking to purchase tickets as an employee perk might receive three separate calls from KSE sales teams: one for Patriots tickets, one for a Revolution suite, and another for a stadium event package. Now, every KSE team has access to the same fan and partner data to sell smarter and more collaboratively.

Instead of viewing customers as an “event attendee,” “Patriots fan,” or “Revolution group buyer,” the organization can proactively serve their needs as one “KSE customer.”
Behind the scenes
Instead of housing customer data and interactions in 15+ sources across the organization, KSE can power fan and partner experiences from just one.

Sales has accelerated its proposal creation process from more than seven days to just 2.5 with faster, easier data access. The team also has greater visibility into its sales pipeline.
Once a customer has purchased tickets, reps use AI and automation tools to offer useful products like a parking package or food and drink deals.
",Sports,KRAFT Sports + Entertainment
"Customer since 2015
10,000+ employees
 
In our fast-paced digital world, the services we rely on the most are the ones we notice the least. From high-speed internet to mobile phone service, or TV packages to fixed landlines, we expect seamless service 24/7 and only take notice when it doesn’t meet our expectations.
Providing reliable, future-proof services for both businesses and consumers is a responsibility that Dutch telecom KPN takes very seriously. And with Salesforce, it’s transforming internal operations to give customers the best possible experience when they purchase new products, reach out for support, or want to manage their accounts.
When KPN for SME decided to transform its digital strategy to become more customer-centric, it needed to align sales, service, and delivery operations to create a smoother customer experience. That meant consolidating four business-critical systems onto a central, stable, and scalable platform to unlock 360-degree visibility.
“We chose Salesforce because it’s a state-of-the-art platform that integrates seamlessly with other solutions,” said Cremers. “We rolled out Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Communications Cloud to create a single source of truth across the business.”
The company worked with Salesforce Industries to implement Communications Cloud, which is specially tailored to support end-to-end processes for telcos. For example, sales, support, and product management teams can create and customize smart product bundles for customers using a simplified product catalog and easily draw up agreements or quotes for B2B customers. This not only accelerates the sales cycle and reduces time to market, but helps the team to be more productive and offer greater value to customers.
The platform also enables the company to make smarter decisions based on real data, which has triggered a shift in behavior among employees. “With visibility of how our performance directly impacts NPS, the team is much more motivated to hit their targets and increase KPIs,” said Cremers.
These insights also help to upskill employees. By adopting a policy of total transparency, the team can see both their successes and their mistakes – which means they can learn best practices or identify areas for improvement. “We’ve created a more trusting environment. People are more accountable for their actions and work together to support each other; no one is punished for making a mistake,” Cremers commented. “It’s great to see that spark for self-improvement in the team – everyone wants to be the best they can be.” 
Communications Cloud is also helping to improve performance. Staff can generate quotes instantly instead of in a couple of days, meaning they can target customers when they’re most interested in making a purchase. Using artificial intelligence, the solution being quoted can be checked to be sure that it's viable for each customer, which is particularly useful for more complex orders for SME or enterprise customers.
To increase cross- and up-sell opportunities, KPN for SME has evolved its service agents into personal solution experts with Service Cloud. As well as handling cases and queries, they’re empowered with the skills to help customers get the most out of their products and to sell more relevant or complementary services. 
Service Cloud's artificial intelligence feature, Einstein, provides prompts to help reps identify when to cross-sell, and they can access knowledge articles to learn about a solution or to help them resolve an issue faster.
“At first the service team were scared of being seen as pushy, but Salesforce gives them all the information they need to identify the best opportunities to sell,” explained Cremers. “They’re really happy with the new role now, and they love using Salesforce to give customers more value from their products.”
And when it comes to handling cases, the team has better insights into who the customer is and why they’re reaching out. This data also helps to address common issues to reduce those incidents from happening at all.
“The team handles an average of 6,000 cases per week, and only between 5%–10% of those are complex enough to require an expert,” said Cremers. “The remaining cases can generally be solved immediately, so we should eventually be able to optimize our processes to eliminate those simple queries.”
Service isn’t the only department to get an overhaul, the company has replaced third-party engineers with an internal team of 200, and with user-friendly workplace technology, new employees can be onboarded and productive faster than ever before.
“Outsourcing was costly, and we were only achieving 60%–70% first-time resolution, but the alternative was to conduct a site survey before sending out an engineer,” Cremers revealed. “We were initially reluctant to spend that upfront, but with better data we realized it actually saves more in the long run.”
KPN for SME is already well on the way to achieving its goals, and it plans to roll out more Einstein functionality to be more predictive in the future. “At the moment we’re using Salesforce data to look back and learn – we’d like to use it for forecasting too to help us be more proactive,” said Cremers. “So far, everyone is happy with Salesforce. Our team is happier and more productive, customers are more satisfied, and we’re smashing our targets. I’m excited to see what comes next.”



Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.
",Communications,KPN
"NASA is digitally transforming the Administration, developing a strategy that is helping the team streamline the intern recruiting process, turn inspirational touch points into engaged advocates, and maintain a brand that's as much a part of Americana as it is the Federal government.
And even if you aren't developing the next generation of STEM leadership, hosting shuttle launches, or crowd-sourcing novel ideas to solve challenges like how to remove grease from a potato chip (hint: the answer is about vibrations), NASA strategy still serves as an example for any agency looking to...
Recruit and retain top talent
Increase engagement from employees and constituents alike - after all, the customer experience often mirrors the employee experience
Strengthen relationships with key industry partners
In other words: NASA’s digital transformation strategy serves as an example for any agency looking to keep the mission relevant.
Here's how.
Challenge: Turning systematic legacy IT challenges into a call-to-action
Solution: Introducing an intake and case management system in one
Additional apps: From program-specific apps → enterprise-wide platform strategy
Results and impacts: How NASA’s results and impacts can apply to any agency
NASA’s work is multifaceted, doing as much here on the ground as it does up in space. The agency manages programs like aeronautics research, various science missions, human exploration, and more — and the various teams behind this work recruit all kinds of interns to support these efforts. As a result, the recruiting process was equally multifaceted with individual teams standing up their own process for collecting resumes, storing PII, recording what an intern accomplished during their time with NASA, mapping that internship role to a specific pathway, and so on.
And this isn't uncommon.
As many program leaders across any number of organizations working on a variety of missions look to improve their processes and operations, they implement whatever system seems to be a best fit for the needs and budget at hand, and that will not necessarily match from one program to the next. The result: different sets of data, collected by different workflow rules, stored in different formats and databases. The impact: more time, energy, and resources spent pulling reports, answering data calls, and maintaining system integrity. Less time, energy, and resources spent focusing on mission-critical innovation.
It’s an expensive, industrywide conundrum — that NASA took as a call to action.
In its recent study on government IT spend, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that Federal agencies spend over $100 billion on IT and cyber investments. Of that, an estimated $67.9 billion of that is dedicated to operations and maintenance.
That is 67.9% spent on legacy IT, which (when paired with the $34.6 billion spent on national security and defense) leaves only $17.7 billion available for development, modernization, and enhancement. At best, only 17.7% of budget is spent on innovation.1
This is why NASA’s example is so significant. It shows departments and agencies how they might transcend industrywide challenges, and focus more resources on the mission-critical work, not the clerical work that tends to come with it.
The team launched the STEM Gateway on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Customer 360 for Public Sector, an internship management platform that brings NASA’s multifaceted internship landscape together into one, online community portal. It includes several modules and apps that NASA uses to automate and streamline the way it reaches, resonates, and recruits the next generation of STEM leadership.
Here’s how it works:
Intake:
Prospective interns enter the Gateway through the portal’s Experience Cloud interface, register a profile, browse information about STEM programs and opportunities, and submit an application, marking which roles or areas are of interest. Once an application has been submitted, candidates can log back in to check the status and take action on any next steps (such as submitting employment eligibility records or signing up for onboarding activities).
The self-service nature mitigates data entry errors as the candidate is guided through the required fields and checkboxes. The consolidated design means one application, one experience, and one source of truth for any number of internship opportunities.
Application processing:
NASA employees leverage the same consolidated design principles in their work on the backend. When an application is received, it is treated as a case and assigned to an internship coordinator via Service Cloud. Here, the internship coordinator can review the application, take notes, tag subject matter experts from any program on key questions, and make offer recommendations. PII is captured once and stored in a central place, (with an additional layer of security from Shield), as are details about which candidates were hired for which program, survey results at the end of the post, and more.
Additional opportunities for engagement:
Internships is just one of over thirty NASA STEM engagements hosted by the STEM Gateway system. Creating a universal application and registration system for these engagements provides a better user experience for both NASA employees and the public as it allows information to be collected once and reused across multiple interactions. Additionally, it is allowing NASA an automated and reliable view into how individuals are participating in multiple opportunities offered by the agency to build and strengthen their STEM knowledge. Over the next year, NASA is moving towards migrating approximately seventy additional engagements into this system and retiring their associated legacy systems and manual processes. Here are just two examples of other engagements utilizing NASA STEM Gateway today:
NASA CONNECTS is an online community of practice (CoP) that launched as a part of the Gateway; it is a module built in Experience Cloud where educator members can interact with NASA personnel, curriculum, and each other. Here, educators collaborate and discuss best practices, share training resources, and follow relevant educator groups or other educators.
NASA's STEM’s In-flight Education Downlink application receives online request forms from educators and administrators who want to schedule a time slot for astronauts aboard the International Space Station to speak at school events via live video stream. NASA staff can review the request and schedule a downlink right in the Gateway
Reporting:
Integrated reports and dashboards built using Tableau and CRM Analytics give the team a set of business analytics tools to roll up results, spot trends, and pinpoint catalysts driving the internship program and other NASA STEM engagements. The team uses this to better understand what demographics are missing from the talent pool, trace those gaps back to barriers in the application process (such as if more time needs to be spent with institutions dedicated to minority groups), and report on how many students are preparing to enter STEM careers — with NASA, the Federal government, or industry as a part of the Administration’s commitment to contributing to Federal STEM goals.
The team also uses this to down-select candidates. In fiscal year 2022, the internship program filled roughly 2,200 internship openings per year across the agency, and the number of applications for a single opening can vary widely. The team has seen as many as 300 applications for a single internship opportunity. So, they built a dashboard on CRM Analytics that pulls up an open role, and filters applicants by GPA, academic level, major, school or academic institution, region, skillset, and more. The team can then remove those attributes before sending a candidate along to a hiring manager to both streamline the review process and reduce the impact of implicit bias. 
NASA launched several other apps using many of the same design principles as the STEM Gateway, digitizing and automating one program after the next and connecting them on the same platform.
The Guest Ops app is a scheduling and CRM app that NASA uses to manage the process of inviting key influencers to NASA events. Automated workflow rules streamline to-do items like issuing invites, triggering parking passes, and so on. RSVP and attendance data are again added to a personalized profile record in Sales Cloud, which the team uses to nurture relationships with those individuals who have an interest in NASA’s mission. Here, the team can review past engagements, takes notes on common interests, and call the right influencer to participate in future events that help keep NASA top of mind. 
The Subject Matter Expert Speaker Database on Experience Cloud and Salesforce Platform has a similar intake function to the STEM Gateway, collecting digital request forms for NASA speakers to participate in various community and academic events. Staff can review the request form, match the most qualified person to speak on behalf of the agency, and report on the number and type of events with NASA representation using again a similar set of Tableau-based reports and dashboards. NASA employees can also authenticate in, review training materials, sign up for courses, and become a more prepared and more effective NASA speaker.
NASA had a manual request process for adding projects to its Mission Cloud Platform (MCP) — a platform on AWS that has seen more and more demand as interest in Cloud Computing services are on the rise, making it more and more difficult for the team of just 15 people to manage this process using offline spreadsheets, emails, as well as tracking demand for its platform with its ever growing customer base. So, NASA built the Mission Cloud Platform Dashboard app on Service Cloud and Public Sector Solutions - Employee Experience automating the CRM analytics, funding and customer tracking. On the verge going live, the team has scaled from managing 20 projects to 145 projects without adding any additional headcount and this will alleviate workload by automating routine customer interactions as well as new customer onboarding. Some of NASA’s most mission-critical programs are now on AWS because of the MCP, including instruments on the International Space Station for infrastructure and payload management, programs support collision avoidance for low earth orbit, and projects supporting Artemis – NASA’s return to the moon.
The STEM Gateway has enabled NASA to support a 143:1 ratio; each internship coordinator can now manage an average of 143 internship applications. The work it took to answer data calls has been reduced by a factor of 15; the team used to have to pull data from 15 different systems and build a report summarizing all of those data sets. Now the team just has to pull data from one system and roll it up on one (real-time!) report.
Most importantly, these digital apps serve as an example for departments and agencies looking to modernize all kinds of processes, programs, and missions:
The STEM Gateway is an intake and case management system. Similar to the high-level process and multifaceted landscapes behind grants programs, benefits programs, ERAPs, and other services that have both an intake and eligibility review or customer service-style action.
The scheduling apps are applicable to anything that involves appointments out in the field, logistics and planning, and linear, repeatable processes that could move faster and more efficiently with automated workflow rules triggering next steps.
The outreach, engagement, and CRM capabilities offer a set of tools to understand customer needs at a more granular level, see the history and context, and have more productive, collaborative conversations as a result. Think about what this could do for recruiting, public affairs/public relations, developing partnerships, and so on.
The data analytics and security layers unlock the kind of transparency and reliability that builds trust in a program from the system level. I.e.: from the program’s foundation. Think about the impact this can have on everything from the employee experience to program support and funding. More accessible data = more inspired employees, better visibility to outcomes (not just events), and a greater understanding of how the mission continues to be relatable to today’s community needs.
NASA’s is an example of the impact that can come from developing a strategy that uses automated workflow rules to bring information into a single view, connect programs, and fuel data-driven decisions. 
",Government,NASA
"Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed) frees up employees to spend more time helping over 2.9 million members achieve their financial goals thanks to AI and omni-channel support.
In a Nutshell
PenFed combines the exceptional member experience for which credit unions are renowned with the digital experience typical of a large bank. Now, members get faster support thanks to AI, live chat, and self-service support options. Plus, service agents have a 360-degree view of member data so they can work more efficiently and deliver service that members love. Since expanding its communication channels with chat, PenFed’s call center has reduced its average speed to answer by an entire minute to less than 60 seconds. It has done all this while increasing membership 31%.
Why it Matters
Economic uncertainty, inflation, and fluctuating interest rates raise critical questions about the financial future. To ease these concerns, consumers need answers in real time — without having to call in.
Now, PenFed members can get help faster with self-service, chatbots, and live chat. With many of its members being active military or veterans and many of its branches near military bases, it’s essential that members can access support easily — whether they’re home, on the road, or deployed abroad.
Director, Operations Projects
What the Difference Looks Like
PenFed’s call center first opened in the 80s, staffed by four people sharing one computer. It built its service platform in-house, but it did not provide key insights into a member’s account like the products they use and their engagement history. This caused agents to spend more time handling each case over the phone.
Here’s what the employee experience looks like today:
By streamlining customer data into one unified platform with Mulesoft, PenFed now has complete data for every customer, whether they use a branch or digital banking. Plus, every team, from the contact center to the branch, can now work from the same member view in Financial Services Cloud.
With up-to-date member information at the ready, agents have the context they need to take action right from Salesforce, working faster and more efficiently. For example, branch representatives can now handle multiple types of customer requests in a single window. Today, PenFed resolves 20% of cases on first contact with AI-powered chatbots, resulting in a 223% increase in chat and chatbot activity in the past year.
Onboarding new members used to be a lengthy and manual process. Today, PenFed provides a single view of member data, integrating internal and external platforms into one central place with API-led connectivity. This allows PenFed to conduct credit checks and provide applicants with a quick and seamless onboarding experience.
Einstein automatically handles simple routine questions, like password resets, deflecting over 60% of all internal service cases. This frees up service desk agents to spend their time solving more complex service requests.
In less than eight weeks, PenFed implemented two new support channels — live agent chat and chatbots — with just one engineer. It can now deploy new functionality every month without requiring custom coding or development.
This resulted in better member experiences, too:
2.9 million members have self-service options at their fingertips through PenFed’s online banking powered entirely by Experience Cloud. They can easily check account balances, access educational resources, and open a support request via chat.
Members receive instant access to financial support programs like loan deferment (skip payments). In just two weeks, PenFed built a loan deferment portal on Experience Cloud, assisting over 11,000 members facing financial hardship.      
Members can choose their channel of choice when they need help. They also enjoy shorter wait times without repeating the same information since agents already have easy access to member interaction history in one place. On average, agents now answer a call within 30 to 45 seconds.
Behind the Scenes
To ensure the security of its member data, PenFed built its security infrastructure in collaboration with Coastal Cloud.
",Financial Services,PenFed
"Spotify Advertising boosted B2B ad sales conversions with automation and personalized web content, leading to higher quality ads for millions of listeners.
What you need to know
Spotify is known for matching people to the content they love, whether music, podcasts, or even ads. Behind the scenes, manual sales tasks and a disjointed view of advertisers made it difficult to sell efficiently and grow revenue. With a single source of advertiser data, automated seller activity capture, and real-time collaboration, Spotify Advertising increased sales team productivity by 40% by cutting down on meetings and email traffic.
Why it matters
The perfect song can set the mood, but the wrong ad can kill it. Yet, when personalization helps millions of listeners discover both new artists and brands, it can amplify customer relationships. With a 360-degree view of its advertising business, Spotify can see how much ad inventory it has left on certain products and who's buying it to serve up the right ads to the right customers at the right time.
Global Head of Business Strategy & Operations, Spotify Advertising
What the difference looks like
Before Salesforce, Spotify Advertising had highly manual and inefficient processes that impacted its ability to be as customer-centric as possible. Here's how Spotify Advertising is improving those processes to deliver the optimal experience for customers:
It previously took months for Spotify Advertising to gather and act on campaign data. Now, Salesforce acts as a single source of truth for Spotify’s ad inventory. Executives and ad reps have full visibility of the sales pipeline with dashboards and AI-powered insights from Sales Cloud Einstein.
Opportunity Scoring helps reps sell fast with AI by prioritizing leads based on those most likely to close.
In less than seven days, data flows into Spotify’s marketing environment for follow-up. Spotify Advertising has also increased the number of marketing campaigns it runs each year fivefold simply by automating customer journeys like registration.
Spotify Advertising uses a third party tool to track website visits. With Personalization, visitors see customized buttons and banners based on their previous activity, leading to a 53% increase in click-through rates. A prospect’s level of engagement then determines whether they speak to a sales rep or see self-service options.
Spotify teams, external partners, and vendors connect and communicate in one place with Slack. This has helped reduce meetings and emails, increasing productivity by 40%.

Automated workflows in Slack have also simplified the campaign lifecycle for sales. Now, Slack keeps reps informed on account progress all the way from RFP to payment.

With CRM Analytics, Spotify knows which customers are in danger of leaving or decreasing spend. Dashboards help teams monitor and understand account health, revenue performance, and product adoption, among other fields. This way, sales can follow up with customers who need additional help or attention.
*Spotify ad sale performance is influenced by a multitude of internal and external factors.
",Technology,Spotify Advertising
"When it comes to driving, consumers’ preferences change fast. One minute, they crave the luxury of a self-driving vehicle, the next, they’re content to rideshare in a practical Fiat 500. Global open mobility company astara recognized that the market was crowded with various companies offering different services to consumers, but none that catered to what they really wanted. However, with so many companies in the industry, it was difficult and costly to compete as a business centered on car distribution, vehicle subscriptions, and connected vehicle software. The solution? Not competitive intelligence, but customer intelligence.
“We needed to transform our entire business model to get closer to our customers. And Salesforce Customer 360 helped make it happen,” said Jorge Navea, astara’s CEO.
Using Salesforce Customer 360, astara can bring together data that includes dealership interactions and website visits to create a single view of its customer. Now, astara can predict if a driver is going to be more interested in taking out a subscription for a sports car or buying a family 4x4. And that means it can stay one step ahead of its customers – and its competitors.
The transformation has helped astara achieve:
300% increase in turnover in six years
20% uplift in lead conversion rates
30% boost in customer loyalty.
Let’s take a closer look at how Salesforce Customer 360 is giving astara the data and tools needed to drive right on the edge of automotive innovation.

CEO, astara
1. Listening to customers unlocks new revenue streams.
2. Boosting efficiency and visibility with 700+ MuleSoft integration flows.
3. Smarter opportunity management helps drive 500% growth in six years.
4. Greater personalisation helps increase NPS by 20%
astara sold 230,000 cars in 2022, a new record for the company even after 43 years in business. Yet, employees were still reliant on data from their B2B dealership partners to understand how its market and customer base were evolving. This created problems, such as spotting new mobility trends and sending personalized promotions to customers. “To stay competitive, we need to listen and connect to our customers directly,” said Antonio Rodríguez, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at astara.
astara built a new platform on Salesforce Customer 360, which allows sales, service, marketing, and channel colleagues to collaborate and innovate using the same data.
astara can now assess digital competitiveness in Finland, for example, or whether subscription models have taken off in Peru. Using this data, astara’s sales reps and marketers can build stronger relationships with customers by offering them exactly what they’re looking for. For example, if someone is interested in a specific model or version of a vehicle that is currently unavailable, marketing automation flows can offer alternatives based on customer behavior.
“Salesforce is much more than just a CRM platform; it’s transactional, operational, and social. And it accounts for 70% of our tech stack,” said Rodríguez.
Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer, astara
Better customer experiences don’t just happen on their own. Behind the scenes, astara’s technology department used Heroku Connect and MuleSoft to unify information from more than 70 sources – from banks and third-party lenders to car dealers and shipping firms. It has also connected Salesforce with its SAP enterprise resource planning system, which simplifies subscription billing.
And there’s still more integration to come. astara wants to use Automotive Cloud to connect customer data and vehicle management in the same platform. “With Automotive Cloud, we will be able to increase customers’ lifetime value and decrease operational costs,” said Rodriguez.
astara has created 700+ automated workflows with MuleSoft, which boosts efficiency and ensures the right data is available at the right time. For example, it can assign a final customer sales order to a vehicle that has not been produced yet by assigning the customer to the specific manufacturing slot confirmed by the OEM.
To improve the decision making process, astara uses Tableau and CRM Analytics to visualize mobility and vehicle ownership models trends. “With Salesforce, we can turn data into actionable insights to help our people make smarter decisions and build stronger connections with customers,” said Rocío Rufilanchas, astara’s Global Chief People Officer.
The company, which employs more than 2,500 people, is also using Slack to encourage stronger connections between colleagues. The productivity platform is integrated with Salesforce Customer 360, making it easier for teams to share knowledge and accelerate innovation.
Global Chief People Officer, astara
When your organization is expanding fast, it can be hard to keep track of new business opportunities – especially when a lot of your sales come from external partners.
In six years, astara has grown its revenue by 500% and moved into 15 new territories. And it’s not missed a beat. Whether it’s a vehicle sale or subscription, every step is managed in Sales Cloud. Einstein lead scoring provides AI insights that help sales reps prioritize opportunities.
astara also uses CRM Analytics and Marketing Cloud Intelligence to capture data on dealership sales, which means it can promote the right vehicles in the right territories. “We’ve gone from invoicing €1.9 billion in 2015 to €6 billion in 2022,” said Rodríguez. “Our sales cycle is now more collaborative and predictive.” This has helped astara increase its lead conversion rate by 30% and reduce its customer acquisition costs by 20% in a year.
To make sales processes even more efficient, the company has built a customer portal on B2C Commerce Cloud, which means drivers can purchase spare automotive parts without having to contact astara or a dealer. “With Salesforce, we can be more flexible in how we go to market. It helps us keep a start-up mindset,” said Navea. 
Winning new customers is just the start. You also need to keep them. For astara, this means personalizing every mobility solution and customer interaction. And its strategy has been a great success: customer loyalty has increased by 30% year-on-year and its Net Promoter Score rose by 20% year-on-year.
To nurture its customer relationships, astara has developed more than 250 automated and personalized journeys with Marketing Cloud which are linked to key moments and objectives. The journeys enable astara to maintain direct relationships with thousands of customers – even if they bought or leased their vehicle through a third party.
Engagement metrics are captured in a customer’s record in Service Cloud and used to shape future interactions, such as up-selling conversations and marketing promotions.
astara also uses Marketing Cloud Intelligence to measure the success of new campaigns and initiatives. “Our digital channels clock up to around 50 million visits every year,” said Marta Rios, astara’s Chief Brand Officer. “With Marketing Cloud, we can make sure our content delivers maximum value.”
For astara, providing an excellent experience doesn’t stop when a customer signs on the dotted line. By tracking every customer support interaction in Service Cloud, astara can ensure its personalized approach spans the entire mobility lifecycle.
Chief Brand Officer, astara


",Automotive,astara
"Water is a critical resource for homes and businesses, and managing that resource is becoming especially important during this era of climate change. Suppliers must ensure the water they provide is safe and that supplies are reliable.
American Water is the largest publicly traded water company in the U.S., with more than 7,000 employees in 46 states managing municipal water and wastewater systems. The company prides itself on being a helpful partner for communities that don’t have the capacity or resources to provide clean water to their citizens.
The company had used Salesforce to help it engage with customers since 2004, but until recently lacked any governance or best practices relating to its use. This had led to many contacts and records being duplicated, creating confusion for users. Engagement with the solution was poor and many key features were underutilized.
Looking for a backup solution to increase safety in their existing organization, Kathleen Udasco, Manager of the company’s Corporate Business Development Department, and her team worked with experts available as part of Salesforce’s specialist support plan.
Here are four steps from American Water’s journey you can take to help you maximize the value of your customer relationship (CRM) management solution.
Lesson 1: Choose partners who can help speed up problem-solving.
Lesson 2: Streamline the user experience to improve engagement.
Lesson 3: Unlock real-time reporting to improve decision-making.
Lesson 4: Develop internal skills with targeted coaching.
To help American Water streamline employees’ use of its CRM platform, the company drew on the expert support and guidance available as part of its Premier Success Plan.
This included having access to a dedicated advisor, who worked closely with the team to identify and resolve the key issues preventing the company from maximizing the value of its digital investment.
By drawing on the extensive technical resources available, American Water was able to implement a backup solution that gave the company additional peace of mind without the need for a heavy administrative lift.
“Our customer success manager is awesome. He always sends me more resources than I need and connects me with the right people. He’s also helped me take an inventory of what we’re doing well and what we can improve on. It’s been a great experience.”
Kathleen Udasco, Manager, Corporate Business Development
Manager, Corporate Business Development
To encourage users to engage with digital solutions, they need to be simple to use and offer tangible benefits.
As American Water’s business development staff members were only logging into the CRM solution once or twice a month, the company recognized it needed to improve engagement with the platform.
This was accomplished by establishing best practices for CRM usage and automating key administrative and reporting tasks. For example, external spreadsheets used by business development managers and other employees in the field were tied to unique identifiers and uploaded automatically into the CRM platform.
Now, the business development team is engaging with the solution at least three to four times per week. The company has also seen productivity and efficiency increase over the past two to three years.
The inability to translate data into a usable format can create a roadblock to effective decision-making.
By making greater use of Salesforce’s real-time dashboards and reporting features, American Water’s business development team has improved how it tracks its performance in key areas.
The team is now better equipped to generate actionable insights and meet its reporting obligations to leadership and external stakeholders.
“Having those real-time dashboards which allow our leadership to track how we’re performing, versus our budget or growth goals, has been great. As a publicly traded company, it’s really important for us to have efficient and accurate reports we can share with our board and investor relations team,"" says Thom Chiomento, VP of Business Development and External Affairs.
With digital skill shortages a growing issue in many sectors, developing internal capabilities is critical.
American Water’s business development team members were able to access expert coaching sessions and training opportunities on relevant topics as part of the company’s support plan.
These sessions allow team members to build their expertise in core areas such as creating custom reports and summary formulas.
Get our bi-weekly newsletter for tips and insights tailored to your role.
",Technology,American Water
"Breitling is a #SQUADONAMISSION to do better by making luxury more sustainable.
Entering the spotlight are sustainable processes, transparency, ethical materials, and all the timeless elegance you’d expect from high-end brands. Take Breitling, for example. Breitling has been crafting beautiful, luxurious watches since 1884. Like all luxury brands, it understands the importance of staying relevant to its customers and people. Today, nothing is more relevant than sustainability.
That’s why Breitling is a #squadonamission. Action by action Breitling is transforming its business to reduce the social and environmental impacts while inspiring its network of suppliers to do the same. Think 100% upcycled packaging, 100% Swiss Better Gold, and 100% renewable electricity across HQ operations.
The watchmaker got serious about sustainability in 2020, hiring Aurelia Figueroa as its inaugural Head of Sustainability to develop a comprehensive sustainability strategy. This resulted in a full-scope approach to sustainability across five pillars: product, planet, people, prosperity, and progress.
“We engaged nearly 100 global stakeholders including employees, customers, suppliers, business partners, and industry experts to shape our strategy in an inclusive manner,” she recalled. “From there we defined three leading areas to focus on, amongst a total of 10 material topics: social impact along the value chain, environmental issues, and product integrity. Salesforce helps us track meaningful insights throughout the value chain and is an important part of our overall strategy in both our product and planet pillars.”Breitling adopted Net Zero Cloud to support its sustainability strategy in 2022. Let’s take a closer look at how it has helped accelerate those sustainability squad goals in year one.
Global Head of Sustainability, Breitling
1: Better access to data
2: Tracking scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions
3: Turning insights into action
4: Inspiring people to prioritise sustainability
5: Squad goals: do better within our scope of influence 
One of the biggest challenges around sustainability is being able to accurately collate data from multiple sources to calculate emissions accurately. In 2020 and 2021, the Breitling sustainability team manually collected data.
Breitling’s Sustainability Specialist Brice Boissonneault recounts the processes and challenges this entailed. “Carbon accounting involves gathering data from energy suppliers for our premises, across logistics and the supply chain, then calculating the emissions generated during production, and those of our partners,” he explained. “That’s not just time consuming, doing anything manually always introduces the possibility of human error.”
As well as increasing the speed and efficiency of calculating emissions, Breitling wanted to improve data integrity. Some supply chain emissions factors, for example, were based on older data. While this provided some value as a benchmark, it didn’t offer the level of accuracy the company was looking for.
Breitling turned to its partners along its supply chain in order to improve data quality and availability. In key categories, primary data was gathered. In order to manage the data, Breitling chose Salesforce Net Zero Cloud to manage its data across its full scope of carbon accounting. Today, data in Net Zero Cloud has helped the company establish a baseline against which it will evidence reductions as a result of its cooperation along the supply chain.
At same time, it is looking at materials used in boutiques, another key emissions category. “Building materials such as cement, wood, and glass all have a huge carbon footprint, but even the leather furniture and carpets cause emissions,” said Boissonneault.
Emissions are generally split into three categories. Scope 1 covers greenhouse gas emissions that are directly generated by the company, including heating, and fleet vehicles. Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions generated from purchased energy including electricity. To capture this data, Breitling created standard processes in Salesforce for everything apart from boutiques, which Boissonneault explained require a building energy intensity approach based on the location.
Scope 3 emissions include purchased goods and services used by a company, downstream logistics and transportation, waste generated in operations, employee commuting, and business travel. In order to manage these diverse topics, Breitling has established a tailored approach to each. For example, along the supply chain it works with key suppliers to gather primary data and drive management efforts moving forward. For employee commuting, it issued a survey to gather data from employees globally. It complemented this approach with detailed assessments. For example, in cooperation with RMI in 2021, it conducted a product carbon footprint on its best-selling watch and unpacked more than 300 components to work out the carbon footprint of each and every part. This provided Breitling with a valuable first scoping of where the organisation’s greatest impacts along the supply chain lie from a product perspective.
Sustainability Specialist, Breitling
With better visibility of its carbon footprint, Breitling could begin to identify opportunities to reduce emissions and its impact on the environment. It co-financed the development of a solar power plant for one lab grown diamond site and switched to a biogas heating system.
“Partnerships are important to drive meaningful action. We want to work with ethically minded suppliers who are equally focused on sustainability,” said Figueroa. “We now source 100% of our gold from the Swiss Better Gold Association, a public private partnership which improves the working and living conditions of small-scale gold mining communities. We have worked with the mines from which we source to establish high-quality primary emissions data and implement carbon insetting projects to reduce environmental impact.”
When it comes to sustainability, working together is vital to slow down the effects of climate change for a liveable planet in the future. And there are a lot of stakeholders invested in Breitling’s success.
“We report annually to the Carbon Disclosure Project, we’re committed to the Science Based Targets Initiative, we issue an annual Sustainability Report aligned with the World Economic Forum and International Business Council Stakeholder Capitalism metrics, and we’re accountable to internal stakeholders,” said Figueroa.
That’s a lot of people to report to, but with Salesforce, Boissonneault designed reports and tables to display relevant information to different bodies. For example, if he needs to report on the percentage of renewable energy used, Salesforce combines data from multiple sources into one dashboard at the tap of a button.
“Salesforce makes audits and assurance much easier. With accurate data at our fingertips we can focus on the things that matter, saving a huge amount of time,” he explained.
Anecdotes make great stories, but data is more inspiring when it comes to persuading other suppliers or companies to join the sustainability movement. Breitling builds close relationships with suppliers and a strong bi-direction sharing of best practice helps everyone to up their game.
“Suppliers turn to Brice for his expertise – he’s great at explaining complicated subjects in simple terms for companies who might not yet have dedicated staff to address these issues,” added Figueroa. “Salesforce is part of that. It shows people that managing emissions is more achievable than they think.”
Global Head of Sustainability, Breitling
Breitling actively encourages its people to unite into squads dedicated to a particular mission. The company believes camaraderie drives purpose and that together, we can achieve more than would be possible individually.
By building upon support across stakeholder groups for sustainability, Breitling has been able to achieve meaningful first steps across its strategy. Key contributors to its achievements to date have been employees, suppliers, and partner organisations. It is continuing to engage customers as well on the subject, building upon its product focused precedents to date with Econyl™ straps or upcycled packaging, for instance.
Today, Breitling staff who want to contribute to sustainability, environmental, or ethical initiatives are given paid leave to volunteer in the community or in nature. As recently as Climate Week 2022, employees were offered four activities over the course of one week in order to give back to their local environment. And suppliers are actively working on charting production methods with lower carbon emissions.

Conclusion:
Getting started with sustainability
Breitling has achieved great things in its first year with Net Zero Cloud, but being an early adopter was no mean feat. It turned to trusted partners, Capgemini and Salesforce, for advice. Capgemini is helping the company build upon its carbon management activities to develop supply chain mapping of its key biodiversity and water impacts.
“Taking a greenfield approach can feel overwhelming. In order to unpack this, engaging our stakeholders at the outset in a materiality assessment was key, because we were able to define together where we wanted to focus our efforts. We clearly saw the demand from stakeholders to ensure a full supply chain approach to subjects such as environmental impacts along the value chain,” Figueroa reflected.
“We spoke to Salesforce about our vision, and I remember coming out of that meeting with a huge smile on my face,” recalled Boissonneault. “We’d dreamed of our ideal platform, and when we saw Net Zero Cloud in action, we knew this was it.”
As Breitling continues working towards its sustainability goals, it plans to integrate more systems with Net Zero Cloud and uncover richer insights about the best way to work with suppliers to drive down emissions.
“Sustainability is challenging, but with Salesforce, I feel more engaged than ever and I’m excited to keep working together with all our stakeholders,” Boissonneault concluded.
",Consumer Goods,Breitling
"When Dr Bashir stepped into her kitchen on her day off, two terrible things happened. She stood in a puddle of cold water in her socks and realised her fridge had broken overnight. Remembering the great ShopLive video chat she had with Akira at Currys when she bought her laptop, she heads over to her local branch.
On arrival, she’s greeted by Steve who listens carefully to her requirements and brings up a list of options using StoreMode, a bespoke app for sales reps, on his tablet. Together, they look at the models in store, making sure the new fridge will fit easily into the space left by the old one.
In a few minutes, she’s ready to buy, but what about delivery? Dr Bashir can't fit the fridge in her car, so Steve checks her details on his tablet and arranges next day, home delivery and collection of her old appliance for recycling. On the day, a team from Currys arrive to install the new fridge and take her old one away.
With colleagues like Steve working hard to give customers their all, it’s easy to see how Currys has become the UK’s leading technology retailer – more than 80% of UK households have shopped with the retailer in the last three years.
“Customers find technology exciting, but they can also find it confusing and expensive. They need help to choose the right tech, to afford it, and then to enjoy it to the full. In the UK, we have 11,000 capable and committed store colleagues ready to give expert face-to-face advice, and Salesforce is helping us to build customers for life,” explained Alex Baldock, Group Chief Executive Officer at Currys.
1: Creating lifetime value for customers.
2: Augmenting the shopping experience.
3: Secure, scalable ecommerce.
4: Empowering colleagues to build stronger connections.
5: The app that changed everything.
6: Building strong relationships based on trust.
Currys was founded as a bicycle shop in 1884. Since then, it’s become a market-leading technology retailer with a strong  online business and over 300+ stores across the UK and Ireland. In fact, it was named sixth busiest retail website in 2021 by Retail Week.
The company believes that purpose and profit go hand in hand. To give customers lifetime value from their purchases, it’s expanding its services across credit, insurance, trade-in, repairs, refuse and recycling. In fact, sustainability and giving tech a longer life is one of Currys’ key service initiatives and their Newark campus is home to the largest repair centre in Europe. Last year the operation fixed 850,000 products from across the Currys group.
From helping customers to make greener choices to attracting ethical-minded investors, sustainability is no longer a nice to have, but the key to building brand loyalty and growing market share.
“Customer expectations have changed rapidly over the last few years. They have a different set of needs and priorities,” said Paul Olley, General Manager at Currys, Ashford. “When it comes to shopping, people expect the same great experience in-store and online. They want to shop when and where it suits them, and they want impartial, expert advice from people who represent their local communities.”
And expectations only got higher during the pandemic, with customers favouring retailers and operators in non-competing sectors offering a fast, simple ecommerce experience. Today’s consumer is less tolerant of any friction in their shopping experience.

Chief Information Officer, Currys
Data reveals up to 80% of Currys’ customers start their journey online, making the website the perfect place to kick off its omnichannel transformation. While 60% of Currys customers prefer to shop across multiple channels, its omnichannel shoppers are 27% more likely to shop again compared to those who use one channel.
The vision for Currys’ digital transformation was simple: give customers an unrivalled omnichannel experience, augmented by technology, but enabled by people.
Simplicity is key when it comes to creating a smooth customer experience, but Currys had more than 500 applications and complex digital journeys across multiple websites and brands. This wasn’t just a source of potential confusion for customers, it was also challenging to maintain, especially during peak periods such as major product launches/releases, when the volume of traffic and transactions soared.
But with Salesforce, the difference according to Chief Information Officer, Andy Gamble, is ‘like night and day’.
“Salesforce shares our values of putting people first and winning together,” he revealed. “We worked with Professional Services and our preferred systems integrator to relaunch our website on Commerce Cloud and enhance the in-store experience.”
Salesforce Professional Services worked alongside Currys from day one, providing trusted advice and guidance to accelerate the implementation, and ensuring scalability by applying a best practice approach. With a thorough understanding of the retailer’s environment and goals, Salesforce experts worked across Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, and MuleSoft technologies to help the team to overcome challenges and build a truly scalable solution in record time.

Programme Director, Currys
Keeping the customer front of mind, the team designed one digital experience and aligned multiple backend systems under a Commerce Cloud shop front. But when you’ve been in business for nearly 140 years, finding the right balance between legacy technology and new investments can be challenging.
“We didn’t want to transform everything, but rather think about the role legacy systems played in our new environment. Customers won’t thank us for having a great financial reconciliation platform, but they’d notice if it stopped working!” said Arron D’Aubney, Chief Technology Officer at Currys. “MuleSoft was a game changer. It accelerated our transformation by stitching together backend systems seamlessly.”
In less than 12 months, the new website went live on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and the ecommerce team said goodbye to performance issues, limited scalability, and sleepless nights during peak seasons. In fact, after redesigning the look and feel of the website, Currys had its most successful peak period ever, handling millions of interactions and hundreds of thousands of orders without a hitch.
With more time to focus on creativity, the team enhanced content to promote services such as its Care & Repair plans and installation services, optimised the website for desktop and mobile, and rolled out Einstein Artificial Intelligence, making it easier to search for products and giving returning customers a more personalised experience.
Commerce Cloud has given Currys a strong personalisation engine. Customers can see content and offers based on their behaviour or the data that Currys already holds. For example, if a customer has already shown an interest in eco-friendly products, the site can surface content about Currys’ green credentials and provide offers tailored around recycling. Tests on homepage personalisation to date have shown higher engagement, higher conversion, and increased basket spend. The addition of Commerce Cloud also makes it easier for Currys to run tests like this at scale.
“With Salesforce, we can surface a huge range of products and still make it easy for customers to find everything they need. Expert advice is only a click away, but if customers don’t want to speak to an agent, Einstein can guide them towards more related items without disrupting the browsing experience,” said Gillian Geraghty, eCommerce and Omnichannel Director, Currys.
Einstein Product Recommendations also shows customers relevant items that complement their purchase at the checkout, and popular products that other customers viewed.
By helping people find the right product at the right time and increasing up- and cross-sell opportunities, the company has seen both conversion rates and average order value (AOV) increase. With 8.5 million shoppers - online and in store - per week, that’s no mean feat, and the team is excited to start running personalised offers and promotions on the platform in the future.
“Commerce Cloud gives us the agility to react quickly and release new functionality every two weeks,” said Natalie Barnett, Head of Online Trading at Currys. “We used to start load testing for peak periods six months in advance. Now, we don’t need to do anything – Salesforce scales seamlessly, so we can spend more time bringing our visions of an incredible shopping experience to life.”
The next piece of the omnichannel puzzle was creating a consistent shopping experience from anywhere. That meant equipping customer-facing sales colleagues with 360-degree visibility of the customer from the moment they step into a store.
Currys’ Colleague Hub, built on Service Cloud Lightning and run on the Salesforce App, will give the sales team everything they need to know to delight a customer from their tablet. This includes the online customer history, a log of all their interactions, and any items they’ve put in their online shopping cart, all displayed in real time.
It also acts as a one-stop-shop for colleagues with fast access to knowledge articles, and tasks. It’s integrated with other Currys internal systems and data from the website to help the team access key everyday apps and get a single view of the customer.
“Shopping for electricals can be exciting or emotional. The last thing we want is to start telling a customer about the latest games console if they’re stressed because their washing machine has packed up,” explained Steve Head, Sales Advisor at Currys Ashford. “With real-time insights by asking genuine questions and listening to their needs, we know how to support each and every customer and can have more authentic interactions.”
For customers who can’t pop into their local branch but still want to speak to a real person, Currys launched a service called ShopLive in 2020. This 24/7 video chat offers the in-store experience online, making expert advice more accessible to around 34,000 callers a week. On the calls customers speak to a store-based colleague wearing a headset who can walk around the showroom, give the customer a live demo of any product, and even place the order for them during the session.
From the customers’ point of view, they get the help they need come up via a video conferencing, which became increasingly familiar to many during the pandemic. Ninety-four per cent of customers are highly satisfied with the service. From Currys’ point of view, the business, sells more - conversion is four times higher and the average order value is 40% higher than unassisted online. Customers are also more likely to protect their tech with add-on services.
Live video assistance isn’t the only trick Currys has up its sleeve when it comes to delighting the customer, it’s also using an app called StoreMode. The app is accessed through Colleague Hub, combining a single view of the customer with collaboration tools, and the full product catalogue and payment function of Commerce Cloud.
Rather than specialising in one area, sales reps can now take training modules on their tablet and become an expert in anything. If they need help answering a customer query, they can tap into a wider pool of knowledge using an internal social media platform and get an answer in minutes.
“StoreMode facilitates more guided selling. We can use filters as we’re talking to customers to find the most appropriate product for their needs and lifestyle and complete the transaction there and then. If they need help spreading the cost, we can offer financial services such as credit or insurance,” explained Head. “We can also take them through the sustainability credentials of a product to help identify which are best for the planet and their pocket.”
The app also gives colleagues the power to order items for next day delivery to the store – giving customers more options on top of home delivery, click and collect, and contactless collection.
Paul Olley reported he ‘couldn’t imagine life without StoreMode’. StoreMode empowers our colleagues in stores and helps them to build more memorable and deeper relationships with customers and strengthens their reputation as trusted advisors

Sales Colleague at Currys Ashford 
As it moves into the next phase of its transformation, Currys is well on the way to cementing its position as the UK’s choice for all things tech. Its Net Promoter Score has increased by 20 points, and the volume of online customers doubled in the past two years, with two-thirds of customers now shopping across both channels. 
And the team is unanimously excited for the future. Store colleagues can’t wait to get their hands on StoreMode, the omnichannel team are letting their imaginations run wild, and the contact centre and marketing teams are next in line to take customer-centricity to the next level.
“With Salesforce, we have all the tools in our armoury to support and delight customers at scale. Customers trust us, and we trust Salesforce – our relationships are built around winning together, and that’s why we’ll succeed in the future,” concluded Barnett.

eCommerce and Omnichannel Director, Currys
",Retail,Currys
"As COVID-19 worsened, the healthcare sector rapidly turned its attention to how to continue providing quality healthcare to patients during the crisis. Innovations such as tele-health consultations, wearable devices, and the use of advanced data analytics to model scenarios were embraced. Now, as organizations consider what comes next, the challenge is how to continue to build on that innovation to create better healthcare outcomes.
As a nonprofit health plan company, Priority Health is tackling this challenge head-on. As the fastest growing provider of health plans in Michigan, Priority Health knew it needed to innovate and scale to meet the changing needs of its over one million members. But disconnected systems and applications meant the company did not have the complete view of members needed to realize its digital transformation and growth goals.
Priority Health’s leadership recognized that it needed a partner that could help it integrate its core systems to unlock a 360-degree view of its members, opening the door to innovation. It also needed a more strategic approach to achieving its long-term objectives. The company turned to the Salesforce Customer Success Group, including Professional Services and its Premier Success Plan, for help.
Here are four lessons from Priority Health’s digital transformation that might help your organization create better, more personalized customer experiences.
Lesson 1: Unlock better customer experience with a single view of customers
Lesson 2: Create self-serve solutions to ease administrative bottlenecks
Lesson 3: Leverage automation to create tailored marketing journeys
Lesson 4: Choose partners who can support you at every step
With member data stored in multiple systems, Priority Health’s customer service representatives often found themselves speaking to members without knowing their history with the company. This meant members were often forced to repeat their story each time they made a call. Members also often experienced delays as service representatives switched between systems to find the information they needed.
Priority Health partnered with a team of digital transformation experts from Salesforce Professional Services to help unite its sales, service, and marketing teams on a single, scalable customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
In addition to helping the company plan for long-term sustainable success, this Professional Services team was also on hand to help guide Priority Health through the critical moments of implementing its new technology solution.
With member data now available on a single customer engagement platform, Priority Health’s customer service representatives begin every interaction fully informed. This allows them to work more efficiently across all member touchpoints, deliver better member experiences, and help members to achieve better health outcomes.
Automated workflows built into the platform minimize redundant tasks, saving time and allowing service representatives to engage with members more effectively from the outset of every call.
“Salesforce’s Professional Services was phenomenal,” said Stella Michael, Director of CRM Platforms at Priority Health.
“They did a really great job in bringing the teams together and clearly articulating what we need to do to design a solution that is scalable, reliable, and maintainable. They had clarity of thought, were aligned to our business vision, and built a quality solution.”
Director of CRM Platforms
Priority Health works with a large network of agents nationally. However, legacy manual processes meant onboarding new agents took up to 10 days to finalize. Once approved, agents did not have any visibility into their historical list of clients or requests for quotes.
With help from Salesforce Professional Services, Priority Health has developed a new agent portal for their health plan enrollment using industry-specific cloud and mobile software. This enables agents to self-initiate the onboarding process, complete a step-by-step enrollment, and submit their application 60% faster than before.
The agent portal is also a one-stop-shop for agents to access existing applications, commission statements, lists of clients, and guided flows for submitting requests.
With agents now able to find information they need when they need it, the company has seen a reduction in the overall time it takes for them to match the best health plan policies for members.
To help it deliver tailored personalized experiences to members, Priority Health is using digital marketing automation to deliver omni-channel outbound marketing messages. Marketing automation makes it simpler for marketing teams to identify, segment, and target specific groups among its membership for tailored and actionable communications.
It also makes it easier for team members to optimize content, increase the visibility of campaign performance among stakeholders, and report on campaign successes.
Priority Health is also using data monitoring and encryption tools to ensure customers’ data remains confidential and enhance compliance and governance across the entire platform.
Throughout the project, Priority Health partnered with Salesforce Professional Services, who worked closely with the company’s project team to help it customize its roadmap and achieve its long-term objectives.
Members of the project team have also had expert coaching sessions included as part of its Premier Success Plan.
These sessions allow team members to build their expertise and understanding of how to use Salesforce products and capabilities with confidence.
“The Premier Success team was proactive about helping us out from the start,” said Stella. “As we started maturing internally, attending conferences, and sharpening our skills, we were able to learn about specific topics that interested us through their expert coaching sessions. It was a great partnership.”
Director of CRM Platforms
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",Healthcare & Life Sciences,Priority Health
"Individuals and organizations have similar needs. Both require constant internal communication and collaboration between the various parts to stay healthy. Mindbody, the leading wellness experience software, has worked hard to achieve optimal business health. The company helps gyms, spas, salons, and other businesses schedule their services and connect with their ideal audience.

Recently, the leaders at Mindbody realized they needed to get in better shape when it comes to communication between various departments. With expert coaching from Salesforce, the team at Mindbody began a journey of transformation that resulted in improved internal communication and a smoother customer experience. Now the various parts of the business are aligned on everything that’s vital to their mission, brand values, and business.

Mindbody initially became a Salesforce customer several years ago, using Sales Cloud to place all of its sales and revenue activity on a single platform. This helped the company improve its data tracking for its sales team, but there were still growth opportunities that were going untapped. Customer service reps and other internal teams needed access to all customer data to ensure a smooth sales-to-service handoff and improve customer satisfaction, streamlining the end-user experience. The Mindbody team quickly realized a complete shift to the Salesforce Platform would improve their customer experience and help them achieve revenue goals down the line. The only question was how to do it.

The company began by adding a Salesforce Premier Success Plan to ensure the company’s team leaders had access to Salesforce experts who could guide them through each step of the journey. This shift would be no small undertaking for Mindbody. Its data was stored on multiple Salesforce instances, and training teams on new data management was going to be a time-consuming process that required expert guidance.

In addition to adding the Premier Success Plan, the Mindbody team upgraded to Salesforce Lightning and integrated Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. This enabled the Mindbody team to quickly and easily access customer data and helped them improve their services. Salesforce provides a 360-degree view of Mindbody customers and their activities, enhancing the experience for team members and customers alike.

Here are three steps from Mindbody’s journey you can take to help to streamline your view into your customer activities:
Lesson 1: Choose a single source of truth to streamline customer activities.
Lesson 2: Enhance team collaboration with Sales and Service Cloud.
Lesson 3: Get the most out of Salesforce with the Premier Success Plan.
One of the first major shifts for Mindbody was their transition from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning. Salesforce Lightning enables hundreds of new, innovative features that improve productivity and empower teams to achieve their goals. Migrating to the new platform helped merge multiple instances and gave the Mindbody team a fresh start to store customer data and keep it clean.

Since the shift, Mindbody leadership has reinforced the importance of data entry into Salesforce to ensure that everyone involved has a complete view of the customer experience. Using Salesforce Lightning also helps improve data quality by ensuring that free form text can’t be used.

“We view Salesforce as our single source of truth,"" said KC Duggan, Director of Revenue Systems at Mindbody. ""If something didn’t take place in Salesforce, then it didn’t happen.”
Director of Revenue Systems
By combining Sales and Service, Mindbody effectively created a one-stop shop for all important customer data. The company now uses both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to track customer communications, meaning all teams have access to the same data.

Both Mindbody’s sales and customer experience teams now employ Sales Cloud to keep track of all customer activity. Before using this Salesforce program, each team only had access to their own data in separate programs. By combining their information into Sales Cloud, they were able to significantly improve their approvals workflow and lead-to-cash flow. Customer service teams can use Sales Cloud to see everything about a customer’s past history with Mindbody and take note of all past interactions. This allows them to better understand the complete experience customers have had, improving their ability to answer questions and find solutions to more complex issues.

To enhance collaborative efforts between teams, Mindbody leaned into their use of Service Cloud. They heavily used the articles in their Salesforce knowledge base to streamline and standardize processes. This makes communication between service reps and customers more helpful and consistent, improving employee productivity overall. When sales teams have access to the same data, they can ensure that prospective customers have a comprehensive understanding of their services, increasing customer retention and overall sales.

“We adopted the Salesforce Knowledge-Centered Support methodology to help ensure that we’re not only maintaining the content we have, but also adding new articles as we release new features,” Duggan said. She went on to note that this strategy helps ensure that customers have the support they need to use any exciting new features as they’re released.
“I strongly believe that we need to get the most juice out of our squeeze when it comes to vendors and their technology, and the Premier Success Plan helps us do that,” Duggan stated. “We take advantage of pretty much every aspect of that package.”

Mindbody currently leverages the Premier Success Plan in several ways.
The company sets standing meetings with customer success managers and escalates issues related to configure-price-quote to the critical accounts technology team. The team also keeps an active calendar of expert coaching sessions on new Salesforce services. Through their partnership with Salesforce architects, the leadership team at Mindbody helped build an expert coaching roadmap to help employees reach goals and learn best practices from Trailblazer communities and other businesses in similar spaces.

“When we have questions about our design or if we need to look at what other organizations in similar spaces have done, we can reach out for expert coaching at Salesforce,” Duggan said. “We’re looking to learn from others.”
The team at Mindbody believes there’s always an opportunity to optimize the end-user experience. Using Salesforce as its go-to platform for sales and service enables the business to deliver on its ideals and keep customers satisfied.

“Given that we are the leading wellness experience software, Mindbody needs to be working with other leaders in the spaces that they shine in. Salesforce, to me, is one of those,” Duggan said.

Mindbody plans to closely monitor their Salesforce data and find new ways to improve the user experience. By continuing to partner closely with Salesforce, the team at Mindbody can stay on top of the latest business shifts and maintain their position ahead of the curve.
Director of Revenue Systems, Mindbody
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",Communications,Mindbody
"In the highly competitive online travel booking sector, repeat business is the holy grail. To win customers’ repeat bookings, businesses must ensure that booking travel is a simple, customer-focused experience, with service to match. The need for seamless customer experiences has been particularly important since the emergence of COVID-19, which has heightened tensions around travel.
This is something leading online travel agency Travel Republic knows well. Since 2003, the U.K.-based business has helped millions of customers book flights, hotels, transfers, and experiences, allowing them to build their ideal holiday. Prior to the pandemic, around 35% of these were repeat customers.
To continue to achieve its growth goals, the business recognized that it needed a single shared view of its customers across all touchpoints. This would allow it to better understand its customers, achieve better customer segmentation, and create personalized customer interactions.
Having assessed a variety of solutions, Travel Republic Managing Director Antonio Fellino turned to Salesforce for help with implementing a unified technology solution that would allow the company to look after its customers better. To enable it to more quickly realize value from the project, the company drew on expert guidance and support provided by Salesforce’s specialist support team.
Here are four lessons from Travel Republic’s digital transformation journey that you can use to reach your goals faster.
1. Choose partners who can help you deliver maximum value.
2. Create better customer experiences with a single view of customers.
3. Deliver tailored customer journeys with marketing automation.
4. Take the pressure off in-house teams with 24/7 support.
To ensure it was able to get the most value out of its technology investment quickly, Travel Republic’s project team drew on the expert advice and support included with the Salesforce Premier Success Plan.
This plan included Travel Republic’s access to Salesforce experts who worked closely with the team to prepare for the implementation phase and help the business achieve its long-term objectives.
Members of the project team were also able to access expert coaching sessions and training opportunities on topics relating to their technology and its rollout. These sessions allowed team members to build their expertise and understanding of how to use the solution, so they could hit the ground running.
“One of our challenges historically has been buying a product and then not really making the most of it,” said Fellino. “Salesforce helped us to get our act together by helping to coordinate and drive progress forward.”
Managing Director
When customer data was siloed in multiple systems, Travel Republic’s team members were unable to access a complete view of customers across the business’ touchpoints. This made it difficult for customer service agents to access the information they needed to solve customers’ problems.
Travel Republic’s team members worked closely with expert strategic and technical advisors, and customer data is now available on a single customer engagement platform. The company’s service agents now have a better understanding of the customer journey. This allows them to enter interactions fully briefed, access the information they need easily and quickly, and deliver better customer service.
In addition, Travel Republic united its service and marketing teams on a unified, scalable customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
“Our goal is to have a ‘single brain’ that allows us to understand all of our interactions with a customer — whether that’s on live chat, in a customer service call, or in an email,” explained Fellino. “That will then affect how we communicate with that customer downstream. So, if a customer has a live complaint with us, for example, we can ensure that we don’t keep advertising to them.
In this video (2:16), learn how Travel Republic is working with its Salesforce advisors to deploy new capabilities with confidence, boost internal productivity, and improve the customer experience.
The customer experience has become an increasingly important differentiator for organizations of all kinds, but it’s particularly crucial in the volatile travel sector.
Travel Republic is using digital marketing automation to transform how it delivers customer experiences.
Marketing automation makes it easier to connect with consumers and deliver relevant, measurable, and optimized user experiences. This includes harnessing customer data — such as customer profiles, browsing and booking history, and user-generated reviews — to build personalized messaging journeys across customers’ preferred channels.
The company also plans to roll out additional features that will allow it to extract more value from its data, as well as segment and manage audience segments more effectively.
“Our customer success manager coordinated our SMEs and key stakeholders throughout the rollout,” said Fellino. “He really understood what we were trying to achieve as an organization, and provided the specialist support we needed to allow each of our product owners to move forward and achieve more with the solution.”
Having laid a strong foundation for additional innovation, Travel Republic plans to continue working with its Salesforce advisors to help it deploy new capabilities with confidence, boost internal productivity, and improve the customer experience.
The company can also rely on ongoing support and backup from a team of Salesforce experts who provide personalized insights and technical guidance by cloud, industry, and customer needs.
This support includes access to 24x7 technical support to mitigate disruption and a team of developers to review and troubleshoot code to fix or avoid problems.
“Working with the Premier Success team has been a really positive collaboration for us,” said Fellino.
Managing Director
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",Travel Transportation & Hospitality,Travel Republic
"7,900 employees
Avaya is a leading pure-play unified communications & collaboration and contact center software company with around 100,000 global customers, serving more than 90% of the largest US companies. Its sales and services teams rely on state-of-the-art CRM technology for account management, sales operations, compensation planning, and other critical business activities.
The Avaya sales organization relies on vast amounts of CRM data to manage and optimize its relationships within each account, and the more quickly and intelligently this data can be analyzed, the better positioned sellers are to capitalize on opportunities. For years, wrangling this data to produce meaningful forecasting was a time-intensive process, yielding multiple reports in various locations that account teams would then have to manually aggregate and interpret--and even after they did so, it wasn't often clear what immediate actions the seller should take.
Using CRM Analytics Plus, which combines descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics, Avaya simplified and accelerated its reporting processes, reducing more than 12,000 global reports to a mere 15 dashboards, and made self-serve analytics available to all users. Today, the Salesforce-native visual analytics of CRM Analytics and the predictive capabilities of CRM Analytics’ Einstein Discovery help Avaya sellers forecast their sales predictions more effectively and spot new ways to grow their business within each account.
When visual analytics within Avaya's CRM platform replaced the burden and limitations of manual reporting, all areas of sales and sales operations saw an immediate effect. Communicating sales volumes to executive management became more streamlined and interactive, and sellers had a clearer picture into current account activities so they could more easily prioritize their daily and weekly work.
Even more significantly, CRM Analytics Plus helped them take forecasting to a new level. Using Einstein Discovery, Avaya now applies statistical methods and machine learning algorithms to the internal and external data stores, putting insights at the sellers' fingertips that help inform and predict future sales. They no longer need to manually piece together multiple reports, aggregate disparate data, validate inputs, and adjust for specific scenarios—the CRM delivers AI-driven predictions and recommended actions to them in real time.
Examples include customized CRM Analytics Plus models for prioritizing deals by predicting ""propensity to close in quarter"" and calculating ""time series"" intervals to avoid time wasted on blind bookings with no opportunity attached. With these enhancements, sales teams and their management spend far less time assembling the forecasts, and more time pursuing the opportunities that are likely to yield the best results.
Effective analytics requires the capability to not only generate new insights, but also make the insights accessible to the people who need them, and doing so at the right place and time. Avaya's vision for empowering its sales teams depended on putting insights directly in view of CRM users as they performed their day-to-day work, such as viewing account information or entering the data for a new opportunity.
Without needing to learn or consult alternate tools, sellers and teams using the CRM are now presented with various insights that are relevant to the account they're viewing or the action they take. Examples of insights might include account health checks, opportunity scoring, and propensity to buy.
""Tableau CRM Plus lets us link the analytics to our business processes by embedding these insights right within the CRM workflow,"" said Mariano Salatino, Vice President of Sales Operations at Avaya. ""No other tool could give us that ability without a huge investment in custom development."" As for Einstein Discovery, he adds: ""We've proven that higher adoption of Einstein translates to a higher probability of hitting or exceeding sales quotas.""
The Avaya CRM Analytics Plus solution embeds advanced analytics right into the CRM experience for users, giving them dashboards to interact with instead of juggling disparate apps and reports. At the same time, the platform enables a high level of precision for personalizing each user's view. And because CRM Analytics Plus is native to Salesforce, the personalized insights reach every CRM user without requiring any changes to infrastructure, security, or permissions.
Over time, this approach makes it very easy for the IT and sales operations teams to add continuous value. ""We can easily make changes across everyone's experience of the CRM as our business evolves and transforms,"" said Salatino. ""All we have to do is change a single dashboard, and thousands of employees get the benefit of updated capabilities. It's managed within one template, rather than across thousands of reports.""
Self-service, embedded advanced analytics has led to another important achievement at Avaya: data democratization. Where before a small team of analysts used the data to send reports to sellers and executives, now all roles, technical and non-technical, have the freedom to analyze and explore the data themselves—all on a trusted platform with rigorous role-based governance. Salatino points out that usage of the CRM Analytics solution increased 500% in the first year, then doubled again in the year after that.
""It's been a real paradigm shift for us,"" said Salatino. ""We've moved from 'intelligence for the few' to 'intelligence for all' as a result of this transformation. The data and the self-service analytics are available to everyone, if they have permissions. So, rather than relying on analysts and reports, everyone can do the forecasting themselves.""



Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.
",Communications,Avaya
"San Francisco-based BetterUp is on a mission to transform careers and businesses around the globe. BetterUp’s platform combines coaching, technology, and behavioral science to deliver change at scale — improving individual resilience, adaptability, and effectiveness. Focused on driving growth and transformation for both individual members and their organizations, BetterUp leverages a network of more than 3,000 coaches, working in 64 languages across over 70 countries worldwide, who deliver a personalized, transformative experience for each of its users.
BetterUp’s results speak for themselves: 90% of members report a reduction in stress levels, and users also report huge gains in resilience, focus, and agility. The company’s coaching platform is trusted by more than 600 organizations including NASA, Google, Hilton, and other leading Fortune 1,000 companies.
How did BetterUp grow, in less than a decade, into a global company changing the lives of hundreds of organizations and thousands of people each year? Through a combination of delighting customers, cultivating a strong internal culture, and, of course, always staying true to its mission. BetterUp has also been a Salesforce customer since 2016, leveraging the platform’s scalability and work-from-anywhere flexibility as the company has grown. Let’s take a closer look.
Stay true to your mission.
Transform your GTM strategy with CPQ.
Embrace flexibility and extend your reach.
BetterUp focuses on three key impact areas: mental fitness, career and leadership development, and social connection. “We’re striving to help people everywhere live their lives with greater clarity, purpose, and passion,” Adam Lavezzo, VP, Revenue Strategy & Operations, said. The company aims to help people find greater meaning and direction in both their personal and professional lives, because they're increasingly interconnected. Internally, team members look at it as, “A journey of, ‘How do we bring out the best in a person?’""
Right now, it’s bringing out the best in people through the BetterUp platform, a comprehensive organizational solution that focuses on four areas: growth and transformation, mental fitness and organizational health via BetterUp Care, diversity and inclusion, and sales performance. The platform combines a science-based approach to behavioral change and HR topics with one-on-one and group coaching, assessments, and content activities. It’s all managed by Identify AI™, BetterUp’s proprietary algorithm that finds the best coaches and recommends personalized pathways to growth for each individual user.
VP, Revenue Strategy & Operations, BetterUp
The platform leverages the power of mobile devices and videoconferencing, so it’s easy for organizations anywhere in the world to adopt BetterUp and roll it out at scale to employees, onsite or over distance. Coaching sessions take place remotely, over video calls, and coaches can suggest additional sessions and supplemental content to focus on specific topics for peak performance. Individual users have dashboards that track their progress across key indicators, and BetterUp also offers specialists to help members focus on key areas including communication, nutrition, and even navigating the journey of being a working parent. The goal is to help each user reach their individual potential, in turn helping teams and organizations realize greater success.
BetterUp’s approach is working in a big way. Managing a global network of coaches, clients, and technology is no small feat, however. Let’s look at how BetterUp leverages Salesforce to help it grow by helping more of its own clients grow.
Virtually all of BetterUp’s go-to-market (GTM) teams — account executives, customer solutions, operations — run on Sales Cloud. Lavezzo cites this as a key to keeping the business moving forward. “We all benefit from the workflow management on the sales side, and the CRM powering a lot of our outreach on the marketing side,” he said. Sales Cloud also serves as a key source of truth for data in decision-making, helping the team decide which customers and markets are primed for growth.
The addition of Salesforce CPQ (configure, price, quote) to BetterUp’s tech stack took its GTM efforts to a whole new place. “CPQ has been a game changer for us in terms of the efficiencies of all of our deal flow,” Lavezzo said. Between customizing the size and scope of its offerings to fit different customers, and sourcing and managing coaches from a global talent pool thousands deep, BetterUp’s deals can get complex in a hurry. CPQ automates manual and time-consuming processes, including:
Getting internal approvals for quotes
Reviewing redlines with the legal team
Sending quotes out to customers for review
Lavezzo said CPQ has had a huge impact on streamlining BetterUp’s internal processes and helping drive more efficiencies. The result is the ability to close more deals, faster. “Our sales reps can now spend more time selling, versus waiting for the manual process of closing a deal,” he added. “That speed directly impacts our ability to achieve our mission, bringing BetterUp to more people, faster.”
VP, Revenue Strategy & Operations, BetterUp
The automation also benefits BetterUp’s supply side operations when new customer companies come online. When a new customer signs on with BetterUp, the quote includes data on the number of employees in the company and where those employees are located. For example, if the engagement is to coach a group of people in Japan and BetterUp’s network isn't as robust there, a signal can be sent up internally to begin recruiting and sourcing talent for the job.
“Especially on the go-to-market side, we live and breathe Salesforce. The reporting we have there is our source of truth, not just on what has happened, but how we’re continuing to trend against our goals,” Lavezzo said. This ranges from sales tracking data to reporting on customer health. Many of BetterUp’s client engagements begin with just a segment of the organization getting access to coaching. Over time, initial small-scale success can serve as a proof point to expand the engagement to reach more of a client’s workforce.
“We’re continually tracking the health of the account, and our relationships with the folks we're in contact with. Salesforce makes it easy to lean into how we can make BetterUp available for more people in a given organization,” Lavezzo said. “That’s really important to us.”
While COVID posed challenges for BetterUp as it did to all businesses, the company had embraced remote and hybrid work long before the pandemic took hold. “Since our inception, we've been incredibly remote-friendly,” Lavezzo said. More than half of BetterUp employees worked remotely pre-COVID, so while the transition into the pandemic wasn’t painless, BetterUp already had some tools and procedures in place to make things a bit smoother.
More than its familiarity with collaborating — and celebrating company wins — over Slack, though, BetterUp’s raison d’etre really shone through during the months when so many people were relegated to working from home. “COVID accelerated individuals and companies alike, recognizing that there wasn't a distinction between people’s personal and professional lives, and that we need to focus on individuals’ mental fitness,” Lavezzo said. BetterUp saw more customers understanding that investing in their people was mission-critical, and how having access to a coach and a mental fitness platform in your pocket could help.
 
That drive to help more people lies at the heart of the company’s long-range plans. BetterUp is doubling down on things like processes and efficiencies. “We want to redirect our talent to doing what they’re uniquely capable of doing, which is engaging customers to bring BetterUp to more people in their organizations, and deploying quickly and seamlessly,” Lavezzo said. “So I think we're spending a lot of time thinking about where we can be investing in systems and processes to cut down on busywork or administrative work.” For Lavezzo, the goal is building intelligence throughout the company, from sales through deployment to post-sales renewal expansion, and on- and off-boarding. “It’s gotta be one cohesive system,” he added.
In many ways, BetterUp has long been a global company, as it works with many companies that have employees all over the world. Over the last year, however, it took the step of opening its first offices in Europe, and building out teams there. Having Salesforce already in place made it easier for BetterUp to add new reps, regions, products, and even new currencies in a seamless fashion.
BetterUp’s growth is all in service of the company’s core mission to transform the lives of as many people as it can reach. It’s a mission that uniquely blends the hyperpersonal with hypergrowth. And that means working with an incredible amount of mission-critical data every day. “If company X is buying us because it wants to transform the lives of its working parents, we learn about the programs it has in place and the challenges that are there,” Lavezzo said. That’s a wealth of information to inform how BetterUp configures its product and gets its coaches up to speed on how best to work with that company’s individual employees. Sales Cloud and CPQ make all of that data actionable. “With Salesforce, we have that information captured, structured, and accessible,” Lavezzo said. “It allows us to deliver personalization and transformation at scale in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to.”
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",Professional Services,BetterUp
"At Chambers Gasket & Manufacturing Co., a custom fabricator of nonmetallic gaskets, sales representatives were spending too much time entering information rather than pursuing new client opportunities. This was stifling business growth. So, President G. Michael Kenny wanted to deploy a digital commerce system that would allow customers to order items online, reducing internal manual data input and order-entry time.
G. Michael Kenny
President
Through four carefully considered steps, Kenny built a simplified self-service B2B storefront that frees up his sales staff to capture new clients.
Although he’s self-admittedly not the most tech-savvy, Kenny wanted to build the storefront and deploy it using Salesforce B2B Commerce.
He attended a B2B Commerce boot camp in Chicago, where Chambers Gasket is located. After four days of intense learning, Kenny felt confident enough to build out the architecture connecting B2B Commerce to the other Salesforce elements Chambers Gasket had already deployed. Then he got to work building the storefront.
“There were some delays in working on it, but all in all, it took me two or three hours a day over six months to implement it in the sandbox and then put it into production.”
G. Michael Kenny President
Kenny’s customers already know the items and quantities they need. They don’t want bells and whistles from a digital commerce site, sales pitches, or hand-holding to help them select an item. They want a simple site where they can buy their items quickly and get back to work.
So, Kenny built a site offering a streamlined experience. Shoppers have multiple ways to quickly find the items they want, drill down for more details, enter the quantity, add it to the cart, and check out. The B2B portal includes tiered pricing to encourage orders of higher quantities. Customers can also use the quick order feature to paste the part number and quantity right into their cart.
“We really tried to tailor the shopping experience with no frills — just in and out, and make it as simple as possible. Frictionless.”
Use this guide to see how to:
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Once completed, an order automatically becomes a Salesforce record and is placed in the ERP. Customers are notified right away that their order is being fulfilled.
Previously, order fulfillment might take much more time. For example, if the order was sent in by email, it might linger in a sales rep’s inbox for days before being filled.
“Now the customer doesn’t have to deal with, potentially, an out-of-office notice, or go back and forth to get their order filled. They can be confident their order is in our system, and I can be confident the system is checking raw-material inventory, checking if we can meet their dates, and responding to the customer.”
Kenny also incorporated order-process automation into the system. Chambers Gasket sales reps no longer enter information on a piece of paper by hand, then type it into the purchase order, then enter it into the larger Salesforce ecosystem. Customers are doing that themselves through the self-service portal.
Order totals are automatically computed based on quantities purchased.
This automation is especially important because the company offers multiple price breaks based on quantities and various maximums and minimums. Sales reps previously had to swivel back and forth between systems to compile those numbers, a process that took up a lot of time.
“Converting an online sales order to B2B Commerce will save 18 minutes of human time per transaction, which translates to, on average, $7.50 in savings per transaction. Over thousands and thousands of sales order lines we process every year, that adds up.”
With that extra time, Chambers Gasket sales reps are working to close new business. For example, when COVID-19 began, many of Chambers Gasket’s medical technology customers pivoted to manufacturing PPE and medical-testing equipment. Those customers, and many new ones, turned to Chambers Gasket for help cutting the Plexiglas.
As a result, Chambers Gasket saw its business in the medical technology sphere jump sevenfold in the first quarter of 2020, its best quarter ever, revenue-wise.
“I have 10, 15, 20 requests from new accounts that I’ve never heard of before looking to make filters and facemasks and whatnot,” Kenny said. “Without being able to drive many customer orders to B2B Commerce and lower that cost and time, I wouldn’t have time to chase these new opportunities.”
",Manufacturing,Chambers Gasket & Manufacturing Co.
"Skiers and snowboarders are known for taking things to the next level — and not just on the hill. They’re also very digitally engaged, sharing their passion for the outdoors, snow, the latest gear, and fresh tracks. With that said, few brick-and-mortar ski shops have been able to create engaging digital experiences for such a savvy community.
Christy Sports is determined to change that. Headquartered in Lakewood, Colorado, the company is one of the largest winter sports specialty retailers in the United States. While historically known for its five-star in-store service, a somewhat disconnected digital platform kept the business from delivering the same stellar service online. The company needed a digital transformation to ensure no sales opportunities were left on the table and to gain visibility into internal processes and resources.
To better engage with customers online, Christy Sports started on a journey with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Order Management, and MuleSoft to allow the business to better connect online and in-store customer journeys. This would enable a seamless five-star experience regardless of location, device, and purpose for visiting. And Christy Sports met its initial goal of launching christysports.com on this new platform in only 81 days. Read on to see how.
Harvey Bierman
CDO, Christy Sports
As the Chief Digital Office of Christy Sports, Harvey Bierman created an 18-month roadmap for developing and accelerating the company’s ecommerce and digital marketing efforts. The plan started with improving Christy Sports' digital experience to match its in-store experience, optimizing the team, streamlining processes, and pivoting the tech stack — in that order.
Between the COVID-19 pandemic and other unanticipated technology barriers, the team needed a trusted, scalable, and enterprise-level technology partner to enable the digital transformation at the speed COVID required. While people and process optimization continued, technology became the most time-sensitive priority.
Christy Sports, in partnership with Red Van Workshop, deployed Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. This helped the company build a robust customer engagement system and enabled it to embrace continued agile and transformative customer journeys. The platform also had the integrated order management layer Christy Sports needed to replace its manual online order fulfillment process. MuleSoft helped connect this new digital platform to its back-end and third-party systems.
“Commerce Cloud, Order Management, and MuleSoft allowed us to tackle a lot of really complicated things simplistically so that we could set that foundation, do it quickly, and then start leaning in on the people and process.”
With Christy Sports’ technology stabilizing its platform and automating its processes, Bierman turned to his high-performing team. He planned out what competencies the business would need staff-wise in the next 18–24 months. He then investigated whether they already existed within the company, could be hired in, or would have to be outsourced.
Wherever possible, Christy Sports is bringing key competencies in-house. One of the primary focus areas has been to improve the company’s digital narrative. Through new hires and retraining of tenured team members, the business has brought to life customer journeys that better represent the service and expertise the business is known for in its stores.
With the team plan in place, Bierman and this newly formed digital team focused on improving the user experience. As a result, Christy Sports consolidated four of the company’s five websites into a single site. This allowed for easier and more cost-effective maintenance and gained a data-driven view of each website visitor to ultimately inform customer journeys. This increased customer satisfaction, which drove more personalized experiences that led to an immediate double-digit increase in conversion rates.
“At the end of the day, nothing sets you up for success better than offering a really great experience on the web,"" Bierman said.
This efficient consolidation was a big part of creating the unified customer journey. “There are all sorts of journeys that we’re focused on getting to, and then using digital communication, push marketing, the website, personalization, social media, and email and SMS to shepherd the consumer through a journey that’s somewhat unique to them,” Bierman said.
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",Retail,Christy Sports
"From city streets to the Fashion Week runway, FILA is an iconic brand with global appeal. Until recently, the century-old company sold exclusively through wholesale partners. When Jennifer Estabrook took over as president of FILA North America, she breathed new life into the company’s ecommerce business — using Salesforce to completely revamp the buyer experience.
Kathleen Hachmeyer
Director of Technological Innovation
While many sports brands experienced a double-digit decline, FILA’s revenue grew nearly 10% in 2020. Here are three ways the brand took advantage of a flexible and connected commerce platform to boost sales — and tighten its relationship with retailers — during a global pandemic.
1. Bring B2C simplicity to B2B commerce.
2. Take a data-driven approach to optimize buyer engagement.
3. Create a seamless and connected experience.
COVID-19 quickly propelled the world online — and FILA went with it. As in-person meetings came to a screeching halt, the brand had to rethink its B2B sales strategy.
FILA wanted to mimic the success of its newly launched B2C commerce site while maintaining strong relationships with its retail customers. The solution: Create a consumer-like shopping experience that provides the flexibility B2B sales require, including dynamic pricing, complex shipping functionality, and custom product catalogs for retailer-exclusive items.
The sportswear brand worked with award-winning digital consulting firm XCentium to build a B2B site that captures the FILA look and feel and allows the team to make changes on the fly — without development or code — which was a big impetus for switching from its previous order capture system to the Salesforce Platform. For FILA, it’s that flexibility — on both the business user and customer side — that’s driving amazing results.
""Our average order value has increased substantially, and I think a lot of that comes back to the flexibility the Salesforce Platform allows. We’ve also seen greater engagement — whether that’s order frequency or time spent on the site. Internally, we've seen a huge decrease in the time it takes to launch something new on the site. With our previous system, a new catalog could take weeks to actually get up and running, whereas now it takes maybe a day or two.""
After its recent ecommerce success, FILA’s chairman set a lofty goal of selling a million dollars of goods a day. The brand continues to tap into insights from the platform to drive that ambitious growth.
With real-time visibility into behavioral and transactional data (on both the B2B and B2C sides), sales and marketing teams can see trends, including hot-selling items, and run promotions to drive more traffic to specific merchandise. And FILA can create segmented offers and product recommendations based on customer purchase history and seasonal relevance.
""The reporting is huge — looking at logins, how long it takes for buyers to make a purchase, and whether or not they are driven by promotions. It’s really easy to measure and react to on the B2B side now.""
FILA also streamlined marketing efforts by integrating its digital asset management platform with Salesforce. Now, both B2B buyers and internal business users have easy access to product information, imagery, and other branded assets to help them market and sell new footwear and apparel.
As retailers everywhere navigate a rapidly changing and unpredictable retail market, FILA continues to see an uptick in online sales. The brand attributes its success to having a truly connected customer experience ecosystem — with sales, service, and digital commerce (both D2C and B2B) unified on a single platform.
Coinciding with the launch of its new B2B commerce site, FILA also implemented a new ERP to automate operational processes and deliver a seamless self-service experience. “The ERP is definitely high on the totem pole — and knowing how much we rely on it, it made sense to launch them together versus trying to have our B2B site come first,” said Hachmeyer.
For FILA, the integration helps the company improve demand planning and forecasting while eliminating the need to update and maintain information in multiple systems. On the buyer side, customers can now track and review their purchase history in real time, enabling a better ordering experience.
FILA’s short-term roadmap includes continuing to harness the agility of the platform to build a full, end-to-end ecommerce experience — using MuleSoft to improve the data flow between systems. “We have a lot to do yet, but we're excited,” said Hachmeyer.
",Retail,FILA
"Getting one sporting event on air takes a lot of work and hundreds of people across multiple teams. So just imagine the kind of workforce a major brand like FOX Sports needs to deploy to broadcast a game.
The company operates multiple sports channels, broadcast divisions, and media outfits. Its channels include FOX Sports, FOX Sports 1, FOX Sports 2, Fox Deportes, and Big Ten Network, and it is home to major sporting events such as the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and Major League Soccer.
Each of these games requires multiple groups within FOX Sports to provide staffing support to employees, freelancers, and resources. And with each group previously using its own scheduling and organizing system, there was no single channel to communicate and collaborate across departments.
To make scheduling easy for employees and freelancers, who often work long hours to bring events to viewers, FOX Sports has unified its production scheduling systems and streamlined its processes. The company rolled out an application called Playbook to its studio, post-production, remote operations, transmission, broadcast, and technical operations teams to create a single view of events.
Playbook is a sports production scheduling and workflow application that was built based on a powerful field service solution. It is now enabling about 260 administrators and 8,500 freelancers to get their schedules on the go, in real time. Within FOX Sports, teams have become more collaborative, agile, and productive by having access to event data in one place.
Leading this transformation is Gina Porretti, FOX Sports’ Senior Vice President for Studio Operations. A seasoned TV professional, Porretti has been instrumental to FOX Sports’ successful studio operations, looking after a range of areas, from technical and creative to financial. She has held senior roles in TV operations and production.
Here are four ways Playbook helps Porretti and her team achieve transparency in event data, automate manual processes, resolve staffing problems, and boost collaboration.
Senior Vice President, Studio Operations, FOX Sports

Step 1. Drive smart collaboration through a single view of business.
Step 2: Empower workforce with real-time access to information and greater mobility.
Step 3: Optimize resources and plan staffing strategically.
Step 4: Improve productivity and business agility.
Without a single platform across its departments, it was difficult for FOX Sports to foster collaboration and make sure teams were using the same data to make decisions.
“We were all working in our own silos and trying to make sense of what we were doing, and were communicating via email or text message,” said Porretti. “There was no one universal system for us to go to gather data or see what everybody else was doing.”
Now, FOX Sports’ studio, post-production, remote crewing operations, transmission, broadcast, and technical operations teams can access real-time information via a single channel. They collaborate more and strategically plan their staffing using tools such as templates, notifications, notes, workflows, and approvals. This has sped up preparations for event production and ensured the company is using its resources optimally.
FOX Sports first deployed Playbook to its studio, post-production, and remote operations teams. To help users with the new app, the company also rolled out ‘HelpDesk’ using a powerful customer service and support platform.
The transmission, broadcast, and technical operations teams have also transitioned to Playbook. Now, about 260 administrators and 8,500 freelancers benefit from having a single system for complete visibility into workflows and resource scheduling.
“We can see what everybody’s doing. If I want to know what’s going on at Fox Deportes today, I just log in to Playbook, see the schedule, locate an actual show today or in the future and if crew is assigned we can verify who is booked on that show or event.”
Gina Porretti, Senior Vice President, Studio Operations, FOX Sports
Learn more about Salesforce Service Cloud.
Previously, crews had to get their schedule through email and phone calls. Now, everything a crew member needs to know is instantly available in the app on their mobile device. For the first time, they can see all the events they are booked for in one place and quickly accept or decline a shift through the Playbook app, making management of their schedules more efficient.
For FOX Sports production staff, the ability to assign and track schedules and other activities through mobile devices has greatly accelerated production workflows. They can send a request to see if an entire crew is available for an event and get a reply quickly, enabling them to plan and schedule resources optimally.
Staff coordinators no longer spend long hours looking through emails for crewing preferences. With application templates reducing the repetitive work involved in using a staffing grid, coordinators can now focus on resolving staffing conflicts and rebalancing assignments.
“We now have transparency. If my team is booking a portion of a crew or facility for a game, I can see what remote crewing has been able to do, who they booked for that event, confirm the call time, and whether our call times align with theirs so we can sync up appropriately. That’s a single source of truth for us.”
Gina Porretti, Senior Vice President, Studio Operations, FOX Sports
Learn more about Salesforce Field Service.
FOX Sports’ need to organize and optimize resources such as crews and facilities is complex. From preproduction to broadcast transmission, every stage in broadcasting a game requires multiple teams and hundreds of resources.
FOX has improved its production timelines and deployment of resources through analytics and timely insights. By having a common scheduling and workflow platform, production staff can make decisions based on the same data, helping them avoid issues such as staffing and scheduling conflicts.
Within Porretti's department, the studio operations and scheduling teams have improved their coordination, thanks to more transparent event data. Operations managers can easily check with the scheduling team for any issues with crewing, helping them address concerns promptly.
Managing other areas of staffing is also more efficient now that Playbook is fully integrated with other systems such as Workday and FoxPAY. This has sped up onboarding of new employees and processing of payroll.
Fox attributes the integration success of Playbook with Workday and FoxPAY to MuleSoft. The integration supports the digital transformation of the onboarding and payroll process.
Ultimately, having a single platform has enhanced FOX Sports’ operational productivity and accelerated workflows. Gone are the days when different departments would operate on their own, using different systems, and missing opportunities for synergy.
FOX Sports single pane of glass view with Salesforce allows it to streamline scheduling and operations, and provide historical context for live productions and studio events.
As powerful as it is, FOX Sports has plans to improve Playbook. “We will continue to tie it to other software applications, such as our travel system, bring new teams on to the platform, and develop new ways to improve its ease of use,” said Porretti.
“As opposed to calling a coordinator to know what crew is booked for an event and to make sure they are on track with scheduling, I can just go to the dashboard and all the events for the week ahead would come up. It’s just lifesaving.”
Gina Porretti, Senior Vice President, Studio Operations, FOX Sports.
",Media,FOX Sports
"Use of GE Renewable Energy’s existing Onshore Wind Parts digital commerce site was declining. Shoppers trying to buy turbine parts were frustrated with the interface, inconsistent part naming, and slow load times. The company needed to quickly build a new B2B storefront that addressed these issues.
Livia Miyabara
Marketing & Strategy Leader, GE Parts and Repairs
Using a phased minimum viable product (MVP) approach, GE Renewable Energy crafted and implemented a fully functioning, market competitive, and responsive B2B digital commerce solution with a modern user experience in just 10 weeks. The MVP approach has proven successful for companies looking to expedite their ecommerce initiatives. These tips were impactful for GE Renewable Energy:
GE Renewable Energy began by conducting online surveys and phone interviews with customers to identify their pain points and how to improve the shopping experience. Customers told GE that they wanted a simplified site where it was easy to find parts and prices and quickly complete their buying journey. The market segmentation fueled by this research helped inform GE Renewable Energy’s viable product approach.
The MVP approach helped focus the team on the top features needed to build a superior site that met customer expectations.
“At the start, there’s so much you want to do so fast. You want to transform everything. But the phased approach makes you pause and organize your thoughts and your priorities, create that MVP plan, execute that, and build on those successes. They may be smaller successes, but they build up to that larger overall program success.”
GE’s MVP approach began with focusing on the customer.
“We knew the customers’ needs had to be front and center. Everything related to system integration and automated order processing was out because customers don’t see those processes. That focused us on helping users find the right part, simplifying the checkout process, and driving price transparency and self-service.”
With the help of implementation partner Deloitte Digital, GE used B2B Commerce to build a lightweight pilot program, with a refined front-end shopping experience but no back-end implementation. Customers could see and engage with the solution and give feedback about what the company was building — and what features the storefront was still lacking.
“It was critical for us to have customer voices heard throughout the process and to really ensure that we’re keeping them as the North Star through this project.”
Based on feedback from the pilot, GE and Deloitte Digital tweaked the storefront. The portal has responsive design and mobile capability, and presents a simplified typical B2C shopping experience.
The new virtual storefront features self-service capabilities that allow customers to search by keyword and part number. They can simply enter the wind turbine model, and the results will show only parts relevant to that turbine.
Users can drill down through multiple category hierarchies and ad hoc facets, check product availability, identify obsolete parts and their replacements, request a quote, place orders, and check order status.
Streamlining B2B search for expansive catalogs and complex products directly addresses customer pain points most specifically the clunky, time-consuming buying process.
After the front end and its user interface were complete, GE and Deloitte Digital integrated B2B commerce with the ERP and pricing systems, and built automation into the system’s back end to handle order processing and fulfillment.
“Customers don’t need to wait for a human being to process their orders, driving faster response and return to service, which is a priority when our customers want to avoid a stopped turbine and continue producing renewable energy. The automation also frees up employees to focus on helping users find the right part and answering questions or providing additional details about a product.”
While the implementation team built this superior storefront experience, the business team maintained constant contact with the organization’s financial, business, and technical sides to earn their buy-in. The team demoed the latest features and sought feedback before moving to each next step.
That allowed the team to measure success as they went along — and iterate as needed.
“It was essential for our success that the business and technology teams were tightly aligned. And there’s a broader set of people on both the business and technology sides who came together to make sure we were releasing the right functions and features.”
Getting large budgets approved can be difficult, but by keeping the financial side involved and showing successes along the way, the implementation team was more able to get approval for smaller expenses as they came up in the natural course of deployment.
Since rolling out the new storefront, GE Renewable Energy has seen increased customer engagement, growing its user base by 35% in the last six months. Most users are accessing the site at least twice a week.
The data collected from those engagements helps the company better understand the customer journey and continue to modify the store.
“Now we know what features customers are using, what they’re looking for, and what they’re looking for that they can’t find. With that information, we can really improve the customer experience, and continue to drive sales.”

",Technology,GE Renewable Energy
"Founded in the 1950s as a small mechanical workshop in Spain, Grupo Antolin has become a world leader in developing, designing, and manufacturing automotive interior components. This family company has 27,000 employees operating in 26 countries.
With its constant desire to innovate, Grupo Antolin developed a plan in 2018, which included the launch of its Smart Integrator strategy. This reaffirmed its position as a global supplier of technological solutions for car interiors.
This strategy launched new innovative products in each of its existing business lines (headliners, doors, lighting, instrument panels, and electronic systems). It was also the start of a new commercial phase that required implementing a customer relationship management system (CRM). Daniel Pardo, head of business development in the lighting and human machine interface (HMI) area, indicated, ""We proposed starting a pilot with Salesforce because it was not only about new products, but also about new sales cycles, new contacts, and a pre-sales process that we were not used to.""
From a commercial point of view, the leap into manufacturing new products has meant a radical change for the Spanish company. As a Tier 1 manufacturer, Grupo Antolin sells directly to the major car manufacturers (BMW, Renault, Mercedes, etc.) that rely on the company for its new models. But some of these customers were not aware that Grupo Antolin was a manufacturer of these new products, ranging from backlit trims to capacitive surfaces to control electronics — all with multiple variations.
The company also lacked the right contacts for the new products. As Pardo explained, ""The headliner buyers are different from those who buy the interior lighting or the control electronics. We did not always have the contacts for these types of parts.""
It required a lot of pre-sales work which is where Sales Cloud came into play for the new product business development team in Spain, US, and China.
From the outset, it was clear that a successful Sales Cloud implementation depended on the company’s management being involved. So, the initiative was conceived as a pilot test that focused on business development for the new products without extending its scope to sales.
Contact management was one of the first benefits of implementing Sales Cloud. Jiménez highlighted, ""Thanks to Sales Cloud, we can keep track of our customer contacts. Even if we have not been selected for a project, we can identify the main contacts in the different areas (purchasing, engineering, design) and build up a history of our interaction.”
Pardo agreed with his colleague, stating ""This is fundamental."" He explained that much of the information was kept in local files, so it was not visible to the rest of the sales team. Now, any salesperson in the US can consult a contact generated in Spain before launching an offer, saving time, and avoiding duplicate work.
Pardo also highlighted ""how easy transitions are now with Sales Cloud. If there is staff turnover, whoever sits in my chair knows everything I've been doing up to today.""
In the automotive industry, sales cycles can extend over several years. Properly managing opportunities is essential, especially because Grupo Antolin may have more than 300 active opportunities at the same time.
Pardo said, ""Sales Cloud is helping us track opportunities, and provides reports to evaluate which products are generating more interest.""
The reporting capabilities also make it possible to determine which customers are engaging most with the company. Pardo said, ""We use Sales Cloud to validate the product and the customers themselves.""
Because Grupo Antolin had not marketed these new products before, the company is in the process of defining its sales cycle. This is essential for controlling times and forecasts. Pardo pointed out, ""After ten months of operation, we now have visibility into the sales cycle."" They can determine when the first customer contact was made, how many contacts have been made, where bottlenecks have occurred, who the decision makers are, and more.
""Knowing the sales cycle is fundamental,"" explained Pardo. ""For all the meetings we do to follow up on product-based opportunities, we only use Salesforce. It has already established itself as a standard in terms of reporting."" Before implementing Sales Cloud, the company relied on spreadsheets. Jiménez recalled that several meetings with the different key account managers (KAMs) were necessary to consolidate all the information before generating the final report.
""Using Salesforce has allowed us to optimize this time. And, because it is a cloud-based tool, the people involved have access to all the information in real time,"" Jiménez explained. It is even possible to produce live reports on the fly.
This simplicity in preparing dashboards also extends to senior management. This report includes indicators such as ""number of opportunities generated and number of nominations, including product and customer graphs.”
And Grupo Antolin created dashboards to show the number of sales per customer. Pardo explained, ""We are now involved in the five-year sales plan in which we set targets by product and customer. With this information, we not only cross-reference it with the generated opportunities, but also apply probability percentages of realizing the sales.”
Grupo Antolin has total visibility of their opportunities so they can analyze the status of each, whether in the prospecting phase, negotiation or on stand-by. ""Using Salesforce is agile for live reporting,"" said Pardo.
Despite not yet reaching the one-year mark with Sales Cloud, Jiménez said, ""Salesforce is helping us to better segment opportunities and really focus on the long term."" He stressed, ""We have better structured information with more segmented opportunities.""
Jiménez pointed out, ""Now, we are working with more contextualized information and better indicators."" They even have information on when the last modification was made to a commercial opportunity. They continue to work on taking advantage of the solution's full potential. Jiménez concluded, ""We are currently working on consolidating the use of Salesforce as a commercial tool, taking into account that the current use of the platform meets the expectations initially generated.""
",Automotive,Grupo Antolin
"In the competitive streaming services sector, it’s not just the quality of the content that matters. Companies also need innovative technology and great customer service to attract — and retain — subscribers. This is something Brazil’s largest media company Grupo Globo knows well. 
Grupo Globo owns Globoplay, a subscription video-on-demand service that streams a billion hours of content every year. In 2014, the company implemented a multicloud technology and data platform to help better understand its subscribers, create more personalized customer experience, and increase customer engagement with its brand.
As a result of modernizing its data platform, the company can now tailor digital marketing journeys for Globoplay’s customers based on their profile and viewing history and deliver personalized recommendations. This has contributed to an increase in the number of subscribers, as well as the time subscribers spend viewing content. Having a consolidated view of customers also makes it simpler for customer service teams to assist subscribers on their preferred channels, improving service efficiency.
However, with the streaming service continuing to grow, Grupo Globo recently revisited its digital capabilities to future-proof the business. Here are three ways the company’s IT Director Samuel Dall’Agnol and his team are building on the company’s strong digital foundations to maximize the value of its technology.
IT Director

1. Partner with experts to maximize existing digital capabilities. 
2. Review and redesign architecture to tackle pain points.
3. Streamline customer service with automation.
4. Build on past successes to see results sooner.
Grupo Globo knows streaming services often experience spikes in user activity, and, as a result, a dramatic increase in workload. This requires flexible resource management to ensure operational consistency.
When the growing popularity of Globoplay resulted in huge numbers of consumers trying to subscribe to the streaming service in prime time, the company started having issues.
As a result, many consumers were unable to conclude their purchase of a subscription, leaving them frustrated and hampering the company’s growth goals.
To boost the capabilities of its existing technology solution and ensure it could support the sudden spikes in demand in prime time, Grupo Globo partnered with the world’s leading CRM experts.
This gave Grupo Globo access to a team of consultants and platform architects who were able to align with the company’s long-term business goals, future-proof its technology, and help it avoid over-customization and technical debt (the ongoing cost of convenient decisions made when implementing code).
“We got everything right from the first go when working with Professional Services. Before, we used to make some mistakes and we used to spend time refactoring.” Samuel Dall’Agnol, IT Director
Learn more about Salesforce Professional Services
If higher than anticipated volumes of customer activity are hampering operational effectiveness, it may be necessary to review platform architecture.
For the team working with Grupo Globo, redesigning the company’s platform architecture was a critical first step in making it more scalable and flexible. Identifying and fixing issues, ranging from minor technical debts to more complex changes that impacted many systems, enabled the company to more effectively support the high volume of subscriber activity the company was experiencing.
The team’s architects also helped Grupo Globo customize its platform, adding new functionalities and different product offerings to its existing CRM platform.
“Our Salesforce Professional Services architect identified problems we did not even know existed.” Samuel Dall’Agnol, IT Director
Learn more about Sales Cloud
With customer experience shaping up to be a key differentiator for many businesses, providing customers with exceptional support is critical.
To improve customer satisfaction, Grupo Globo needed to enhance the support available to Globoplay’s customers. It also wanted to streamline service delivery and reduce the high cost of servicing customers associated with its customer support call center.
Grupo Globo’s team of Salesforce experts improved the company’s customer service platform by rolling out an AI-powered virtual assistant chatbot which gives personalized recommendations based on customers' past interactions and products. This enables customers to resolve common issues instantly, without needing to speak with an agent. This has also helped reduce costs associated with supporting its customers.
As an added bonus, the collaboration has resulted in an improvement in the chatbot’s understanding of Portuguese, thanks to feedback from Grupo Globo.
Learn more about Service Cloud
By building on the company’s existing digital foundations to boost Globoplay’s sales and service capabilities, Grupo Globo has seen a positive impact almost immediately. For example, subscription sales have increased by 209% year over year.
The company has also seen a 10% reduction in the cost of providing customer support, due to the use of the virtual assistant chatbot. Almost a third (30%) of subscribers now resolve their problems with only the help of the chatbot.
The overall reliability of Grupo Globo’s technology platform is also higher, with the business reporting a 70% increase in the average time between failures.
By focusing on the viewer behavior data and building personalized content and recommendations, Globoplay increased customer engagement.
Marketing Cloud is instrumental to intelligently segmenting Globo's audiences and executing personalized communications and recommendations. With a single view of its audiences, Globo can now personalize the entire subscriber journeys from acquisition to engagement and subscriber care, driving retention. Globo was able to increase retention rate by 30%.
Learn more about Salesforce Media Industry Solutions
Learn more about Marketing Cloud
Grupo Globo is now focused on building a center of excellence to help it better manage its technology solution in the long-term. Drawing on the expertise of its technical team, the company will create a framework for this that addresses go-to-market business strategies, compliance, roles, responsibilities, and cost efficiencies.




",Media,Grupo Globo
"W.K. Kellogg changed breakfast forever when he invented the flaked cereal we now know as Corn Flakes in 1894. Since then, the Kellogg Company has been a leader in the category with wholesome cereals and snacks in stores around the world.
To engage deeper with consumers and B2B customers of every size, Kellogg puts advanced analytics at the center of its thinking. Rob Birse, Vice President of Global Advanced Analytics, AI, and B2B Ecommerce, believes data is the fuel that will help the company scale and achieve near-real-time engagement with customers.
Vice President, Global Advanced Analytics, AI, and B2B Ecommerce

With data built into commerce processes, Kellogg can suggest products that help smaller customers such as rural stores maximize shelf revenue. It can reach consumers directly and route trends and feedback to Kellogg food techs and engineers. And it can care for the community with donated meals and an online hub of opportunities for employees to volunteer their time and money.
Let’s take a look at how Salesforce Customer 360 helps Kellogg wow its customers.
Step 1: Use AI to meet the needs of mom-and-pop stores, too.
Step 2: Test concepts and trends with DTC relationships.
Step 3: Feed the community and nourish the world.
Kellogg is no stranger to big box chains around the world. But small format stores are also a key revenue driver. Until recently, it was difficult for sales reps to build relationships with these mom-and-pop stores in remote locations. Kellogg wanted to provide B2B customers with helpful, store-specific insights while giving its sales teams time to focus on key priorities.
First, Kellogg launched a mobile ecommerce storefront for distributors to sell directly to small-format B2B customers.
It then used AI to examine purchasing patterns for stores with similar locations, sizes, order histories, trending products, and customer bases. With dynamic segmentation built in, Kellogg could automatically group similar stores together when demand shifted. A convenience store with a new hospital across the street will see tremendous changes in demand compared to more remote locations.
A “Suggested Order” section pre-populates in customers’ carts with the optimal store product mix based on their grouping. The AI can then proactively make educated guesses about the stores’ ideal assortment to help them maximize shelf revenue.
“The AI makes recommendations at a scale of thousands per minute — something a human or a traditional sales or marketing engagement model could never do,” said Birse.
Hypersegmentation is coming. As brands gain access to intelligent insights, they can create customized foods for high potential consumer segments, such as those who value gut health or allergen-free ingredients.
B2B marketplaces are the future. Kellogg joined forces with other major brands to extend its points of sale around the world. Marketplaces allow store owners in emerging markets to stock up on products in one place.
Serve long-tail customers. Long-tail customers operate in the dark compared to big omnichannel retail chains. Democratizing technology and data can bring a new level of intelligence to each store, allowing it to measure performance and act on trends to provide a better shopper experience.
AI also plays an important role in Kellogg’s “shelfie program,” an innovative program that involves crowdsourcing consumers to do work that ultimately benefits the community. Here’s how:
Kellogg enlists the help of shoppers and gig workers to take snapshots of in-store end caps and shelves.
Participants then upload the photos through a third-party app, helping Kellogg identify low- and out-of-stock products and monitor retailers’ shelf setup compliance.
Kellogg then issues a reward — not in money or prizes, but in meals back to the community. Through its company-wide Better Days program, Kellogg works directly with food banks to turn shelfie participant reward points into meals in the store’s region.
The program may even generate a little friendly competition between stores with promotional signs that encourage shoppers to participate.
Having this data allows Kellogg to take action when products aren’t displayed as expected. If a shelfie reveals products that were sourced outside of authorized Kellogg channels, the company can alert distributors to strengthen retailer relationships and adjust the store’s purchased assortment.
Research suggests 80% of business buyers expect to conduct more business online. But when faced with so many competing priorities, just getting started can be a challenge. Whether you’re starting from scratch or replacing an aging legacy platform, you need proven steps to get your digital storefront up and running. The B2B Digital Commerce Playbook helps you:
Build a long-term plan for digital commerce
Align cross-functional teams
Secure buy-in
Launch your digital storefront faster

Kellogg then built on its existing cross-channel technology to create a complete commerce engine that included direct to consumer (DTC).
“We already have this technology that’s shared across engagement channels, so why not build on something you already have?” said Birse. “We have an entire commerce engine on Salesforce B2B Commerce.”
Yet, while DTC builds relationships, a consumer’s purchase of one or two items isn’t enough to drive large volume sales. One of the ways Kellogg builds cart volume is with a “headquarters” site for its Cheez-It brand. Cheez-It HQ lets fans buy merchandise from apparel to snacks, increasing basket size and building brand ambassadors.
Kellogg is also building an insights engine on top of the commerce platform to converse with consumers on new products. Consumers can interact with Kellogg’s food techs and engineers to test and review new product concepts. Plus, Kellogg will have a new consumer audience to sell to.
Birse believes consumers also play a big role in determining regional demand. In what he calls “online to offline” retail, data from online actions like social listening could identify shifts in consumer conversations that translate into offline responses. If a morning news program on high-fiber breakfasts suddenly boosts chatter about Special K in a particular region, Kellogg wants to have the data to share with stores and shift those products to the front.
“There’s no end to the list of use cases data can be applied to,” said Birse. “Anything at all can be converted into a shoppable action that might align with a consumer trend or desire.”
Kellogg is a purpose-driven organization, striving to create a world where people aren’t just fed, but fulfilled. With this legacy in mind, Kellogg is addressing wellbeing, hunger, sustainability, and equity, diversity, and inclusion to advance sustainable and equitable access to food, creating Better Days for 3 billion people by the end of 2030. The Better Days Hub, powered by Philanthropy Cloud, provides a centralized place for Kellogg to:
Post new volunteer opportunities for employees looking to give back.
Learn what causes, activities, and funds employees are most interested in.
Encourage employee donations to any nonprofit or campaign, not just its own.
Identify champions to help create compelling content for fellow employees.
The vast majority (80%) of Kellogg employees find the platform user-friendly and similar to consumer apps. The hub also provides data that program leaders can use to deepen employee engagement in philanthropy.
“We have access to so much more rich and robust data that we didn’t have before,” said Stephanie Slingerland, Senior Director of Philanthropy and Social Impact at Kellogg.
Kellogg also focuses on sustainability by minimizing waste. The OMS helps the company remarket unclaimed products to the customers that are most likely to buy them. Bulk stores and closeout retailers can even purchase these products and visualize their order on a single truck to maximize efficiency and prioritize sustainability. Instead of shipping from across the country, products are sourced from the closest distributor possible.
“This is a great example of a much more sustainable process,” said Birse. “OMS will be front and center doing that for us going forward.”
Better Days was especially important during the pandemic, when it was more difficult to help children facing hunger in person. In response, Kellogg donated $7.5 million in food and funds to global COVID-19 hunger relief efforts, including Michigan children who would normally receive free lunch at school.
After pioneering the cereal and snack world for nearly 130 years, Kellogg has its sights set on trailblazing a new industry era. In partnership with Salesforce, Kellogg aims to change how all consumer goods companies interact with their networks.
“We’re working together to help find commercially viable solutions that change the industry’s approach to creating value,” said Birse.
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",Consumer Goods,Kellogg
"Supplying medicines to millions of patients and thousands of healthcare providers across the UK is complex at the best of times. Add a global pandemic into the equation, and it gets even tougher. But McKesson didn’t miss a beat. Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, it helped to restock pharmacy shelves, maintain supplies for intensive care units, and provide nursing support to patients in their homes. And Salesforce was at its side every step of the way.
McKesson has been transforming healthcare outcomes around the world for more than 180 years. “We are dedicated to improving care in every setting. We partner with care providers, pharmacies, and manufacturers to safely deliver the right medicines and services to the patients who need them, when they need them,” said Ranjit Gill, IT Director for McKesson UK. “With Salesforce, we can make better health possible for more people.”
Ranjit Gill,
IT Director for McKesson
McKesson is an industry leader in pharmaceutical distribution, clinical services, and healthcare technology solutions. In the UK, it dispenses more than 150 million prescription items every year at its LloydsPharmacy outlets and supports 80,000 patients with its LloydsPharmacy Clinical Homecare services. McKesson also operates the UK’s largest pharmaceutical wholesaler, All About Health (AAH). It supplies in excess of 15 million items per week to more than 15,000 organizations, including pharmacies, NHS hospitals, and care homes, from 16 distribution centers.
McKesson’s commitment to its customers has always been a differentiator. As part of its continuous journey to excellence, it wanted to deliver an even better experience. And that meant transforming and re-platforming its entire UK business. “We were using a lot of homegrown IT solutions that were costly and complex to maintain,” explained Gill. “This prevented us from delivering innovations to enrich the customer experience and drive sustainable growth.”
Like many organizations, McKesson embarked on a digital transformation. But this was a transformation like no other in terms of its speed and scale. In just over two years, McKesson has deployed multiple cloud-based platforms, enabled hundreds of application integrations, and empowered 21,000 employees in the UK to interact with customers and patients in new ways. And it’s made a real difference at the healthcare frontline: pharmacies can place orders more rapidly, nurses can use their time more effectively, and patients can get answers more easily.
Salesforce is at the heart of McKesson's digital transformation, bringing greater efficiency, agility, and visibility to its operations and teams. ""To better serve our customers and patients, we need a holistic view of all interactions across all channels,"" said Gill. ""With Salesforce, we can maximize the digital potential and provide a more flexible and frictionless customer experience.""
Thousands of pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies across the UK are already benefiting from a richer experience following the launch of three new B2B procurement portals by McKesson. Built on B2B Commerce Cloud, the webshops provide self-service access to thousands of pharmaceutical and over-the-counter products — from painkillers and probiotics to shampoos and sun creams. The portals are integrated with McKesson’s sales, service, and fulfillment operations to provide better customer outcomes and unlock richer business insights.
The first B2B webshop, which sells pharmaceutical products with a short shelf life, was implemented in just four months in partnership with Acumen. “We used to distribute printed catalogues, which meant product listings were already out of date even before pharmacists placed an order,” said Gill. “We’ve integrated the portal with our warehouse systems, which means product availability can be adjusted in real time. Pharmacists can also view their purchase history, auto-fill their baskets, and take advantage of special deals.” The average weekly order on the site now takes just two minutes instead of 20, which frees up pharmacists to spend more time with customers.
Ranjit Gill, IT Director for McKesson
The success of the first portal inspired McKesson to expand its digital self-service approach to more B2B customers. It plans to launch a fourth webshop on B2B Commerce Cloud in early 2021 for NHS hospital buyers, who place bulk pharmaceutical orders on a regular basis. The Medicator portal will simplify this process by offering re-ordering options and pre-defined baskets.
“With Commerce Cloud, we can give time back to our customers, so they can focus on delivering better patient outcomes,” said Gill. A richer and simpler procurement experience has already encouraged more customers to order online, which has significantly increased transactions and sales across the portals.
A digital approach means McKesson can apply product quotas to online orders, which will help ensure critical medicines are distributed fairly to NHS trusts across the country. This will be particularly important when COVID-19 vaccines become available.
McKesson uses the data captured in the portals to keep enriching and personalizing the online purchasing experience for its wholesale customers. For example, it plans to use Einstein to make product recommendations based on previous orders, which will help McKesson provide a more intuitive ordering process to customers and unlock improved cross-selling opportunities. “With Salesforce, we can make the procurement of pharmaceutical supplies more proactive and predictive,” said Gill.
McKesson can also make the purchasing journey more seamless by providing access to the three B2B portals through a single log-on. “With MuleSoft, we can build intelligent, reusable, and secure APIs to support key processes, such as user authentication, order fulfillment, and pricing updates,” explained Gill.
Hosted on Google Cloud, MuleSoft is critical to McKesson’s broader digital transformation and has supported the development of more than 50 APIs across eight core systems, including SAP S/4HANA and Salesforce. “We used to rely on complex and costly point-to-point integrations, which meant even a simple change could take four months to deliver,” said Gill. “With MuleSoft, we can deploy an API within one or two weeks, which means we can adapt more quickly to business change.”
This agility was critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. Within a matter of days, McKesson had to adapt its business to cope with new social distancing rules and a spike in orders for pharmaceutical products. “In the past, responding to greater demand would have involved buying and deploying new servers,” said Gill. “With Salesforce, we were able to quickly and seamlessly scale our B2B sites to ensure customers could order the products they needed during the pandemic.”
McKesson also had to ensure clinical homecare visits could continue safely for more than 80,000 vulnerable patients across the UK. It uses Field Service to coordinate the rotas of around 1,000 LloydsPharmacy Clinical Homecare nurses who administer therapies for people diagnosed with complex conditions, such as cancer, hepatitis, and Parkinson's disease. “With Field Service, we were able to adapt the schedules to give nurses extra time to change their PPE and take added precautions due to COVID-19,” explained Gill.
Patient appointments and queries for LloydsPharmacy Clinical Homecare are logged in Service Cloud, which helps maximize safety and efficiency.
McKesson is hoping to take a similar centralized approach with its customer service teams for LloydsPharmacy and AAH. By using MuleSoft to integrate Service Cloud with Commerce Cloud, agents will have visibility of customers’ transactions on the AAH wholesale webshops, which will drive richer conversations and faster resolution times. By empowering agents to place customer orders, McKesson will be able to offer a consistent procurement experience across multiple channels.
McKesson uses the data captured in the portals to keep enriching and personalizing the online purchasing experience for its wholesale customers. For example, it plans to use Einstein to make product recommendations based on previous orders, which will help McKesson provide a more intuitive ordering process to customers and unlock improved cross-selling opportunities. “With Salesforce, we can make the procurement of pharmaceutical supplies more proactive and predictive,” said Gill.
Ranjit Gill, IT Director for McKesson
Despite the complexity of McKesson’s digital transformation, every launch has been delivered on budget and on time. And there’s still more to come. “With Salesforce, we don’t need an army of people feeding and watering our IT infrastructure, which means our teams can focus on unlocking greater value for our colleagues and customers,” commented Gill.
McKesson is already investigating using Chat and Einstein chatbots to enrich customer and patient interactions and creating more targeted promotions with Marketing Cloud. “Once you start a digital transformation, it becomes a springboard for other great ideas,” said Gill. “With Salesforce, we can be more responsive in rapidly changing times and improve care outcomes for millions of people.”
",Healthcare & Life Sciences,McKesson
"Orlando City Soccer Club (SC) — also known as the Lions — is a professional club based in Orlando, Florida. The club has competed in the Major League Soccer (MLS) competition since 2015.
Fan experience is key to Orlando City SC’s prosperity and sustainable growth goals. To build loyalty and future-proof its success, the club’s management recognized that it needed to improve fan engagement on game day and year-round. With sports fans increasingly expecting to interact with their team via their mobile devices, the club needed an engaging, interactive mobile app that was simple to use.
The club’s existing app wasn’t up to the job. So Bruno Scotton, Orlando City SC’s Salesforce DevOps Engineer, reached out to Salesforce and implementation partner Cogny for help.
Working closely together, the partners built the new LionNation app, which integrates with the club’s unified customer engagement platform and rewards members of the LionNation program to earn rewards for interacting with the club through an online portal.
Here are four lessons from how Bruno and his team use Salesforce to drive fan engagement and loyalty, deliver personalized experiences, optimize performance with data-driven insights, and contribute to sustainable growth.
Salesforce DevOps Engineer

1. Improve customer experience with a unifying app for engagement.
2. Gain a 360-degree view of customers with integrated digital solutions.
3. Build customer loyalty with rich experiences and incentives.
4. Use data-driven insights to engage more deeply with fans.
To deliver unique, interactive experiences for fans, Orlando City SC designed a mobile app that provides a single, dedicated space for engaging with the club. It invites fans to join in the fun by gamifying and rewarding them for interacting with the club.
For example, fans are invited to vote for the player who they think should be “man of the match” and share their suggestions for player substitutions. Fans can also access information about the team’s history, player stats, and fixtures; purchase tickets and merchandise; earn loyalty points that can be used to redeem experiences; and learn club chants.
Meanwhile, LionNation members who can’t make it to games in person can also watch the club’s locally televised matches through the app.
“Previously, with everything in different places, we didn’t have access to all of our data, and we weren’t able to engage with our community in real time, like we wanted to,” said Scotton. “The app is a place where people can go instead of social media or external websites to find out about the club and interact with us in real time.”
The results so far have been positive. Since the app’s launch, fan adoption has increased from 7,000 to 22,000. On game days, 62% of registered fans use the app. On days when there isn’t a game, around 36% of registered fans still log in to check out team statistics, read news stories, or claim rewards.
Watch this video to see how Orlando City SC supercharged fan engagement.
Orlando City SC’s sales, member services, marketing, merchandise, finance, and IT teams were already connected by a single cloud-based ecosystem, but the club needed to integrate the app into this shared environment.
Linking the LionNation app to the club’s existing customer relationship management (CRM) platform helps build a 360-degree view of fans. This improves sales, support, and the marketing teams’ ability to do their jobs, make smarter and faster decisions, and deliver tailored experiences to fans.
Connecting the app with existing digital solutions also enables the club to provide a consistent, frictionless experience across touchpoints. For example, integration with the club’s ticketing system allows fans to securely purchase and manage their tickets from the app. Also, fans who experience a problem with a ticket or merchandise purchase from the app can contact support teams via the app.
Further benefits of connecting everything on a single platform include faster response times for support cases, more leads for marketing campaigns, and increases in sales and customer satisfaction.
“The infrastructure Salesforce provides helps us to connect and automate everything we do through the app,” said Scotton.
Learn more about Salesforce Customer 360
Learn more about Sales Cloud
Learn more about Service Cloud
The LionNation app helps build fan loyalty by offering members exclusive benefits. For example, fans making purchases through the app can access discounts and earn loyalty points, which are tracked in a digital experience platform. These points can be redeemed for rewards, such as signed jerseys or an opportunity for younger fans to run onto the ground with the players at the start of a game.
The app also makes it easier for fans to attend games in person by providing information that makes planning easier, such as where to park and how to buy last-minute tickets. The app includes a digital wallet that allows fans to preload funds, so they can buy tickets, merchandise, and food and drinks by scanning a barcode.
In addition to building loyalty, the solution delivers actionable insights about individual fans’ spending that can be used to automatically send marketing messages, improving the club’s cash flow.
“The wallet makes fans’ lives easier because they can show up to games with just their phones,” said Scotton. “But it’s also good for the club because people deposit their money with us during the season and that gives us more cash flow to work with.”
Since launching the app, the club has seen an increase in ticket sales and revenue. Revenue from concession stands alone has increased by more than 14%. Overall, the club has generated more than $1.5 million in revenue from app users.
Learn more about Marketing Cloud
Learn more about Experience Cloud
For Orlando City SC, every interaction via the LionNation app helps it gain a better understanding of its fans. This 360-degree view of fans enables the club to provide personalized experiences for individual fans based on their behavior.
  For example, the club can track whether an app user goes to games in person or prefers to stream games. Other data includes what fans are buying, eating, and drinking, and what kind of rewards they redeem.
  “By creating profiles for every one of our members, we’re able to provide them with exactly what they want. For example, if we know a customer drinks a certain type of beer, next time they show up at a game, we might give them an offer for their preferred beer. Or we might give them a discount on merchandise. We believe this all helps to make our fans happier.” Explained Scotton.
  The club’s internal teams use customizable dashboards to monitor data, target specific groups, and generate actionable insights that help team members make better business decisions. It also enables the club to optimize marketing in real time to ensure it doesn’t leave potential revenue on the table.
 



",Sports,Orlando City SC
"The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the importance of online sales for B2B companies. More than ever, customers are going online to buy their supplies and equipment. And this trend is only accelerating — according to recent research, 55% of B2B leaders said digital channels would provide more than 50% of revenue in three years.
But many healthcare companies have struggled with this trend, and Ovation Medical — which provides orthopedic and podiatry products to more than 12,000 private practices, medical facilities, and retailers across the U.S. — was no different. The company still relied on in-person and phone orders, even when the pandemic accelerated B2B customers’ shift to online buying. Ovation leaders suspected this low-tech approach was leading to lower sales, and they knew the manual order-taking process impacted the productivity of sales representatives.
Erik Rost
VP, Sales
To remove the bottleneck from sales, Ovation Medical deployed a robust digital commerce platform that automated and streamlined repeat business operations and sales processes. They went live in just four weeks. This new portal improved customer experiences, while freeing up sales reps to focus on new business.
Since the deployment of the new site in mid-2020, repeat order processing time has been cut in half. As a result, the productivity of sales reps has doubled — each rep manages up to 400 customer accounts simultaneously — and spends more time landing new business. See their tips for this rapid growth in productivity.
Ovation didn't have the infrastructure to deploy a digital commerce platform. The first thing it needed to do was change that.
The distributor already used Sales Cloud to create a centralized view of customers and track sales activities for its small sales team. Using B2B Commerce as the platform for their digital commerce site was a natural fit because B2B Commerce uses the same data model as Sales Cloud so there’s no integration required. It was like turning on digital orders so sales and service reps could get a single view of their customers.
Building a digital commerce platform can be slow, tedious, and costly. To speed up and streamline the process, Ovation made two key decisions early on: It would use an MVP approach, and partner with Salesforce implementation partner Forte Group. With the MVP approach, the company was able to roll out features as they were built, so they could start getting value and feedback, while continuing to add new features over time.
Simultaneously, Ovation and Forte Group consulted with Salesforce’s B2B Commerce product managers to build a custom portal that supported well-established business practices.
During implementation, project stakeholders shared their requirements. This allowed the implementation teams to create custom features that complemented B2B Commerce’s out-of-box functionality and supported Ovation’s specific order flows for more than 500 active products in different sizes and colors.
Ovation and Forte Group built self-service and automation into the system. As a result, a customized “Order now” page is created for each registered user, providing them with immediate access to their previous orders with pricing built in. Returning customers can easily reorder any items, update their order, or purchase new products without getting sales reps involved. New customers register on the site and request a follow-up by a sales representative to negotiate pricing. Once pricing is established, reordering is streamlined.
Ovation uses B2B Commerce to create, manage, and track online orders. The portal is integrated with Salesforce CRM and the inventory management system, ensuring the fulfillment process remains uninterrupted.
The Forte Group also built customized features to preserve the standard order process and custom order flows. Orders appear in the CRM as closed and converted to Salesforce opportunities for automated sales pipeline monitoring.
Erik Rost
VP, Sales
",Healthcare & Life Sciences,Ovation Medical
"There was a time when seeing your name in an email subject line was enough to make your digital experience feel personalized. Today, however, consumers have higher standards, with 66% of customers expecting companies to understand their unique needs. This data proves that personalized experiences are essential to a business’ success and growth. Personalization is especially critical in the healthcare industry, where customized content is often lacking. Only 40% of consumers say communications from the healthcare and life sciences industries feel relevant.
As a leading fertility-benefits management company, Progyny understood the importance of delivering personalized content to its patients, so company leaders decided to scale their personalization efforts to create experiences unique to their customers’ needs.
Growing from just five customers in 2016 to partnering today with over 180 large employers in 2021, including Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Salesforce, the company needed a way to manage continuous growth and deliver a fantastic member experience unmatched in the industry. It’s safe to say its efforts succeeded. Today, Progyny supports more than 2.8 million members on their path to parenthood. It’s estimated that 10% to 20% of their members are driving interaction through the portal.
Read on to see how the innovative fertility-benefits company turned the insurance model on its head — creating a secure, high-touch digital experience that supports members at every stage of their fertility journey. You can also get tips for how to create a digital experience that scales as your business grows.
David Schlanger
CEO, Progyny
All generations prioritize convenience over brand, according to the 4th edition State of the Connected Consumer. Brands that make it easy to do business will maintain a competitive advantage over those that don’t. In the healthcare industry, self-sufficiency and the ability to easily access health records are important to the patient-provider relationship.
Like many other healthcare companies, Progyny managed a lot of its customer touchpoints through email or over the phone. To offer a more convenient experience, Progyny decided to invest in technology that would save time for its employees, streamline operations for employers, and simplify engagement with patients. This resulted in a one-stop digital experience that incorporates tools from the consumer world, like online appointment requests, bill payment, authorization requests, and streamlined access to the resources members need to understand their benefits and the fertility process.
With Salesforce Experience Cloud, Progyny made it easier for members to self-serve online while empowering fertility specialists to focus on clinical support, while Progyny’s fertility coaches provide emotional support. The improved experience is reflected in the company's Net Promoter Score, which is over 4x higher than the industry average.
Lissa Kline
SVP, Provider and Member Services, Progyny
Data can uncover valuable patterns of how customers have engaged with a brand or business. Web page visits, online communications, and purchases are some examples of behavioral customer data that can help reveal customer profiles and areas of interest.
With a wealth of data in one place, Progyny uses Salesforce to personalize every facet of the member's fertility journey — from care plans to specially curated content, including videos, podcasts, and other vetted resources. For example, a member dealing with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) may receive targeted content that’s relevant to the treatment path she’s considering, and a member who is exploring surrogacy would receive information tailored to her options.
Members are also assigned a dedicated patient care advocate (PCA) to help them understand the risks and benefits of treatment options and provide emotional support through the ups and downs. The 1-to-1 experience between patients and their PCA is one of the primary ways Progyny engages with its members, and technology is the fuel behind the enhanced and tailor-made experience. It’s that level of personalized support — supplemented by resources and information that’s easily accessible through the portal — that inspires deeper patient-provider relationships and ultimately results in better outcomes.
Lissa Kline
SVP, Provider and Member Services, Progyny
Eighty-eight percent of consumers are more loyal to companies they trust. Consumer trust and confidence grow with transparent communications around data. According to the Connected Healthcare Consumer report, one thing consumers evaluate insurers on is quick access to their records.
Being in the healthcare space, Progyny takes patient privacy very seriously. Salesforce’s entire Customer 360 Platform was built with HIPAA compliance in mind, making it easy for the company to maintain control of its data while accommodating HIPAA regulations. Progyny uses Salesforce Shield to assist with HIPAA regulations. There are other tools that also help support a holistic HIPAA-compliant execution on digital experiences such as Marketing Cloud, Heroku, and MuleSoft.
The member portal also gives members private, one-on-one access to their patient care advocate so they can communicate — anytime, anywhere — without having to disclose personal information to everyone around them. This is made possible through Salesforce Chatter, a secure messaging tool which allows Progyny to chat with members securely.
Lissa Kline
SVP, Provider and Member Services, Progyny
The global fertility services market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 8% between 2021–2026, according to a new report by Research and Markets. As more employers offer fertility and family-building benefits, Progyny needed to prepare for massive scale, no matter what curveballs came its way.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Progyny didn’t skip a beat. That’s because the organization had already invested in the infrastructure needed to provide members with an individualized and seamless digital experience. As its business grows, it is able to scale without compromising experience. As the healthcare industry continues to grapple with ever-changing expectations, Progyny is prepared for a future that promises to be more digital and patient-centric.
David Schlanger
CEO, Progyny
",Healthcare & Life Sciences,Progyny
"RBC Wealth Management, a division of RBC Capital Markets, LLC, provides trusted advice and wealth management solutions to individuals, families and institutions. More than 2,000 financial advisors in 180 locations in 42 states rely on technology to enable a world-class client experience.
Like many companies beginning a digital transformation journey, the wealth management division was facing a big challenge to piece together disparate systems. Its advisors, for example, had to access 26 systems to pull together the client data they needed to prepare for meetings with new clients.
The company was sitting on a wealth of client data, but it wasn’t able to use that data to provide the connected, personalized experiences that wealth management clients expect.
In an era of increasing competition from smaller, agile providers such as fintechs, RBC Wealth Management knew it had to give its teams the insights and tools they needed to provide superior experiences.
So, RBC Wealth Management turned to a team of the world’s leading Salesforce experts to help it consolidate its CRM systems and integrate data from other legacy systems into a unified platform purpose-built for wealth management.
Here are four lessons from RBC Wealth Management’s transformation you can use to give your employees a 360-degree view of every client, streamline processes to deliver personalized experiences, and empower your IT team to build and scale faster.
Step 1: Accelerate trust and time to value with a full view of client data on a single platform.
Step 2: Simplify onboarding and account access with customer-first experiences that wow.
Step 3: Improve team performance with deep portfolio insights and regular collaboration.
Step 4: Attract the best advisors and grow the business with a data-driven culture.
One of the main challenges for any large organization is to provide clients with consistently outstanding experiences no matter who they're engaging with in the organization. The solution is to unify every line of business onto one platform. But that’s easier said than done, particularly for an organization with more than 2,000 advisors.
So, RBC Wealth Management not only standardized on one CRM system; it also chose a platform that’s tailored to the wealth management industry. With its purpose-built industry functionality, the platform accelerated RBC Wealth Management's time to value.
RBC Wealth Management also needed a way to bring in customer data from legacy systems, so it used industry-leading integration to connect third-party systems to the new platform. And because of the regulation and scrutiny on financial services firms, it used encryption and other security measures to protect clients’ personal and financial data.
As a result of these initiatives, RBC Wealth Management’s advisors can now provide trusted, personalized experiences for their clients.
“MuleSoft has been critical in enabling our IT team to bring our legacy technology and modern platforms together,"" said Greg Beltzer, Head of Technology, RBC Wealth Management - U.S. ""We now have a single view of each and every customer.”
The wealth management industry's traditional process-driven approach to business hasn’t always resulted in the best client experiences. Onboarding is a prime example when new clients typically receive a 100-page physical document with sticky notes indicating where to sign.
RBC Wealth Management wanted to remove that friction. So, using low-code automation, extending it with custom functionality, and pairing it with a customer-first digital experience, it was able to automate its case management workflows for a better client onboarding experience. As a result, onboarding time has been reduced from weeks to just 24 minutes on average.
With the new customer-first digital experience, RBC Wealth Management was able to create a new portal for clients that gives them full visibility of all their accounts. In addition, it gave them access to a financial advisor's analytics dashboard, allowing them to quickly view their portfolio and cases on their own time.
Underpinning many of its initiatives, RBC Wealth Management has been able to integrate its systems using application programming interfaces (APIs) to accelerate innovation. And, reducing the IT team's workload has resulted in a 50% drop in maintenance costs.

The next step after giving advisors a complete view of client data is to provide them with relevant, actionable insights they can use to create better client experiences. This is particularly important for advisors and managers because client expectations are rising steeply.
So, RBC Wealth Management added analytics and AI to its CRM platform. Managers and executives can now view employee and branch performance by portfolio value, revenue, and active campaigns. Advisors have easy access to the insights they need and, importantly, recommended actions to take. For example, they can see if they’re overdue to contact a priority client and then set in motion an automated workflow to schedule a meeting immediately.
This enhanced intelligence has delivered huge operational efficiencies. Advisors spend far less time dealing with internal processes and more time helping existing clients and growing the business.
Slack allows RBC's tech teams more agility in how they collaborate internally. For example, operations teams can swarm around unclear or difficult service issues for faster case resolution. Additionally, individual team members can use Slack's self-select function in channels and conversations to filter incoming information by relevance to their work.
RBC Wealth Management plans to round out its client-centric platform with an accessible digital marketing solution across the organization. This should enable its marketing teams to create powerful, personalized campaigns while also helping other teams. Each advisor, for example, will have a more complete view of their clients’ journeys and, as a result, can personalize conversations and build longer-lasting relationships.
RBC Wealth Management’s investment in a client-first digital platform has equipped its wealth management advisors with the insights and tools they need to succeed. Additionally, RBC is able to attract new talent due to its innovative employee onboarding and workflow processes. RBC Wealth Management is a desirable place to work, which is particularly vital in the financial services sector, where advisors tend to change jobs regularly. And with a unified platform for open communication across teams, RBC continues to foster a culture of collaboration and transparency.
Unifying teams on one platform also allows RBC Wealth Management to plan more strategically. For example, it is combining its strengths in the wealth management and capital markets to accelerate growth in the U.S. At an individual level, this gives financial advisors more opportunities to cross-sell, increasing their portfolios and the number of products per client.
Good people and good decision-making are vital to grow any business. By standardizing on a modern digital platform, RBC Wealth Management now benefits from both.
",Financial Services,RBC Wealth Management
"Running a small business comes with its own unique challenges - including access to information, tools, and resources to achieve their long-term goals.
""There are over half a million small businesses driving 98 percent of our economy in British Columbia,"" said Joshua Ludgate, COO at Small Business British Columbia (SBBC), which was founded to bridge that gap. From starting a business, to building resiliency and long-term growth, SBBC helps British Columbia’s entrepreneurs grow successful and sustainable businesses through access to expert business advisors, educational and professional resources, and community events.
SBBC had already been focused on evolving their products and services to equip entrepreneurs with the skills needed to thrive in our digital world. When COVID-19 hit, a pivotal shift was required in how they provided them. ""We've always been very active gathering small businesses together in-person and bringing in community partners and service providers to support this community,"" said Ludgate. ""Showing up and engaging is a real, tangible action small businesses can take to reinforce their journey. That's a big thing for us.""
“Like most of the small businesses SBBC serves, the pandemic necessitated a quick pivot,” said Ludgate, ""We had to use and distribute resources in a different way to create the same connectivity.""



“We struggle with resource constraints, but not ambition or talent. The craft is trying to balance those two and find a way through it,” said Ludgate.
SBBC knew that British Columbia's small businesses would be one of the largest drivers of rebuilding provincial economies from the effects of the pandemic. “We have to self-generate revenue in order to maintain the level of services we think our community needs,” said Ludgate. ""Like many businesses, we knew we needed to adapt."" The SBBC team took this as a call-to-action, and when asked by Provincial and Federal government partners to support a response to the challenges of COVID in our community, we seized the opportunity. SBBC developed and deployed a program with clear objectives:
Cut through the confusion by acting as a trusted information gatekeeper to help keep the community up-to-date on the programs and supports available and confident as the situation moved quickly, getting core content to small businesses fast.
Create access to a grant program to help small businesses quickly access recovery funding.
Identify a community of service providers - who were also small businesses - who could be matched to provide needed expertise.
To SBBC, it was clear they needed an adaptable system that could facilitate the growing complexity of their mission to provide a single source of truth in their data. They must be scalable as needs evolved - and they needed it quickly. ""An off-the-shelf solution wasn't going to solve our problem,"" said Ludgate.
An additional factor was security. Participating in a government program meant requirements when it came to the technology tools they could use, so SBBC would need to work with a provider who had already passed government assessment. ""We’ve been serving this community for over 20 years,"" said Ludgate. ""And we understood that everything was aligned for us to have an impact, create opportunities, create employment, and keep stable. And that was massive.""
Here's how they did it.
SBBC knew they needed an implementation partner, so they turned again to Belmar Consulting Group with whom they had done a previous project. Together the team deployed an occupational licensing system on Salesforce Service Cloud, hosted in the Salesforce Canadian data centre. It is an online, automated, secure, self-service platform that provides SBBC with the tools needed to connect small businesses to resources, subject matter experts, and more.
Identifying a need: When a business owner reaches out for help, they are invited to create a profile and apply for relief funding via the SBBC website. They're then guided through a series of questions, like their type of business and geographic region, in order for the application to be considered for approval.
Managing cases: Once an application is submitted and deemed eligible, Service Cloud captures that information and creates a record in the system. The record then notifies an advisor at SBBC with a curated list of service providers, in the applicant’s geographic region, that could help support their recovery process.
Scaling service delivery: Integrated reports and dashboards give the team the insight they need to optimize workflows and keep stakeholders informed in real-time. “It was a switchboard for managing and understanding where clients were at any given time,"" said Scott Billows, CEO at Belmar Consulting Group.
Creating connectivity: Automated check-ins acted as a dual-radio trigger to allow the applicant to confirm services had been received and to allow payment to the expert. The service provider would then upload their invoice into the system, which would perform the necessary checks and make the payment.
""We were able to facilitate the goal of the recovery grant program, which was getting professionals in the community to help businesses develop a plan to build back their business, hopefully better and even stronger than it was before COVID-19,"" said Ludgate.
""They needed a system up and running in 30 days or less, and we were ready to do what it took to make that happen,” said Billows.
During this time, SBBC processed 19,000 payments to small businesses or small business service providers. They engaged over 1,250 small business providers (think accountants and lawyers) and managed 45,000 phone calls from the community seeking information, guidance, and support. Overall, SBBC distributed over $20 million in grants to the small business providers and the Province of BC distributed several hundred million dollars back into the community overall.
Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.
",Professional Services,Small Business British Columbia
"STANLEY Healthcare, a Stanley Black & Decker division, provides thousands of healthcare organizations visibility and analytics solutions for data insights, improved security, and increased operational efficiency. Connecting caregivers and their care networks with the essential data they need helps to deliver more productive and safer care.
The company’s commercial sales business team faced multiple challenges using their sales data, including disparate data sources, slow manual processes, and lack of visibility across teams and functions.
Though the company used Sales Cloud, they lacked a central governance method for standardizing data entry into their many systems, leading to mismatched and “dirty” data across multiple sources.
What they needed was a single source of truth that brought their data together: bookings and pipeline data, accurate sales numbers, ERP systems, legacy data, and external files. It was a tall order and STANLEY needed help.
Steve Mascola, Senior IT Director
Step 1: Understand your data challenges fully.
Step 2: Design dashboards for your internal customers.
Step 3: Shift from past performance to forward momentum.
Step 4: Train and engage your data consumers.
Based on BI knowledge from the business and technical teams, it was decided to adopt a CRM-native analytics solution that would enable Sales Cloud users to have access to embedded insights in the flow of their work. However, the process would require some finesse, because they didn’t want to simply move old dashboards into the CRM. They engaged with their longtime partner, Atrium, to take the first step in their data transformation journey to design a CRM Analytics-based solution that met their needs and workflows.
They started by performing an in-depth analysis of their sales reps, leaders, operations, and financial and sales teams. They uncovered core questions that would help to aid the unification into the native Salesforce Analytics platform.
Steve Mascola, Senior IT Director
Through the in-depth analysis, the collective team identified key use cases for their sales and sales operations teams: to view quarterly progress, pipeline-to inventory analysis, and capacity planning. The team then designed easy-to-read embedded dashboards to meet these needs and enable their CRM users to drill down to get more insights for their organization.
With CRM Analytics, STANLEY was able to combine disparate data sources including data from outside of the CRM, centralize data management, and support flexibility for future expansion. The result was overwhelmingly positive and teams were equipped with more efficient tools to achieve success.
Beyond the faster and more dynamic access to reliable data, the new solution delivered sales-centric insights where sales reps work – the CRM: solution-based account analysis, stacked rankings for healthy sales teams competition, and true-versus-weighted pipeline measurement to understand unique variables impacting a rep's accounts.
Steve Mascola, Senior IT Director
Before the team had one source of truth in CRM Analytics, they relied on prior performance indicators and sheer guesswork to make future sales strategy decisions. Armed with new insights, analytics predicted where progress is going at that moment.
“With real-time access to our pipeline, it was more dynamic than anything the sales teams had seen previously,” said Jamie Moss, STANLEY Healthcare Director of Commercial Finance & Operations. “Because of this, we not only get higher-quality reporting, but the sales reps are also much more engaged with the data. They can use it daily to manage their quotas and make realistic strategies for attainable goals.”
Moss added that her team’s time savings were significant since they no longer had to do manual reporting. Now the team can see their data anytime—from compliance numbers to capacity planning for service reps, and even provide key pipeline information sales managers can use to coach employees in real-time. She said CRM Analytics is also visually pleasing and easy to understand.
Jamie Moss, Director of Commercial Finance and Commercial Operations
STANLEY Healthcare invested heavily in training for all users and even brought in their professional training team for STANLEY Healthcare customers to build the curriculum. Their approach included working in a chaptered format, adding interactivity, and an “element of fun,” as Mascola put it.
“We used our powerhouse technical training group to ensure everyone was comfortable and productive with the new solution. The trainers and stakeholders did a superb job, and it made all the difference for a successful adoption.”
The team continuously monitors new content and rolls out updated materials periodically. “We want this to be iterative, so we always take feedback that will make CRM Analytics better,” Mascola said.
CRM Analytics has enabled a new level of visibility and proactivity, significantly boosting the efficacy of sales operations at STANLEY Healthcare. These improvements also help the sales team work more efficiently with healthcare organizations to improve quality and safety that drive better patient care outcomes.
",Healthcare & Life Sciences,STANLEY Healthcare
"At Sonos, premium experiences are everything. As the inventor of multi-room wireless home audio, Sonos innovation helps the world listen better by giving people access to the content they love and allowing them to control it however and wherever they choose.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down brick-and-mortar retailers across the country, Sonos lost its traditional path to consumers. Immediately, Sonos had to find a way to bring the power of the in-store experience online, doubling down on digital-first revenue and ecommerce.
Since then, the company has been able to continue building customer relationships despite the unexpected shift and restrictions on in-person distribution channels. By directly interacting with customers across commerce, service, and marketing, Sonos was able to increase its direct-to-consumer (D2C) share of the business — all from one integrated platform.
Patrick Spence, CEO at Sonos, has been at the company for more than 12 years, applying his expertise in hardware and software technology to help listeners design the soundtrack of their lives. Because of the work he and his team had done upfront to build a connected platform, Sonos was able to quickly pivot to D2C experiences when it mattered most.
Let’s take a look at how Patrick and the team at Sonos are using Salesforce Customer 360 to change how they grow their relationships with customers in ways that meet their evolving needs.
CEO

Step 1: Connect with shoppers anytime, anywhere.
Step 2: Scale service to meet changing customer needs.
Step 3: Empower employees with seamless, intelligent experiences.
Step 4: Build loyalty with targeted journeys.
In this video (2:24), hear Sonos CEO Patrick Spence describe how the company pivoted to (and thrived with) direct-to-consumer operations almost overnight despite having a remote customer service team.
Prior to the pandemic, Sonos was already focused on improving D2C ecommerce sales through its website. But an unprecedented influx of ecommerce during quarantining (and little time to prepare) forced the company to accelerate its plans. With no brick-and-mortar retailer partners open to sell Sonos products during the early days of the pandemic, the company turned to its website to connect with customers directly.
Because Sonos already had centralized data and a 360-degree view of customers in place, the company was able to address the flood of B2C transactions with seamless, connected digital experiences across every touchpoint, no matter which department consumers interacted with. And by scaling both digital commerce and marketing, Sonos was able to message and advise customers of changes or delays in fulfillment directly in shopping carts to set the right expectations with delivery estimates. The result was an 84% increase in ecommerce growth year over year.
In addition to its B2C commerce presence, Sonos also manages a digital B2B storefront for small and midsize dealers. But like consumers, business customers often have questions too. To continue managing global dealer and installer relationships with seamless service, Sonos set up a B2B community that houses everything from knowledge articles to podcasts to act as the main source of information for business customers.
Alongside dramatic increases in D2C sales, Sonos also saw an increase in service requests. With a digital service strategy and single source of truth already in place, Sonos could scale to meet these increased requests by augmenting agents’ productivity with AI and automated tools to resolve customer needs. For customers who prefer to speak with a live person for support, Sonos adopted a voice tool to deliver the same level of personalization and intelligence by phone, resulting in 10% faster call resolution. And with a convenient user community of knowledge articles, customers could also use self-service for quicker answers.
“The customer doesn’t think about just needing service. They think about their entire experience with Sonos. So why wouldn’t we?” said Ruth Sleeter, CIO, Sonos.
Chatbots also allowed Sonos to address more customer needs, while providing an interactive experience. And because the chatbots are connected to CRM, they can even help customers with requests like open case lookup or order status, resulting in a 40%+ deflection rate in case volume.
Using a single view of each customer’s case and order history, agents can deliver more personalized and efficient service, saving 5 hours per week.
Sonos is also wall-to-wall on Slack with several automated workflows, making it easy to operate as a cohesive unit despite working remotely across distributed teams. Teams can swarm on a case alongside service data to make informed decisions that result in seamless service experiences.
Third party service agents can join the conversation too. Slack Connect allows Sonos to include them using shared channels — without requiring intense guest account management.
And customers benefit from helpful, engaging experiences that they want to share with friends and family. Amidst the pandemic, Sonos was able to achieve its 16th year of revenue growth.

Keeping data centralized has allowed Sonos employees to work faster and smarter than ever. Automated workflows within the platform have helped Sonos reduce training times and onboard new agents quicker by connecting multiple processes and teams into one seamless workflow — so employees can start helping customers faster.
Plus, customer service managers can forecast service demand and build omni-channel capacity plans in real time with AI, ensuring proper staffing to deliver the best possible service.
Vice President of Customer Experience

Sonos also powers its business with 29 app integrations. This includes DocuSign, which Sonos uses to power and automate legal and procurement processes all in one platform, as well as Amazon Connector CTI Adapter to deliver engaging service at scale. With additional business capabilities integrated into the platform, Sonos can scale with confidence, elevate the employee experience, and ultimately better serve its customers.
To sell directly to consumers, communicating with them one-on-one is critical. But Sonos is not interested in just creating one-time customers. Data-first digital marketing allows Sonos to create personalized customer journeys based on login patterns, shopping cart abandonment behavior, and other usage data to build loyalty that results in repeat purchases.
At the start of the pandemic when the supply chain was heavily impacted, Sonos was able to quickly update its website to accurately reflect product availability and lead times. And with behavioral triggers in place for user emails captured through the site, Sonos has been able to personalize and automate email notifications when products that the customer is interested in are back in stock or have dropped in price.
In addition to messaging customers directly in carts, Sonos also set up retargeting efforts, creating multiple ad campaigns on owned and paid channels to redirect consumers from competitor search results.
Like all other businesses, Sonos could not have anticipated the massive influx of D2C sales it received during the pandemic. But having one shared view of customer data that increased collaboration and alignment among its teams was the difference between surviving and thriving. With a single view of the customer, Sonos has continued to build a customer- and employee-centric business, unlocking new opportunities and building relationships like never before.
",Technology,Sonos
"As communication evolves at light speed, Vonage provides the infrastructure for businesses to keep up. A global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, Vonage strives to create technology so good that users forget it’s there.
But the influx of innovative new technologies from a series of major acquisitions resulted in a handful of inevitable challenges. The new tools and systems allowed the company to serve customers in new ways, but they also produced siloed datasets and manual processes. Teams lacked a full view into the data profiles of the customers they served.
“What we’ve always done has gotten us to where we are today,” said Tara Zaleski, Senior Director of Business Services. “Unifying and automating how our people and systems work together will help us to accelerate execution as we continue to grow.”
Let’s take a closer look at how Zaleski and team used Salesforce Customer 360, one integrated CRM platform, to unite teams around a single view of their customers while managing change at scale.
Tara Zaleski, Senior Director, Business Services
Step 1: Bring people and processes together with a digital headquarters.
Step 2: Unite sales teams around a shared view of customer data.
Step 3: Automate complex processes to boost efficiency and productivity.
Step 4: Consolidate data into one system for better visualization.
In this short video (2:13), learn how Vonage uses Salesforce Customer 360 to accelerate the world’s ability to connect.
To more efficiently get information and answers to its team members, Vonage decided to create a centralized communication hub, or digital HQ, using Slack.
For example, when a sales representative enters a question into a channel, Slack automatically searches for the answer and outsources the question to Confluence if needed. By streamlining this workflow, Vonage was able to reduce the time and effort it took to collect and verify information, enabling teams to be more efficient and productive while serving customers faster.
And with Slack integrated with its Service Cloud-powered contact center application, team members have more flexibility in how and when they interacted with customers. For developers, Slack provides the tools needed to communicate efficiently and securely to automate workflows.
“A lot of our developer teams use Slack regularly,” said Savinay Berry, EVP of Product and Engineering. “They’ve put in scripts inside the different channels in Slack for our deployment processes.”
While Slack workflows helped optimize communications, Vonage’s many acquisitions introduced integration challenges between legacy systems and their existing Salesforce instances. Customer data was siloed across different systems.
Vonage implemented MuleSoft to link data from multiple systems with a unique identifier with help from Salesforce Professional Services. This gave sales and business teams a complete view of their accounts and set them up to build stronger customer relationships.
“We will use MuleSoft as the intermediary to help our systems talk to each other,” said Zaleski. “We have very successful integration layers today, but we really want to take it to the next level with the MuleSoft platform.”
Vonage also consolidated accounts across instances in its data warehouse, a virtual storage center for customer data. Instead of manually searching for customer account information in each system, teams can view it all in one place, resulting in faster, more consistent support and better cross-selling across business lines.
With customer data in one place, Vonage sales teams were able to more quickly understand the needs of customers and prospects.
To streamline its quoting process, Vonage now uses Sales Cloud to unify sales operations, quickly building custom workflows with Flow's low-code tools. With simplified quote creation and management, provisioning time has gone from four days to just minutes, while also reducing the opportunity for human error.
“Sales agents can easily pull products from a product catalog that are already configured,” said Zaleski. “Once the quote is created, it’s automatically sent to our customers.”
The Salesforce Platform’s low-code building capabilities enable employees without coding experience to become “citizen developers,” according to Berry. “They just need to understand how to use workflows so they can drag and drop different things.”
The benefit of the Salesforce Platform is that anyone across the business can build quickly with low code and then use code to extend and customize. This frees engineers and IT to focus on creating the innovative new products Vonage is known for.
For Vonage to gain a true 360-degree view of customers, the company also needed to visualize and present its data in a way that made sense to multiple teams — from sales operations to executive leadership.
That’s where Tableau comes in.
Vonage’s Business Intelligence team captures data across business units and visualizes it on a single dashboard. Executives present their updates, strategies, and decisions directly from Tableau, saving preparation time and adding clarity to their presentations.
Tara Zaleski, Senior Director, Business Services
The sales operations and go-to-market (GTM) support teams can better forecast and plan pipeline across multiple Salesforce instances by visualizing sales and operations data. CRM Analytics sends sales teams automated notifications around opportunity scoring, pipeline changes, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities. With these AI-powered insights, teams can make more informed decisions for their go-to-market strategies.
Shaping the future of telecommunications requires vision, and for Vonage, it’s all about dreaming big.
“How do we communicate with each other in the next hundred years, or in the next 50 years?” said Berry. “You have to think that big, but you also have to start small and take tangible steps to get there.”
And taking steps toward making big dreams a reality requires close partnership. That’s why today, Vonage works with experts from Salesforce Professional Services. From integrating new and legacy systems to training team members on best practices, Salesforce Professional Services helps the company get the most value from its Salesforce ecosystem.
Vonage also uses Salesforce’s Premier Success Plan for expert coaching sessions tailored to its unique needs and business outcomes. This partnership has accelerated the company’s adoption of new products, empowering teams to work more effectively.
",Communications,Vonage
"Businesses demand fast, flexible, and secure ways to manage online payments. Looking beyond a checkout point solution, they now expect an ecommerce partner that can offer solutions to help them seamlessly run their business from anywhere. PayPal, the world’s leading online payments platform, is on a journey to transform how it delivers those solutions to its 392 million business and consumer account holders.
Over the past several years, PayPal has focused on advancing its product innovation and strategic partnerships to better serve its customers. With its rapid growth and numerous acquisitions came the need to unite several separate CRM systems, teams, and processes. PayPal sought to improve visibility and quality of data across departments so they could win more customers by getting to know their needs and concerns.
Dan Torunian, Vice President, Employee Technology & Experiences, recognized that, to elevate customer experience and grow the company’s customer base, PayPal would have to connect technology and people more effectively.
Let’s take a look at how Dan and his team are using Salesforce Customer 360 to do exactly that, helping them reach their goal of engaging 1 billion customers by uniting teams and company data with a single customer view. We’ve translated their learnings into actionable steps you can take to unite your company around your customers, too.
Vice President, Employee Technology & Experiences 

Step 1. Unite teams with a single view of the customer to deliver connected customer experiences.
Step 2. Scale up sales processes by unifying data on one CRM.
Step 3. Automate the sales cycle to speed up revenue growth.
Step 4. Become trusted advisors with connected service.
Step 5. Enhance security by streamlining data integration.
Step 6. Prepare for the unexpected with strong foundations.
Previously, if PayPal merchants were interested in an additional PayPal product, they had to speak to a different representative for each product. With each new conversation, PayPal team members entered details in separate systems, preventing them from getting a clear picture of the customer’s overall history or product use with the company.
To streamline this experience, PayPal unified sales, service, and customer success teams to work together with a 360-degree view of all the customers’ interactions with the company, so teams can show up as one company, not a patchwork of separate entities. Team members are armed with the right information to recommend a solution, fit for every business need, making it easier to support and engage customers with context and relevance.
“Having a single source of truth allows our employees, to have the knowledge and data [they need] at their fingertips,” said Dan Torunian, Vice President, Employee Technology & Experiences and Data Centers.
To meet its company growth goals, PayPal needed to better scale its sales operations. operations. As a highly acquisitive company, PayPal Holdings has many sales teams, each with its own system and process. The company needed a better way to plan, forecast, and share data between teams and sell across product categories.
PayPal started by bringing all its sales teams under one umbrella and consolidating its data from four systems into a single sales CRM. Sales reps could leverage automation, scoring, and analytics to make it easier for team members to access information and confidently sell across the company’s entire portfolio.
“One of our biggest priorities is to remove the subjectivity from the sales cycle,” Torunian said.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) were built right in the CRM foundation to remove subjectivity from the sales cycle, enabling sellers to forecast more accurately and align territory and accounts among their teams.
With practical and visual insights embedded into the workflow, team members can more easily understand customers and make better decisions, including what solutions to recommend or sell next.
PayPal also reimagined how its sales teams access relevant information, templatizing sales and service best practices, and important account planning information, into a single collaboration tool. Now, PayPal’s teams can communicate more easily from anywhere, and gain greater visibility over the work being done on an account.

By leveraging automation, scoring, and analytics across its entire sales cycle, PayPal has freed up time for team members to focus on selling and closing deals faster. Automation shortened sales cycles and simplified quoting processes, allowing the company to realize revenue sooner.
“One of the biggest challenges when we were engaging with customers was to line up all the things we needed to organize internally,” said Frank Keller, PayPal's Senior Vice President, Enterprise Solutions & Digital Commerce. “It often took a long time to get an offer out or adjust it when negotiating with a customer. Now, through automation and greater predictability, we’re able to close deals much quicker than before.”
Having a single view of the customer gives sales team members the information and insights they need to not only act as a trusted advisor but create personalized experiences at every buying touchpoint. It also helps team members to upsell and cross-sell more effectively.
Consolidated technology also gives leadership the tools needed for more accurate forecasting, allowing them to make better business decisions and continually improve sales processes.
By aligning its sales and services teams more closely, PayPal is able to ensure its employees present as one team to customers across all touchpoints and channels. For example, being able to see details of a customer’s previous interactions with the company enables it to deliver effortless customer experiences.
PayPal is also working to transform its customer service to improve first-call resolution and customer satisfaction scores, while also reducing customer churn. With a single dashboard to review current information, automated tasks, and intelligent guided workflows, service agents have the tools they need to act as trusted advisors, create more meaningful customer interactions and build long-term loyalty.
“Service Cloud will help us significantly improve our ability to meet the customer with empathy at scale,” said Guru Bhat, PayPal’s Vice President, Omni-Channel, and Customer Success Platform. “This efficiency and understanding translates into better customer perceptions of our service and higher scores.”
The experience that third parties have with PayPal is as important as the one that customers have. PayPal has made it simpler for third parties and partners to use its products by replacing its legacy integration setup with a modern API infrastructure. Fully compatible with the company’s technology stack, this infrastructure unlocks and allows data from different sources to talk to each other seamlessly and deliver critical projects faster.
“PayPal has so many different systems and capabilities,” said Torunian. “MuleSoft links them together like a railroad or freeway to communicate with each other in a seamless, effective, and secure way.”
Having united its business units around customers prior to COVID-19, PayPal had the strong foundations it needed to stay customer-focused when the pandemic hit.
PayPal could better determine which solutions were best for merchants’ rising ecommerce needs — especially those that moved to an ecommerce-first model to continue business.
Sales leaders could quickly redeploy sales reps to serve fitness companies that needed to upgrade their web-based payments experiences, for example, as they began offering virtual classes.
PayPal’s strong digital backbone also enabled the company to continue accelerating when it mattered most, quickly adapting its go-to-market offerings and maintaining predictable revenue.
PayPal’s new digital platform is crucial to helping it achieve its goal of serving 1 billion customers. With a single source of truth and a 360-degree view of customers, PayPal can effectively meet consumer expectations for digitized payments, while creating new opportunities for revenue growth.
",Financial Services,PayPal
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"There’s a good reason why CarMax is the largest retailer of used vehicles in the United States: because of the trust it has created with its customers.
“Trust is at the core of why CarMax exists,” said Shamim Mohammad, the company’s Chief Information and Technology Officer. “We brought integrity and transparency into the car buying process — and we made the process very simple and easy.”
Having first disrupted the automotive retail sector when it launched in 1993, CarMax disrupted the industry for a second time by launching a true omni-channel experience that empowers customers to buy a car on their terms: online, in-store, and a seamless integration of both. Here’s how the company used Salesforce to create that experience, delight customers in new and innovative ways, and reimagine car buying.
Step 1: Create an omni-channel experience.
Step 2: Reimagine the in-person customer experience.
Step 3: Enable great customer experiences through great employee experiences.
Step 4: Find a new gear to accelerate change.
Anticipating its customers would want more control of the car-buying journey, the company set about creating a human-centered, omni-channel experience that enabled customers to interact seamlessly online and with their stores, and truly buy a car on their terms.
The car buying process isn't completely linear, and a single customer may interact with multiple associates during their unique journey, from remote support specialists to in-store associates. So, CarMax worked with Salesforce to create a centralized view of the customer to provide a seamless experience across all touchpoints.
As Shamim said, “It gives us the single source of truth. With a 360-degree view, we know exactly where a customer is on their car-shopping journey. Whether it’s our sales, support, or delivery people, they can give the customer an outstanding experience.”
The company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to personalize customer experiences across channels, providing product recommendations for customers and time-saving “next best actions” for associates. It also uses AI to automatically classify and route incoming customer SMS messages, increasing associates’ productivity and customer satisfaction.
In addition, the company launched multiple contact centers to provide remote concierge support that helps customers via phone, text, and digital channels while they’re shopping online.

Before 2020, CarMax was already well underway with its ambitious digital transformation. Then the pandemic hit.
With its strong, digital foundation in place, the company was able to quickly pivot, accelerating the launch of its omni-channel experience to the rest of the country and rolling out CarMax curbside delivery within three weeks.
CarMax Curbside is a new contactless way for customers to test drive and buy a new car with adherence to social-distancing practices. CarMax also offers a home delivery option for most customers.
Associates can concentrate on providing outstanding onsite customer service experiences, thanks to appointment scheduling, guided checklists, and other workflows.
“Now, when you book an appointment for a test drive online, it triggers a workflow that ensures the car is checked, clean, comfortable, and ready for you to drive,” said Permjit Ghotra, AVP, Head of Customer Shopping and Transactions Technology at CarMax.
The buying experience is just as seamless. Customers can save time by completing most of the process online in advance, such as getting preapproval for financing.
One important reason for CarMax’s success is that it puts both customers and employees at the center of every decision.
CarMax redesigned its customer experiences at a fundamental level with intentional relationship design. This involved listening to customers and using design thinking and other tools to empathetically, but deliberately, evolve its relationships with customers.
Custom apps also enhance experiences for both employees and customers. The company’s coders benefit from a modern agile developer experience and use prebuilt partner solutions to accelerate the time-to-market for their apps. On the front end, CarMax’s associates have the tools and information they need to delight customers.
Since the start of the pandemic, CarMax has “found a new gear,” according to Bryan Ennis, Vice President, Customer Experience Centers and Customer Relations. “We’re able to move and innovate faster than ever before,” he said.
Customer-facing associates play a vital role, with some included in the company’s product teams. This ensures development initiatives address user pain points from the beginning, and meaningful testing and training starts early. As a result, it now takes days, not months, to train staff when a new capability or app is rolled out.
Ultimately, it’s this combination of people, culture, and technology that enables this rapid change and allows CarMax to continue to reimagine the future of car buying.""
",Automotive,CarMax
"When your business is largely dependent on travel and onsite visits, a global pandemic can completely derail your operations. But with a solid digital foundation and the right field technology, conducting business virtually is a cinch.
No one knows this better than Fike Corporation, a leading industrial safety manufacturer specializing in protection mechanisms and solutions. Yet, with 75 years under its belt and a rich family history, Fike had become accustomed to its legacy systems, resulting in expensive technician training, longer response times, and siloed data across the organization.
When COVID-19 hit, it served as a catalyst for ushering in a new digital age for Fike, resulting in faster, more efficient virtual processes and seamless data tracking across the business. With Chad Lowman, Director, Corp Business Systems at Fike, at the helm, the company was able to go remote in just two days and complete its digital transformation in 10 months.
Let’s take a look at how Chad and the Fike team use Salesforce Customer 360 and other technology to connect data, streamline the lead and quoting process, and provide impeccable customer service — even from afar.
Director, Corp Business Systems

Step 1: Connect the front and back office.
Step 2: Shift to virtual field service.
Step 3: Streamline lead management and quoting.
Step 4: Collaborate across teams.
To unite teams in one integrated solution, Fike first adopted a new cloud ERP. Now, standard operations such as scheduling, capacity planning, and financial data tracking are integrated with the company’s new sales automation and customer service systems for shared visibility across the business.
Chief Technology Officer
 

Until recently, Fike has faced a complex, costly, and time-consuming process of flying its service technicians to onsite appointments when needed. But with remote work mandates and travel restrictions caused by the pandemic, Fike needed a way to service customer parts without risk.
Fike adopted a field service solution that could partner with its new virtual assistant provider, SightCall. Together, the solution allows Fike to remotely train technicians onsite and easily walk them through repair processes. Using their phones, employees can take augmented reality measurements and solve problems faster, resulting in a 90% reduction in travel costs and 70% decrease in customer response times.
Digital transformation was also necessary in Fike’s sales department, where connecting leads to the right quote was previously a time-consuming process. By consolidating sales data into a single quote-to-cash platform, Fike automated its lead management and quoting process, while improving accuracy.
To test how easy it would be to customize workflows within the new platform and collaborate globally, Fike held a virtual CPQ hackathon to reimagine the company’s sales and business processes across its three product lines. The hackathon revealed a number of solutions, including the ability to:
Quote by item name instead of parts numbers
Develop workflows to reduce manufacturing overhead and increase margins
Create more accurate bills of material to reduce selling incorrect parts
Aaron White is a Business Systems Analyst, Developer at Fike. During Fike’s virtual CPQ hackathon, Aaron built custom objects and flows to gather end users’ input.
Business Systems Analyst Developer



One of the reasons for the hackathon’s success was the ability for teams to quickly and easily collaborate virtually. With participants across the globe, Fike teams were able to collaborate over the same documents in real time, managing communications and executing as quickly as possible. Going forward, Fike sales, service, and engineering teams can quickly and easily collaborate in real time to stay informed and productive across customer accounts and new projects.
“The online method is working better than in real life because it’s helping keep people accountable with time management,” said Chad. “They’ve knocked out several great deliverables in a short amount of time.”
With a fully digitized solution for sales and service, Fike is discovering new ways of doing business efficiently, no matter where its technicians and employees work from. As more companies return to work, new and old processes may be at odds, but having a connected platform to launch from will allow for newfound agility and productivity.
",Technology,Fike Corporation
"Luxury brands differentiate themselves with bespoke craftsmanship, customization, and service at every turn. Yet, it’s become difficult in the digital age to translate these moments into an online experience of the same caliber.
Bentley Motors has been perfecting the luxury car-buying experience for more than 100 years with handcrafted expertise. But data and systems abound across a century of business, and Bentley needed a way to not only build cleaner, more connected customer data but set itself on a path toward digitized excellence for the next 100 years.
Let’s take a look at how Bentley Motors is reimagining the customer experience by creating a 360-degree view of each customer and prospect with Salesforce Customer 360.
Chairman and CEO


Step 1: Integrate for ultimate visibility
Step 2: Build a single view of the customer
Step 3: Optimize sales and service interactions
Step 4: Personalize customer journeys
Step 5: Create a new category of sustainable luxury
When data is all in one place, the opportunities for connected experiences are endless. Bentley Motors began by integrating its legacy systems to increase response times, add personalization, and streamline work for brand advisors. Now, Bentley Motors can unlock and integrate data from various back-end systems to form a 360-degree view of customers for more personalized experiences.
Board Member for People, Digitalization and IT


Bentley Motors’ brand advisor team can view customers on a single pane of glass for deeper personalization and faster response times in managing inbound and outbound sales and service queries. Plus, increased visibility across systems also means Bentley Motors can quickly analyze its data in real-time. With a clear view of data and simplified extraction, employees can examine and analyze multiple data sources automatically, driving real-time decision-making.
Bentley Motors has been tailoring offline customer experiences since its founding. To build engaging moments online, Bentley Motors set out to create a single view of each customer, leveraging industry expertise and technical guidance to redefine customer interactions and deepen personal relationships. These ideal customer records may consist of purchasing interests, vehicles owned, previous inquiries, lead source, and so on — made possible by connecting every touchpoint in one source of truth.


Board Member for Sales and Marketing


And because sales, service, and marketing functions are all integrated in one platform, Bentley Motors can keep customer data current, ensuring messages always reach customers at the moments that matter most.

Instead of manually processing web and social media leads, Bentley Motors now has a lead management process that can streamline and automate sales for ultimate efficiency and flow. With optimized web forms, web-to-lead processes, and built-in intelligence (like lead scoring and next best action), brand advisors can immediately act on leads, forming a relationship when prospects are most engaged.
Plus, brand advisors can easily prioritize cases, driving faster response times and improved customer satisfaction. Bentley Motors has further revolutionized its customer service by piloting a live chat tool, providing a new and convenient digital channel for customers to engage with the company in real time. Going forward, no matter which channel customers engage on, brand advisors will be able to view every service touchpoint on a single screen.
Bentley is planning to unify, segment and activate audience data to further personalize customer experiences. Armed with a 360-degree view of each individual, Bentley Motors has endless possibilities for reaching customers on their terms. By fueling digital marketing with sales and service data, Bentley can personalize every marketing journey to improve customer engagement and drive quality demand.
Whether customers want to hear from the brand via email, SMS, web, or social media, Bentley Motors can deliver, triggering campaigns at the right moment based on customer behavior, new promotions, and so on. Some interactions (like clicking on an email campaign) also trigger lead qualification actions, such as calls or appointment requests. Bentley Motors brand advisors can then reach out to form one-to-one relationships with customers using data collected inside the new platform.
Chief Digital Officer

Bentley Motors’ digital transformation doesn’t just improve customer experiences. It also sets the auto manufacturer on a path to enhance global wellbeing for automobile occupants and the wider world. In its next 100 years, Bentley Motors is committing to more sustainable business practices like ethical wood sourcing, lighter batteries, an electric grand touring car, the largest solar carport in the U.K., and even a project to combat the declining bee population.
Chairman and CEO

Sustainability starts right at the source for Bentley. The Bentley factory in England is completely carbon neutral, relying on solar panels and green energy sources to provide power. Plus, the company is exploring more responsible materials like carbon neutral wood and paint made from rice husks to achieve its vision of being fully sustainable.
Board Member for Manufacturing



Bentley Motors’ new digital platform is a crucial component of its century-long goal to become the undisputed leader of sustainable luxury mobility. With the ability to connect data for increased clarity across the business, Bentley Motors can accelerate business growth and personalized customer engagement to deliver a new generation of luxury services.
",Automotive,Bentley Motors
"When COVID-19 first reached the U.S. and public spaces were forced to close, small businesses were hurt most, leaving many with an unclear future. While money became available through the Small Business Administration (SBA), the responsibility fell on banking institutions to intake, manage, and submit applications in a timely and orderly manner.
To provide loan relief to the people and communities affected by the pandemic, Zions Bancorporation, a Utah-based bank holding company, knew it needed to reimagine its loan application experience and scale up quickly to handle the unprecedented influx of thousands of applications. That monumental task was given to Jesse Ronnow, SVP and Director of Digital Marketing.
Let’s take a closer look at the steps Jesse and his team took to optimize the loan process and serve small businesses faster, using Salesforce Customer 360.


SVP & Director of Digital Marketing
Step 1: Break down data silos to deliver unified, personalized experiences.
Step 2: Streamline application collection and visibility.
Step 3: Collaborate with speed around a 360-degree view of the customer.
Step 4: Deliver a transparent lending experience and service customers from anywhere, virtually.
Step 5: Quantify results and provide visibility to leadership.
As a national leader in SBA lending, Zions Bancorporation regularly delivers financial expertise to its customers across eight affiliate banks in the western U.S. As a longtime Salesforce customer, Zions made the decision to consolidate its existing Salesforce instances into one in 2019 to allow for open collaboration across the entire business and provide a seamless customer experience.
Zions Bancorporation has the ambition to gain 360-degree visibility into customers’ financial profiles to unlock the full power of the bank to serve its customers.
During the pandemic, the bank relied on Financial Services Cloud to streamline the lending process so teams could better collaborate to deliver more personalized experiences for customers.

As COVID-19 shut down businesses across the U.S. and details of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) were released to aid owners, banks began preparing for a massive influx of applications to manage. To ensure timely intake and faster processing, Zions Bancorporation realized it had requirements of its own, including:
Bidirectional data flow with customers
Banker visibility throughout the entire loan process
Easy-to-use dashboards to provide leadership visibility
SVP & Director of Digital Marketing
With a need for rapid deployment, Zions Bancorporation built a web-to-lead form that allowed it to:
Zions then partnered with Salesforce Professional Services to rapidly build a Community Cloud PPP customer portal that allowed borrowers to:
Complete a digital PPP application
Submit all required documentation
Work seamlessly with a banker after submittal, through approval, and finally to funding.
With the guidance and partnership with Salesforce Professional services, Zions Bank launched a comprehensive solution in just six days to digitally capture, manage, and process applications, eventually placing it ninth in the nation for fulfilling the most PPP loans despite being the 43rd largest bank in the country.
Once the borrower's data was submitted, the bank’s employees sprang into action. Critical steps in the loan process, from identity verification and credit check to underwriting, required multiple teams to view, share, and process data.
With an influx of 20,000 applications in the first three days, loan officers were able to collaborate more efficiently using a single view of the borrower.
By the end, Zions Bank had processed over 47,000 totaling over $7 billion. With volume over 14,000 loans processed from new clients, it was crucial to be able to quickly intake and manage new information.
Two-way communication was critical for anxious borrowers who often had questions and were eager to track the status of their loans.
Zions’ web portal let customers track the entire loan application process to provide much needed client visibility and transparency. The Paycheck Protection Program portal was able to build customer trust by:
Facilitating conversations between borrowers and loan officers
Providing resources and information to answer common questions
Keeping customers informed of loan application status
Simplifying the loan forgiveness process
SVP & Director of Digital Marketing
With ample data at its disposal, Zions Bancorporation could measure the effectiveness of its loan program by tracking information like application volume, completion rate, and the number of new accounts. Easy-to-use dashboards allowed leaders to see the data and results in real time.
That data inspired confidence among leaders that its digital team could build such an effective solution in such a short time. With the trust of leadership, Jesse and his team have earned greater autonomy and support for future innovation.
",Financial Services,Zions Bancorporation
"When COVID-19 hit, MIMIT Health, a Chicago-based independent physician group specializing in minimally invasive and targeted treatments, needed to prioritize safety while ensuring continuity of care. Within just 72 hours, MIMIT CEO Dr. Romi Chopra and his team reconfigured its Health Cloud instance to offer new patient solutions, such as telehealth and personalized COVID assessment tools.
In this short video [1:40], hear how CEO and Surgeon Dr. Romi Chopra delivered new patient solutions in a virtual setting.
MIMIT has been accelerating toward healthcare interoperability since 2013 when it adopted a new healthcare platform to unify disparate systems and create a 360-degree view of each patient. In less than three months, MIMIT saw 459% ROI from the platform, saving $500,000 and achieving a holistic view of each patient for more tailored care.
Armed with a seamless patient experience, referral management program, and analytics to turn EMR data into insights, the company was prepared when the influx of calls came at the start of the coronavirus in March 2020. But MIMIT also needed a way to provide virtual care and ensure its patients were safe.
MIMIT Health decided to add new solutions and reconfigure its platform to better serve patients despite shelter-in-place restrictions that kept them from meeting with doctors in-person. To adapt, the company needed to address two key parts of providing care during COVID-19:
Health assessments. Digital surveys to screen patient symptoms — namely high fever, coughing, and shortness of breath 
Virtual appointments. Telehealth visits for those not considered “persons under investigation” (PUI)
After reviewing possible solutions for providing care in the midst of a pandemic, MIMIT developed a plan of attack. The company’s systems team began the visualization process, using task management to develop a project plan and solution in under 48 hours.
From there, the team built a workflow for screening patients and routing them to the correct endpoint depending on their symptoms. MIMIT then began creating predefined steps and automating subsequent actions for conducting patient assessments.
With deep analytics, MIMIT could track the spread of COVID-19 across regional levels to identify virus hotspots. Data analytics also allowed MIMIT to track things like:
PPE and vital equipment inventory
Number of assessments administered
Predictions for future virus spread
To properly care for patients with COVID-19 symptoms, MIMIT needed to implement a telehealth solution that would not only provide safe, reliable virtual care, but also integrate back into its healthcare platform. In just 72 hours, MIMIT pulled in its existing Zoom for Healthcare solution to conduct telehealth appointments within the existing environment, allowing providers to collaborate with care coordinators as they meet with patients.
Once completed, the recording of the visit is automatically saved in HIPAA-compliant cloud storage. When all tasks are completed, built-in workflows automatically set up new tasks for care coordination, coding, and billing.
MIMIT Health can now provide 24/7 virtual care to patients at home on their smartphone, tablet, or computer. By adapting quickly, the company was not only able to provide safe, convenient care to its patients, but also set its employees at ease, leading to increased positivity among the team.
Like MIMIT Health, it’s important for healthcare organizations to not only react quickly in times of crisis, but implement technology solutions that prepare them well for whatever the future may hold. Those already set up with digital infrastructure have the benefit of agility, preparing them to act quickly and build on what they’ve already put in place.
Dr. Paramjit “Romi” Chopra, M.D.
Chairman and CEO, MIMIT Healthcare
Dr. Paramjit “Romi” Chopra, M.D., is an interventional radiologist with over 30 years’ experience in interventional radiology and endovascular therapy. Dr. Chopra is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of MIMIT Health, one of the fastest-growing physician groups in Illinois. Dr. Chopra was awarded the Distinguished Physician Award and the U.S. Congressional Medal for Outstanding Contributions and Excellence in Patient Care and Teaching. 



",Healthcare & Life Sciences,MIMIT Health
"5,200 employees
Salesforce customer since 2006
When Zillow, now the leading real estate and rental marketplace, first launched in 2006, it revolutionized real estate. For the first time, real estate information - like home value estimates and later property listings - was available online, for free, for anyone to access.
Fast forward 13 years, Zillow now sees the industry is ripe for its next revolution. Today’s consumers look for the same kind of simple, seamless experiences they get from companies like Amazon and Uber. The real estate transaction - with its stress, complexity, and huge financial commitment - needed the latest technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced software to turn home buying and selling into an easy, integrated process. To take on this big challenge and continue earning the trust of its customers, Zillow needed to create a seamless experience that gave people confidence throughout the real estate process, from finding the right home to moving into it.
To do this, the company needed an integrated, customer-centric solution that would allow it to turn the large amount of data it captures into insights team members could use to create more personalized customer experiences. It also needed a solution that would help it launch and grow a new part of its business, Zillow Offers. This groundbreaking service gives homeowners the option of bypassing the usual stress of selling a home by selling to Zillow instead. This gives people complete control of the timing and process of their next big move.
Zillow is the leading online real estate and rental network in the U.S. and one of the world’s largest. Unique users to Zillow Group’s mobile apps and websites recently reached an all-time high, with average monthly unique users up 5% to 195.6 million. In addition to home listings, the site adds value for users by turning the data it captures on more than 100 million homes into insights such as the “Zestimate” home valuation. The Zestimate is Zillow’s estimate of a home’s market value, calculated using public and user-submitted data, as well as home facts, location and market conditions.
Users can also access a directory of local agents, browse mortgage rates, connect with a lender to apply for pre-approval, get a mortgage through Zillow Home Loans or request an offer on their home through Zillow Offers. Real estate agents can also become Zillow Premier Agents through the company’s flagship advertising program that connects top agents and their teams with interested buyers and sellers in their market. To maintain their participation in the program, agents must deliver against a minimum service standard of customer satisfaction as rated by their connections and clients.
With thousands of sales and service interactions daily with both consumers and the professionals who partner with Zillow, it is vital that Zillow’s nearly 6,000 employees have the information and tools they need to work smarter and faster. The company turned to Salesforce to help upgrade its sales and service platforms to give employees a better view of the data, enabling them to deliver more personalized service and improving the overall customer experience.
“Data plays a huge role in helping us build a relationship with our customers and maintain that trust over not just months but years,” said Zillow Brand President Jeremy Wacksman, President, Zillow Group. “That’s something we discovered when we started the company almost 15 years ago, and we’ve been building on it ever since.”
Drive business growth on the world's #1 sales platform.
Turn customer data into closed deals with AI.
Build loyalty with every interaction using complete customer support software.
Zillow is leveraging Salesforce’s Sales Engagement, part of Sales Cloud, to automate mundane tasks and streamline the sales process for Zillow Premier Agent sales teams. On the professional side, team members need to work with large numbers of agents from across the country to quickly identify their needs and close deals on the phone. On the consumer side, they need to ensure every house hunter receives the information they need to make decisions and move forward. Sales Engagement allows sales reps to keep their work in one place, see all of the relevant information, respond rapidly, and generally keep up with the speed that is needed to continue the team’s growth. As a result, it helps boost productivity for individual team members and allows the company to scale best practices seamlessly across different points of the business.
For example, Lightning Dialer allows sales reps to leave prerecorded messages instead of repeating themselves, saving time on every call that goes to voicemail. Sales Cadences ensure that every interaction is structured to guide the teams through scheduled, streamlined outreach plans with email templates, call scripts, and custom steps. Using Work Queues, team members can access a to-do list for their entire day — every call, email, and outreach activity is laid out. Plus, additional information such as zip codes and details of mortgages is shown in that same single screen. This not only helps teams work faster, but it also helps them deliver better service to customers.
“Prior to implementing Sales Engagement, we were making around 65 to 90 calls a day,” said Eli Eliason, Zillow’s Sales Executive Manager. “Now sales executives can make 150 or more calls daily. So it’s almost doubled their productivity. Executives are able to connect with more agents and drive that face-to-face connection, even if it’s through virtual consultations.”
The Zillow Premier Agent team is also using Sales Cloud Einstein to sell in a smarter way. This artificial intelligence (AI) tool helps team members better understand the needs of their customers - real estate agents across the U.S. - and automatically prioritize the right next step at the right time.
“We’ve got a huge number of customers wanting to use our platform, and our people struggle to prioritize what’s next,” said Greg Schwartz, Zillow’s President, Media and Marketplace. “Einstein allows us to distribute a high-quality prioritized task list to all of our teammates each day and throughout the day. This has resulted in real gains in conversion and in productivity.”
Einstein’s Lead Scoring feature is also important for Zillow Premier Agent because it takes the guesswork out of which leads are most likely to close. “Lead Scoring is really important for Zillow because we need to track how many leads we’re giving out to our agents,” said Eliason. “We want to make sure that we’re providing them with an accurate expectation of what we’re showcasing when they purchase an ad. So, we might say, ‘You’re going to see two live connections and about eight nurture leads on average’ — we want to make sure that that’s what we’re providing.”
The company is also using Service Cloud to power Zillow Offers, the program where Zillow buys homes directly from homeowners in the U.S. and quickly relists them for sale. For example, if a Zillow Offers advisor, who engages directly with a homeowner requesting a Zillow Offer, has a question for the pricing team, the advisor can open a case about a home’s offer price and estimate. Or, if a problem like a broken sewer is noted at a home inspection, the estimator or inspector can submit a case through the Salesforce mobile app to the Zillow Utilities team. Zillow Offers advisors can also chat with customers using Sonar SMS on Salesforce’s user interface.
Service Cloud’s scalability has enabled this new revenue stream to grow quickly. Only 18 months after initially launching in Phoenix in April 2018, Zillow Offers is now available in 21 U.S. markets, with plans to be in 26 by mid-2020.
Having dealt with data fidelity and syncing issues between the company’s previous customer relationship management and marketing automation software, Zillow recently switched to using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
This single platform solution gives marketing teams better access to the data and reporting they need to effectively communicate with customer segments. It also gives sales executives a more efficient way of accessing curated marketing content to accelerate sales.



Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.
",Technology,Zillow
"14,000+ employees
Salesforce customer since 2005
Medical device company Align Technology designs and manufactures the Invisalign® system, the most advanced clear aligner system in the world, and iTero® intraoral scanners and services. Innovations in technology have made it possible for Align Technology to improve the smiles of 8 million people worldwide as of 2019.

Align is reimagining and reinventing the way orthodontic and restorative treatment is presented and delivered to millions of people around the world through its network of Invisalign-trained doctors.
To keep pace with growth and global expansion, Align saw opportunities to improve its internal technology and evolve how it engaged with doctors. This included changes to disparate systems, outdated analytical tools, and customer service.
Since its founding in 1997, Align Technology has been a trailblazer in digital orthodontics - constantly innovating to bring new and better solutions to doctors that have transformed smiles and improved lives for more than 8 million people worldwide since it launched the Invisalign system in1999.

However, legacy systems made it difficult for the company’s employees to provide optimal support to their customers — orthodontists and dentists — and their patients, the end-users of Invisalign aligners. The company turned to Salesforce for help. Together, they developed an integrated cloud-based solution that could help sales, service and marketing teams interact more meaningfully with customers and end-users, and be easily scaled to accommodate future growth across multiple markets.
Increase customer satisfaction using the #1 platform for service.
Strengthen your customer relationships with a world’s leading marketing platform.
Find customers, close deals, and grow accounts faster with Sales Cloud.
Siloed data meant that Align Technology’s employees didn’t have a single view of the customer. As a result, they weren’t able to access a customer’s complete history during interactions, hampering their ability to resolve customers’ issues quickly and easily. The company realized it needed a whole-of-business approach to customer relationship management that also allowed it to build capability in specific areas.

“To grow and scale globally, we needed a platform that had the agility and flexibility to support all of our different go-to-market models,” says Sreelakshmi Kolli, Align Technology’s Senior Vice President, Global Information Technology.

By rolling out Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud across its business, Align Technology has been able to transform how employees manage interactions with customers. Teams now have a complete view of customers’ information. This enables customer service representatives to access a full history without switching between systems. As a result, they can deal with inquiries more efficiently, increasing productivity and customer satisfaction. Sales representatives can access data from anywhere, ensuring they have the information they need, whether it’s a new or an existing customer.
Align Technology had relied on email marketing, but realized it needed a more strategic approach. It turned to Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, which allows the company to track what customers are saying and doing across a variety of touchpoints, nurture relationships with prospects, and build marketing campaigns.

The company also uses artificial intelligence from Salesforce in the Einstein Discovery functionality to capture and analyze data from customers and end-users, this allows sales representatives to identify the opportunities that are most likely to convert. Strategic decision-making is made easier with the help of Tableau CRM, which allows sales teams to analyze real-time data and proactively address any issues.
Creating more meaningful experiences for both dental professionals and consumers who are the Invisalign system’s end-users has been a key priority for Align. It uses cloud-based apps, built with the Heroku developer tool on Salesforce’s Lightning Platform, to drive greater engagement. These include the SmileView mobile app, which applies machine learning algorithms to a potential patient’s selfie to show them a simulation of what they would look like after treatment. Consumers can also enter their location into the Doctor Locator app and find an Invisalign provider in their area. Invisalign providers can access the Invisalign Doctor Site, a self-service portal to upload patient records, review treatment plans, check the status of an order, sign up for training courses, and engage with their peers.

In addition, individual teams are able to build their own apps on the Lightning Platform, which enables Align to develop and release new apps more quickly than in the past. “The Lightning Platform allows us to focus more on the content, business processes, and engagement journey, rather than on the technology side of developing, testing, and releasing a new app,” says Kolli.



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",Technology,Align Technology
"6,300 employees
Salesforce customer since 2015
Ticketmaster’s mission is to create memories on a massive scale. They are a top 5 global e-commerce player selling 15 tickets per second to events happening around the world. Every year Ticketmaster sells nearly 500 million tickets for a huge variety of concerts, events, and games, and every year their sites receives more than a billion visits. While these numbers highlight Ticketmaster’s success, it also underlines the tremendous task it faces. Now, as customers look for smarter, faster, and more personalized experiences, the task of providing those experiences at scale becomes more challenging. In this customer-experience driven time, Ticketmaster found that its IT infrastructure had an opportunity to better collaborate.
“Everything was in silos. Purchase confirmations might be handled with one system, while password resets were handled by separate emails. The data didn’t really connect and the systems didn’t talk to each other,” said Justin Burleigh, Chief Product Officer.
As the global leader in ticketing, Ticketmaster provides its customers the personalized experiences modern consumers expect. With millions of customers, providing fan-centric consumer journeys requires communication about customer needs and preferences across all lines of business. Using Salesforce, Ticketmaster can connect its customer data across its organization so it can meet customers’ expectations.
“When you need to message 100 million fans in real time across the world, you can’t do that without a platform like Salesforce,” said Bob Ritter, SVP Product Management.
Increase customer satisfaction using the #1 platform for service.
Strengthen your customer relationships with a world’s leading marketing platform.
Empower everyone to build apps on the #1 enterprise cloud platform.
With Marketing Cloud, Ticketmaster can connect channels like email and mobile to create compelling experiences, personalized to each of the millions of fans who use Ticketmaster each year.
“Marketing Cloud enables us to give the right communications at the right time to the right fans at scale.” Bob Ritter, SVP Product Management.
Ticketmaster is deeply aware of their different customer needs and personas. “Speaking to a father who wants to take his daughter to a concert is very different than if you are talking to a young millennial. The conversation after you purchase a ticket is about giving you helpful guidance on that march up to your event date. Where am I going to park? How am I going to get there?” said Kathryn Frederick, Chief Marketing Officer.
Once fans purchase a ticket using Ticketmaster, they may need to seek support to ask questions about their purchase or to make changes. Each interaction is an opportunity to deliver value and create deeper relationships.
With Service Cloud, Ticketmaster gives service agents an easy-to-use, unified view of every customer interaction across the business, along with powerful productivity tools for consistent service every time.
When Ticketmaster partners with clients to put on live events, insights and data are invaluable. Switching to Salesforce Lightning provided Ticketmaster sales reps with a 360-degree view of the customer, placing the power of data right at their fingertips. With Lightning, Ticketmaster is able to more effectively engage and service their clients, so they can create more amazing experiences for their fans.
“Having the tools that we need to drive innovation in our business has been paramount to our success. Things like artificial intelligence and machine learning allow us to ask and answer questions much faster than we ever could have in the history of the company. Salesforce has been at the center of that,” said Justin Burleigh, Chief Product Officer.



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",Technology,Ticketmaster
"900 employees
Salesforce customer since 2016
With changing technologies, the shopping experience has shifted from the mom-and-pop stores that were prevalent only a few decades ago, to massive shopping malls and department stores. Brunello Cucinelli, Chairman & CEO, sees a worrying trend in the commerce experience, where shoppers are treated as transactions and numbers, rather than individuals with needs and desires. He sees an opportunity to leverage his business as a platform for change.
“My life's great dream has always been to work for the economic and moral dignity of human beings,” said Brunello Cucinelli. “Since I was a young boy, I've always been fascinated by the great pioneers of mankind. I wanted, somehow, to be a tiny pioneer of human dignity.”
Brunello Cucinelli creates high-end clothing for men and women. The brand is known for its classic silhouettes and luxurious materials. For the company, fashion is about the person wearing the clothes, not the brand. “It is very simple. We have no logos. I think this is something quite important,” said Carolina Cucinelli, Communications & Digital Director.
For this brand, the challenge is maintaining its personal touch in the age of the digital shopper. Cucinelli needed to find a way to deliver the personalized experience it was known for in stores to the digital world.
“There is a beautiful expression by Voltaire, where he says: ‘If you do not accept the changes of your time, perhaps you will miss the greatest part,’” said Brunello Cucinelli. “So, I have always wanted to use the latest technology, but to use it in a gracious way that doesn't steal our souls. This is why I believe we are living in a new, fascinating time.”
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Brunello Cucinelli’s solution to the changing times lies in what company leaders call “graceful technology.” This is technology that is “there, but does not come between us and the customer,” said Francesca Picchiò, Digital & CRM Program Manager.
Graceful technology enables the company to create stronger, more personal relationships with their customers. Service Cloud helps Brunello Cucinelli employees deliver faster service. With customer order history and automated workflows, store managers are able to expedite customer service needs, enabling employees to spend more time building relationships with shoppers.
“It was important for us to be able to give our customers the same experience that we give them in the physical world — a feeling of being looked after, without being pressured,” said Carolina. “We try to understand when our customers want to be contacted, when they don’t want to be contacted, when they would rather receive a phone call instead of an email.”
Company leaders turned to Salesforce for that simple, luxury experience that their clients had come to expect. “We weren’t just looking for innovative and complete pioneering technologies. We were looking for a partner who shared our values,” said Francesca.
With Salesforce, Brunello Cucinelli found a way to marry the traditions of Italian craftsmanship and service with graceful technology the helps employees elevate the luxury experience. Salesforce empowers Brunello Cucinelli to put human values at the center of its business.
“Online, just by nature, it is a little bit cold, a bit impersonal,” said Francesca. “Thanks to Salesforce, we were able to build customer journeys — to provide our individual customers with an experience that was as close as possible to their expectations and desires.”
A large part of human values is trust. Said Brunello: “We have always believed in human privacy, so we asked Salesforce, ‘Help us to ensure that we maintain this idea of kindness toward human beings in our work,’ and I was happy that we figured this out. Salesforce has given us real confidence that the data of our valued customers is respected.”
Brunello Cucinelli is also succeeding as an exemplary leader by demonstrating that businesses can achieve the perfect balance of profit and purpose. It’s digital business is growing, and the brand is opening new stores in key markets around the globe, all while contributing 20% of profits to charitable causes. Brunello Cucinelli has elevated the luxury experience to such an extent that customers send in handwritten thank-you notes to employees for their service.
It’s not easy to bring the familial, authentic feeling of a small town in Italy on a global scale. With Salesforce, Brunello Cucinelli has successfully done just that. The digital storefront is available in 50 countries. With Marketing Cloud, every communication has a personal feel, where recipients often respond to the email addressing Brunello directly.
Brunello Cucinelli has successfully translated the luxury experience to the digital realm. Since migrating the company’s ecommerce to Commerce Cloud in 2016, the business has quadrupled ecommerce revenues.
“There is something unique about the relationship we have with Salesforce,” said Francesca. “Because Salesforce immediately grasped the specificity of our project, of what we wanted to do. They also understood our need to break away from the mainstream, to think outside the box.”
""Try to humanize the internet and you will be remembered in the next millennium as those, the innovators, who changed humanity,"" added Brunello.
Brunello Cucinelli plans to continue building out the brand experience in the digital realm, bringing the beauty of its small headquarters town of Solomeo to the world.


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",Retail,Brunello Cucinelli
"As the regional club serving both North and South Carolina for more than 100 years, AAA Carolinas decided that the organization needed to change to stay relevant for its members. “Traditionally we’ve been good at transactions, but not as good at anticipating other ways we could add value to members,” said Dusty Holcomb, SVP of Member Experience and Analytics for AAA Carolinas. “We are sometimes seen as your grandma and grandpa’s motor club. We must change that by going to market with a contemporary experience.”
A big part of that change was focused on their technology. Until recently, AAA Carolinas managed its own customer databases for each line of business, including emergency roadside service (ERS) and insurance products (referred to as Car Care and Travel Services). Member representatives focused on completing transactions exclusively for their own part of the business.
The new vision of leadership is to become a highly relational organization, seeing each transaction as a single touchpoint within the entire member lifecycle. “Folks on the front lines have always worked in the dark; it’s been about their relationship with a member, not our relationship,” Holcomb said. “Salesforce helps us bridge that gap.”
The organization embarked on a transformation aimed at creating a “broader, deeper, and more enriching experience for the member,” according to Holcomb. One of the core ways of doing that was to consolidate data into a single member record and to align field sales and member management processes around it.
AAA Carolinas expanded its Salesforce licenses and embraced Salesforce technologies as the platform for this transformation. To ensure success, AAA Carolinas engaged with Salesforce Architects, which assigns program architects to provide strategic planning, deep industry and product knowledge, and on-the-ground technical advisement and best practices.
Dusty Holcomb, SVP of Member Experience and Analytics, explains how a program architect and business architect helped AAA Carolinas expand its vision for using Salesforce.
“By bringing in Salesforce Architects, I wanted to make sure we had perspective on the best way to deploy Salesforce,” said Holcomb. “If we didn’t get it right, we’d always be limping along saying we wished we’d done this better, or naysayers would say, ‘See, it didn’t work.’”
To gradually win over any potential naysayers, the leaders of AAA Carolinas and the Salesforce program architect (PA) focused on creating small successes to drive recognition and adoption. Chief among these successes, the implementation of LiveAgent for online chat support increased member engagement by 330% and reduced service response time by 54%.
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The PA also helped AAA Carolinas develop an automated way to flag new insurance opportunities for sales reps when members transferred into the Carolinas club from other regions. This generated around 1,250 new opportunities per month and is expected to drive $99,000 to $200,000 in additional gross revenue annually.
Another benefit of this change was the excitement it built internally.
“The team began to rally around every opportunity inside of Chatter and collaborated on what went right and wrong,” said Rob McCloskey, Manager of Enterprise CRM Applications for AAA Carolinas. “They started to organically form best practices, and we saw the quote rate rise two points in two weeks just from that community aspect.”
When AAA Carolinas encouraged employees to share on Chatter, some powerful stories emerged. Listen to how the company went the extra mile for a member during an important moment.
The Salesforce Program Architect has also been on hand to add value by helping sales reps understand the full technology capabilities. In one example, the PA told the team about an API that connected Salesforce to an Edmunds database, providing supplemental data about members’ vehicles so reps could flag safety issues and service needs when they talked to members.
In another example, the architect demonstrated how Field Service could stand in for AAA Carolinas’ existing dispatch system, leading to conversations about strategically developing a new, more robust, and easier-to-use dispatch application that ties into Community Cloud.
“Our PA’s day-to-day work with us here, as part of the AAA family, allows us not only to iterate more quickly, but it drives the principles of thinking Salesforce-first,” said Richard Sexton, Chief Marketing Officer for AAA Carolinas. “He’s so in touch with Salesforce deliverables that he’s been a godsend in every conversation. Sometimes it goes unnoticed because he makes those conversations so seamless, but they save us time and money. We’re moving forward faster because he’s here.”



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",Other,AAA Carolinas
"130,000 employees
Salesforce customer since 2014
Writing the future of industrial digitalization in a global landscape is no easy task. ABB, a pioneering technology leader, is doing just that for its global customers across utilities, industry and transportation, and infrastructure. Whether it is bringing electricity from power plants to plug or automating industries from natural resources to finished products, ABB is writing the future of industrial digitalization.
For ABB, it’s not enough to be a global innovation leader. The company strives to be a leader in customer experience as well, shaping the standard for delivering a complete, connected customer experience. To deliver on this experience, ABB has transformed how it connects with customers through its FACE program (Future ABB Customer Experience). ABB partners with Salesforce as a key element of its strategy.
ABB is one of the world’s largest digital industrial companies, managing operations across 100+ countries, approximately 147,000 employees, four global divisions, and one brand representing a revenue base of $34+ billion. Recognized as one of Fortune’s top 10 companies changing the world in 2018, ABB is helping to run the world without consuming the earth.
With such a vast reach, a history of mergers and acquisitions, and quickly changing customer expectations, ABB was challenged to deliver a modern customer experience across all regions, brands, and departments. This was not easy with 100+ CRM systems across the globe.
Salesforce Customer 360 is deployed across ABB’s sales, service, field service, and marketing departments, enabling any employee to have one 360-degree view of the customer, allowing for optimized selling, servicing, and marketing. With Tableau CRM directly integrated across each function to analyze data, employees can drive intelligent interactions that are personalized for each customer.
Ulrich Spiesshofer, CEO, shared that “today we know better, we plan better, and we execute customer interaction better.” Enabled by Salesforce, ABB is better able to drive profitable organic growth and boost productivity. “Salesforce provides us with the best platform to realize increased responsiveness and effectiveness,” he said.
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Customer expectations are higher than ever, as personal and B2C experiences are shaping the standard for B2B buying. Manufacturers need to meet their customers where their customers are.
ABB delivers on this expectation. “We want to offer our products and solutions through the channels that customers want. Increasingly customers are looking at digital channels, both for doing research and procurement, but also to get solutions to their smaller concerns — and in some cases, even large problems,” said Tarak Mehta, President, Electrification Products Division. “As ABB, we understand our role: to create content and to create processes that ensure customers can engage directly with us and get the answers they seek and the solutions they want.”
ABB has over 26,000 salespeople using Salesforce to deliver customer solutions, allowing them to collaborate across divisions — breaking down any internal silos and creating one 360-degree degree view of the customer.
ABB also partners with 30,000 community members to keep channel partners up to speed and consistent in delivering a superior experience for customers.
At one point in time, customers could receive multiple emails and messages from different divisions and business units at ABB. The team at ABB knew that the company would need to deliver on one global unified marketing strategy to streamline marketing messaging for customers, maintaining the ability to be nimble and pivot quickly.
With 26,000 ABB employees in its marketing and sales organization now connected on Marketing Cloud, the ability to engage with customers across all channels is better than ever before. ABB can use marketing automation with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, identify customers on its website with DMP, and structure 1-to-1 journeys with Marketing Cloud.
Sabine Busse, Group SVP of Marketing and Sales, said the power “to collaborate around account planning activities or customer care activities in one single platform is tremendous.”
Today with Marketing Cloud, Busse celebrates ABB’s new ability to “truly generate a 360-degree view of the customer. We have a good understanding of our pipeline of opportunities. We are sharing knowledge amongst the team, and being on one platform allows us to standardize processes and tools.”
ABB provides quality support that continues to drive customer engagement, and now thanks to Field Service, the company is meeting its customers needs instantaneously and at scale.
Mehta imagines as an example, “a field-service person highlighting a customer need from a maintenance point of view or an operational-improvement point of view, converting that into an opportunity for the salesperson to go and visit the customer and say, ‘Here is something we think will make an impact based on what we saw in your process.’ Now that’s a much richer experience and a much tighter connection to the customer's challenges and solutions rather than just calling them up to say, ‘What are you looking for from ABB?’”
According to Spiesshofer, “Salesforce really helps us in that, but it also helps us to allocate resources and prioritize in a much better way to be more agile and, hopefully, be ahead of our competitors in serving the customers' needs with the appropriate solutions at the right time.”
In our fast-changing world, ABB is using the full power of Marketing Cloud, Field Service, and Salesforce Customer 360 to bring people together by committing to creating products that ensure business-enhancing solutions for customers. “Digitalization is changing how industrial companies interact with their suppliers and with the markets as a whole,” said Spiesshofer. “True market leadership is now only possible if you succeed at using data to optimize processes, predict customer needs, and deliver a smarter and more personalized customer experience.”
With Salesforce Customer 360, ABB is digitally transforming its business by breaking down internal silos and unifying its partner ecosystem, customers, distributors, and employees on a single platform to better connect with its customers in dynamic, more powerful ways.



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",Technology,ABB
"When you have almost as many customers as Seattle has residents, the ability to build strong connections with them is critical. For ADP, a leader in human capital management, Salesforce is key to maintaining strong relationships throughout the lifecycle of its 600,000+ customers. “We need to make customer information easily available to employees in different job functions throughout all of our divisions,” says Dan Page, Vice President of Sales Automation. The company started using Salesforce when it wanted to bring together 11 business units so that employees could easily see complete customer views and track every interaction. ADP consolidated all of its customer data in Salesforce, creating cross-divisional records and standardizing the way it manages leads, territories, and customer information. More than 400 web and landing pages are connected so new information is continuously imported into Salesforce. More than 10,000 ADP employees in sales, marketing, finance, and operations now regularly access information from Salesforce. Integration with pricing tools and supporting systems lets sales easily configure products, compute prices, and generate quotes. And, it’s easy for everyone to get reports in real time. According to Page, “Salesforce lets all of our employees get the insights they need.” Marketing Cloud also helps the company gain intelligence and maintain connections with customers. ADP monitors and participates in conversations about its brand, and also identifies customer service issues that need to be addressed. “It helps us keep a finger on the pulse of the business,” says Page. With Marketing Cloud, ADP can quickly distribute information to multiple social networks with one consolidated, branded voice. ADP also uses Marketing Cloud to identify sales leads directly from social. ADP listens to key topics across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and engages leads with helpful content. Leads are entered directly into Sales Cloud from social. With Marketing Cloud, ADP sends leads to qualification teams and then sales teams to maximize their pipeline. Social selling helps ADP optimize lead flow, decrease sales team communication volume and save valuable staff time. ADP can also conduct audits for social lead generation from sourcing to qualification to closure, to easily see the full life cycle of a lead right within Salesforce.
Recognizing the importance of moving quickly in a short, high contact sales environment, ADP built an entire suite of mobile-optimized apps — including digital sales aids, order management, and itinerary planners — in the Salesforce Platform. Along with the Salesforce mobile app, reps now can do everything from prospecting, to conducting sales calls, to closing deals from their tablets. They can find the hottest leads and prospects on their tablets — and even sign contracts from the road. “It’s hard to be productive when you’re walking to your car, trying to carry a laptop, brochures, and paper sales orders,” explains Heather Talerico, Director of Sales Solutions. “With Salesforce we transformed our selling process from ‘how can I help you?’ to ‘based on the type of company you are we can see that these are your key business challenges and here’s how we can help you’. Salesforce lets our reps maximize every moment.”



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",Technology,ADP
"Aldo Bensadoun followed in the footsteps of his cobbler grandfather and his shoe salesman father who later owned stores, when he opened his own shop in downtown Montreal in 1972 with a bold vision: to be the brand that cares.
In the years since, Bensadoun has built Aldo into an international footwear chain with 2,000+ stores in over 100 countries, continuing his family’s tradition of craftsmanship and style on a massive scale. Bensadoun’s founding values have continued as well — the company includes “love” among its formal corporate values.
Today, Salesforce is Aldo’s partner in spreading the same level of care and compassion Bensadoun offered to his early customers to 200 million customers and prospects worldwide. By pulling together previously siloed customer data, Aldo now provides a personalized experience that travels with customers whether they’re in the store, online, or calling customer service. The aim is to make it faster, easier, and more fun for customers to shop with Aldo.
The goal goes deeper than driving sales.
“For us to communicate and to translate our core values of love, integrity, and respect with the customer, we need to be able to do that across not just channels, but also all forms of communication, whether it's social media, online, or in a person-to-person relationship,” said Patrik Frisk, CEO of Aldo.
“Love” is a word that seems far removed from the lingua franca of the 21st-century corporation. And yet Aldo isn’t alone in its heart-forward view of business relationships. One of Salesforce’s headlines is “We make your customers love you,” making the two companies natural allies.
Love comes through in everything Aldo does, from the relationship employees have with one another to the way they serve customers, Frisk said.
Amy Stern, Aldo’s Global Vice President of Human Resources, said love motivates the company’s leadership to give associates what they need to succeed. “One of the ways we demonstrate love here internally is sharing knowledge and … the tools that we provide to our associates,” Stern explained. “We can empower them with knowledge to be the best they can be, and to really serve our customers in a much deeper way … It allows them to put the customer at the center of our universe.”
For example, Salesforce brings customer data to the mobile devices that sales associates use to give better service to customers in Aldo stores, and informs call-center staffers so they can resolve calls 20% faster. That shows love for Aldo’s customers and respect for their time.
“Their expectation is that we know them and their behaviors and their preferences, regardless of where they are,” said Lance Martel, Chief Information Officer. “I think it's not about technology. It's about experiences.”
With predictive intelligence on marketing cloud and on its website, Aldo can recommend a second pair of shoes in a similar style or a coordinating handbag. If you look at a pair of shoes on Aldo’s website, when you walk into a store, Aldo’s app will tell a sales associate what you want so you can try those shoes on faster. Using the Salesforce Platform and AppExchange, Aldo’s A-list app manages and tracks interactions with top-tier customers, and showcases select shoes or prereleases, offering special perks to their best customers.
Having the right information helps Aldo associates make recommendations that feel personal and generous, not like generic upselling, Martel said.
An average Aldo customer buys a few pairs of shoes per year while the company’s top customers buy around nine pairs every year. At best, that’s still less than one pair a month, so blasting weekly sales emails is clearly overkill.
“I think in general we always sent far too much. And we have reduced it by about 50 percent,” said Erwin Hinteregger, Chief Marketing Officer.
The emails Aldo does send are better connected to individual preferences — and that’s driven a 131% increase in email conversion over the previous year.
“That is key, that we get smarter about the individual customer and [offer them] the right product, the right content that they are really looking for. That is really the Holy Grail, at the end of the day, right? It's really getting down to a 1-to-1 relationship,” Hinteregger said.
Ian Richards, Aldo’s Vice President of CRM and Analytics, said Aldo aims for that 1-to-1 connection across communications platforms.
“We really try to send the customer the right information that might be most relevant to that customer at that particular time. Whether it's an email, push, or SMS, across all of our platforms, it's really about being customer-centric and truly personalized,” said Ian Richards, Vice President of CRM and Analytics.
Upgrading to Marketing Cloud drove $100 million in ROI over four years, by focusing on showing love and respect for Aldo customers, putting them at the center of Aldo’s world.
“It's very interesting how the retail world has changed,” Frisk said. Back just a few decades, all you needed was “beautiful footwear — the right product, in other words — and great staff that we’re able to service the consumer — you were gold.”
Fast-fashion chains and convenient online retailers transformed the retail landscape, giving customers more choices, which meant Aldo had to change, too.
“For Aldo, that meant that we needed to really think long and hard about how we stayed competitive,” Frisk said. “It wasn't just about collecting data. It was about personalizing that data. … And that's what Salesforce has enabled us to do.”



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",Other,Aldo
"220 employees
Salesforce customer since 2011
A flood. A burglary. A systems failure. Any of these incidents can have a catastrophic impact on a small business. AXA Business Insurance, based in Glasgow, Scotland, protects small to medium-sized companies, sole traders, and self-employed people against such events with a range of insurance products that safeguard their livelihoods.
Although business insurance has traditionally been dominated by brokers, the direct market is growing rapidly and AXA Business Insurance wants to be at the forefront of this evolution. The company is already a major player in the insurance industry, with 220 employees and  annual sales of nearly $160 million. “More people are choosing to go direct than ever before, and our ambition is to be the number one in the market by 2021,” said Darrell Sansom, Chief Customer & Innovation Officer.
To achieve this goal, the insurer needs to ensure its customer feedback ratings are impeccable. “Digital referrals will be key to future growth — people value the opinions of existing customers far more than any marketing materials we can produce,” explained Sansom. “To achieve a good rating, we need to deliver a personalized, omni-channel service. Small business owners are pushed for time; we need to make things as fast and easy for them as possible.” And that means making things as fast and easy as possible for customer-facing teams.
With four internal systems capturing information on different types of policies, AXA Business Insurance’s customer service advisors lacked a unified view of customers. “There was a gap in customer intimacy,” said Jacqueline Cowden, Head of Business Delivery. “People felt we didn’t always know and understand their business. We needed to stop having product-based conversations and start having more customer-focused conversations.”
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To support this shift in culture, AXA Business Insurance needed a single CRM system that could provide a 360-degree view of its customers. “Salesforce was ahead by miles,” said Cowden. “Not only is the platform extremely flexible, but it also maps to our customer-centric goals.”
Around 150 people in service and sales roles at AXA Business Insurance now use Service Cloud on a daily basis to provide a joined-up, personal experience to thousands of customers. By integrating Salesforce with the company’s communications systems and digital policy management platform, advisors can see at a glance who is calling, every policy they own, recent interactions, and feedback scores.
They can also see customers’ online activity and help them complete any outstanding transactions without having to start the process from scratch. “The more you know about a customer, the easier it is to have a productive conversation,” said Sansom. “Our customers no longer have to repeat themselves, and if they’ve had a negative experience in the past, advisors can understand that and try to change their perception.” If a team member is off sick or on holiday, a colleague can pick up the conversation where they left off, ensuring customers still receive a rapid and informed response.
With a 360-degree view of the customer, advisors can not only provide a more prompt and personalized response to queries and policy updates, they can also cross-sell and upsell more effectively. “We were spending a lot of time trying to win new business, yet there were opportunities going untapped with existing customers,” said Cowden. “The cost and effort involved in attracting a new customer is much higher than selling to an existing one.”
To simplify cross-selling, AXA Business Insurance has developed a “may need” dashboard in Salesforce. This enables advisors to highlight any additional products that customers might be interested in based on their business type and associated risks. This dashboard also helps shape the content of marketing campaigns. “Salesforce has addressed many of the issues that prevented advisors from hitting their sales targets; they think it’s brilliant,” said Cowden.
As well as improving sales and customer service quality, AXA Business Insurance has also increased efficiency by eliminating time-consuming manual tasks. For example, managers can now check performance against service level agreements through real-time reports. “We used to spend half a day each week filling out spreadsheets; it’s now all automatically reported in Salesforce,” said Cowden.
Processing no claims discounts for van insurance has also been massively simplified, freeing up four hours a day. Van insurance is one of AXA Business Insurance’s core offerings along with public liability, professional indemnity, and shop cover.
“With Salesforce, we can ensure we have the right conversation with the right customer at the right time,” said Sansom. “It helps us create more personalized journeys whether it involves sales, service, or marketing.”
This personalized approach is reflected in the company’s gold standard rating of 4.8 out of 5 on Feefo, an online review platform. “Customer feedback and referrals will be fundamental for growing our direct business. With Salesforce, we can help customers get the insurance they need when they need it,” said Sansom.
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",Other,AXA Business Insurance
"Activision has been making the most loved and played games in the world for over 30 years. Pitfall!® took Atari 2600 owners on an adventure in the 80s. Guitar Hero® rocked consoles in the 2000s. Skylanders™ melds the physical and on-screen worlds for a new generation of enthusiasts. How do the teams at Activision keep delighting gamers while pushing the technological envelope game after game and decade after decade? They listen to their customers.
Activision pulled off the most successful launch in entertainment history with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3®. Bigger than any other game, movie, or album before it, Modern Warfare 3 eclipsed $400 million in sales across North America and the U.K. in the first 24 hours it was on sale. Sales went on to hit $1 billion in just 16 days, setting another record. Modern Warfare 3 was a hit because Activision knows gamers. Activision loves making games and it loves talking to gamers about making gaming better. The company also knows that when something goes awry, gamers want customer service that flows organically into the stream of their online lives. So in the wake of the success of Modern Warfare 3, Activision worked with Salesforce to create a new way of listening to its customers. “It’s all about being personal and interacting with people the way they want to be interacted with,” said Robert Schmid, CIO. “I personally don’t like calling somewhere. I just hate hanging on the phone.” The customers who play Activision’s games don’t much like waiting on the phone, either, so Activision deployed Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio to bring customer service online. Using Marketing Cloud, the team can easily track and monitor all relevant tweets and conversations on social media, with the goal of increasing player engagement. All interactions are uploaded to Service Cloud where social conversations are matched back to existing customers for follow-up. In the first year after integration, Activision saw some pretty big changes. Customer tweets about bugs in game play became relationship builders as well as service calls. Employees across departments now collaborate internally to find fixes to issues posted on social media — Activision calls this “swarming.” Replies on Twitter and Facebook not only resolve issues, they become content for use by social, service, and marketing teams. Conversations about related brands and industries of interest are tracked and routed to sales reps as new leads, automatically. Activision unlocked a new level of customer service – you can think of it as social customer care.
Before Marketing Cloud, 50% of customer service at Activision was self-serve. Customers now solve 85% of all problems on their own with the help of self-serve content. Of the remaining 15% of issues that lead to live conversations with agents, more than half are solved via social media. The combination of high-performing self-service and social customer service has helped Activision lower its total customer service-related operating expenses by 25% annually. And the deployment only took three months. “It’s an incredible change,” said Tim Rondeau, Senior Director of Customer Care. “We’re reducing costs and increasing satisfaction at the same time.” When a gamer levels up, that’s a good thing. Activision leveled up its customer service with Marketing Cloud. According to a May 2015 case study published by Nucleus Research, Activision’s integration of Social Studio yielded a 378% return on investment in just over a year. That translates to a cost-to-benefit ratio of 1-to-2.1. In terms of dollars, it’s an $800,000 average annual benefit, measuring only costs related to support interactions. The benefits of keeping customers coming back for more reach much further. Or as Rondeau puts it, “Salesforce is helping us build a better gaming experience.” Put in gaming terms: Achievement unlocked.



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",Technology,Activision
"Formed in December of 1999, Alutiiq provides professional services and technical solutions to the Federal government – everything from information technology and facility services to physical security and engineering. Alutiiq is a subsidiary of Afognak Native Corporation, an Alaska Native Corporation (ANC) that is wholly owned by its shareholders, who are descendants of the Indigenous people of Afognak Island.
“This means that Alutiiq is the source of funding for things like scholarships, traditional subsistence land services, wellness services, and more for the families we represent,” said Allen Hines, Chief Operating Officer, Strategic Operations at Alutiiq. “We keep a culture thriving and traditions intact, and we take great pride in that. Especially because we are in a rather untraditional scenario compared to other privately owned companies.”
Alutiiq plays in a market that is becoming increasingly dynamic as federal agencies are looking to become increasingly digital. Recent events, such as the passage of the Modernizing Government Technology Act, have ushered in a perspective that sees IT as an investment in the mission instead of an investment in upkeep. Evident in headlines like Army eyes enterprise-as-a-service model and DHS looks to overhaul data centers, move to cloud, the ripple effect has inspired the larger industry.
Alutiiq applies this same philosophy to its customers. “We recognized the need to invest in new technologies. We recognized how a robust technical solution could simplify mission-critical processes, advance our capabilities, and position the company as an innovator when bidding in the market,” said Hines.
“We also recognized that in this search, security and stability of our data was still paramount. Server based storage was not optimal with respect to ensuring our data was readily available during, say, power outages or in situations where employees were without server access. To make sure there was no lost time or critical data was not lost, we set out to find a cloud-based solution.”
Hines and team deployed a bid and capture application on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Government Cloud. It is a CRM on Sales Cloud that stores information about a given contract in a single view to facilitate every discussion, decision, approval, and action. The resulting 360-degree view gives the team a clear way to track opportunities, develop winning proposals, and turn it all into successful contract bids – without compromising data security or Alutiiq’s solution criteria:
Simplification: The CRM makes it easy for the right employee to enter and access the right data at the right time. This empowers stakeholders to deliver the kind of timely and relevant communications that move a proposal forward, faster.
Capability enhancement: This model has lent itself to a more collaborative environment. “The depth and breadth of our communication is not limited to a few individuals who are entering data, but rather to a larger group of stakeholders corporate wide,” said Hines. “This helps us pull in the most knowledgeable subject matter experts and work as a team to bid on a contract.”
Differentiation: Integrated reports and dashboards enable Alutiiq employees to analyze data in real time, serve up relevant information to all levels of management, and make more actionable, data-driven decisions as a result. “Teams use these reports and dashboards to quickly assess the big picture surrounding a contract, helping us to better understand things like ‘what was the true strength that helped us win X contract that mirrors this opportunity, now?’ and ‘Do we have examples of us winning Y types of contracts,’ or ‘Should we not bid on this because it may not align to our competitive advantages?’ It helps us focus our efforts on the customer opportunities where we can be of the most help.”
“Alutiiq instills an ever-changing environment and has a genuine willingness to innovate through efficiencies; invest in new technologies; and employ motivated, high-caliber individuals. This strategy embodies those values, and brought the best of those qualities to our day-to-day, customer-related activities,” said Hines.
After making the decision to go live with Salesforce, full user deployment and data migration were complete in just two months. “We met this goal by making Salesforce the new ‘work space’ from day one so that each of our employees could start to play with it,” said Hines. “This gave everyone a voice to make suggestions, highlight helpful tools, and overall help us improve our setup using the context of real projects – not well-intentioned, academic exercises.” After just one year, Alutiiq has 100% user adoption, and has increased the number of user seats by 44% in the first six months with more user integration planned.
New levels of efficiency have attracted interest beyond just Hines’ division. “Multiple users and back-office groups are seeing the potential that comes from this CRM. They are asking how they might migrate their activities into the platform, and achieve the same level of unprecedented efficiency,” Hines continued.
As a result, Alutiiq is developing a technology roadmap to be used as a guide for integrating with the Salesforce Platform; for example, bringing data together from multiple systems into the same platform, enabling automated status updates pushed directly from the CRM, standardizing and automating internal and external communications about proposal/award status, or unifying process and practices across all Alutiiq subsidiaries.
“The key takeaway is to have a committed group of individuals with a common vision and end state. As this group gains a better vision of new possibilities and capabilities available on the cloud, there is a natural desire to determine how that platform can be used to support other areas of the organization to fulfill our mission,” said Hines.



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",Professional Services,Alutiiq
"Salesforce customer since 2006
When Amazon Web Services (AWS) was launched in 2006, it operated like a small technology startup within a large multinational company. Rather than build its own custom CRM software, AWS went with Salesforce. Since then, Salesforce has provided AWS with the flexibility and agility necessary to sustain rapid customer growth.
“We chose to go with Salesforce for its intelligence, its scale, and its ability to support our needs beyond just the basic CRM,” said Michael Eggers, Director of Finance. “At that time, we didn’t really know what direction the business would take, but we knew that if we implemented Salesforce, it would be able to help get us there. Salesforce was enterprise-ready.”
Blaze new trails to revenue growth with Sales Cloud.
Deliver personalized experiences with Service Cloud.
Drive action with intelligent marketing using Marketing Cloud.
AWS uses Salesforce to develop a specific “cloud journey” plan for a customer, and then aligns its sales and operations teams with the information, tools, and processes needed to execute each plan. From lead qualification to deal closure, Salesforce actively feeds AWS sales reps the next steps according to each customer’s plan, keeping the sales reps on track with each account.
“Salesforce helps our reps to effectively manage the relationship so they know what they've committed to on behalf of this customer, and create a trusted advisor relationship throughout the sales cycle,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Sales. “We can do queries on them to ensure that we are on track, both from the customer’s perspective and our own internal metrics.”
Cleaned and enriched customer data from multiple sources — including Data.com plus back-end usage data — gives AWS reps better and more accurate insights into each account. Such complete, consolidated views of its accounts enables sales team members to have smarter, more proactive conversations with their customers.
“Our customers are our obsession,” said Clayville. “Our goal is to help solve their problems, instead of just selling to them; we needed to find a way to scale that practice.” Integrated marketing campaigns quickly deliver leads to the right sales reps, while a propensity-to-buy model helps sales teams anticipate their customers’ upcoming needs. “The propensity model drives productivity in the reps, by enabling them to be proactive instead of reactive,” said Clayville. “It's a game changer.”
AWS also manages a wide variety of other processes with Salesforce, including deal approvals, contracts, and marketing budgeting. By including channel sales in its global territory planning, AWS gets a clear picture of how its partners are contributing to company growth around the world. “The fact that we can run all of these processes on one platform that is centered upon our customers has been vital for us,” said Eggers. “It makes it possible to keep our promise to stay customer-obsessed.”
In areas like account planning, AWS has integrated other tools with Salesforce to create a consistent, repeatable sales process that maintains quality control in customer relationships. “We’ve got a number of new sales members out there now,” said Clayville, “and the way you drive productivity is to quickly share best practices across the sales team. Salesforce helps us to do that.”
The seamless scalability of Salesforce has supported AWS’s unique operations over a decade of explosive growth, and partnering with Salesforce Success resources helped accelerate that journey.
“We are blazing a trail that nobody has gone down before,” said Clayville. “We now have millions of customers all around the world. What keeps a team together are tools like Salesforce that allow us all to recognize the obstacles ahead of us and help us to navigate those obstacles.”
Custom Apps for budget management
Communities for educational outreach



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",Technology,Salesforce
"American Express has invested over 160 years in building one of the world’s most admired brands. Customer safety, trust, and convenience have been core values since the company’s beginnings as an express postal service in 1850. This commitment to service has driven innovations from Travelers Cheques to the iconic credit cards bearing the words, “Member Since.” But today’s competitive landscape is unlike any before it, fueled by rapid innovation and rife with startups bent on disrupting the status quo. From Travelers Cheques to credit cards to Apple Pay, American Express has never been afraid to reinvent itself to serve customers, and now the company has partnered with Salesforce to do it again. Today, American Express is transforming service for the Digital Age, with Salesforce as a key partner. “American Express wants to take service into the 21st century by redefining what it means,” said Susan Sobbott, president of Global Corporate Payments. “The way we redefine it is by being so real time and so in the know, that we can actually anticipate what customers need.” For the Digital Age, that means using data to help customers solve problems and make key business decisions. “The power for us is the information we have, the trust we have with our customers, and our employees’ ability to deliver on that,” said Greg Keeley, EVP of Global Corporate Payments. “Salesforce enables us to connect these dots.”
“American Express is a company that has always been grounded in creating great customer experiences,” said Barbara Agoglia, Global Head of E2E Marketing for Corporate Payments. A century ago, that meant honoring letters of credit so Americans stranded in Europe at the beginning of World War I could fund their passage home. Today, it means ensuring customer security as technology redefines how we pay for everything from groceries to mortgages. “Whether you're using a card or Apple Pay or other new technologies that are on the horizon, we want to lead the world in how payments are executed in the business space,” Agoglia said. Consumers worldwide know the value of the American Express brand, and the Global Corporate Payments division brings that same level of service to corporate accounts. Processing the business world’s payments gives American Express a broad view into client spending patterns. Salesforce helps turn that data into insights those businesses need to make smarter decisions. “Our business is not just about payments; it’s about providing information for our clients so they can run their businesses,” said Keeley. “How do we make their lives easier?” One way is by providing rich experiences based on critical, real-time information. “I think consumer-driven technologies have really changed the game and set expectations,” Keeley said. For instance, business travelers use American Express products for managing expenses and travel details from the road. Keeley sees an opportunity to add more value for these customers. “For them, we’re thinking about: What is the travel experience that they're used to and expect? And how can we take that and leapfrog it and make it even better?” he said. American Express transformed the travel experience by pairing secure payments with easy-to-use business tools. And now it offers them on the one thing no road warrior leaves home without: the smartphone. “We're powering payments on the phone for two reasons,” Keeley said. “One, so the customer can choose to pay with plastic or on the device. Two, that same device is going to be where they can capture their itineraries, where they can capture their receipts, and send in their expense report.” When expenses can be filed from the road and wrangling paper receipts becomes a thing of the past, life is that much easier for the business traveler.
American Express knows its people are its greatest strength, and Salesforce helps them work smarter — and have more fun on the job. Company leaders see the technology as a unified whole, not a collection of pieces. “It’s a platform for our employees — sales, accounts development, servicing, marketing, and product people — to communicate, react in real time, and solve customer problems,” Keeley said. The partnership between American Express and Salesforce started with Sales Cloud in 2010. Now, the Customer 360 Platform connects thousands of employees across organizations, locations, and time zones. Chatter facilitates communication and excitement around solving customer pain points. Sales reps who traded their manila folders and desktop PCs for portable tablet computers running Salesforce now get out of the office and in front of clients more. These reps now have complete views of customers before they walk into meetings, and the Salesforce Mobile App also connects to Chatter for real-time collaboration among colleagues. The success American Express has had with Salesforce Customer 360 is just one example of the company’s transformation for the Digital Age. From a sales team locked into Chatter to smartphone apps that make business travel easier, American Express is leveraging real-time connectivity to take service into the future. Its members wouldn’t expect anything less.



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",Financial Services,American Express
"Amtrak serves over 85,000 passengers a day from 500 stations spread across 46 states, Washington, D.C., and three Canadian provinces. Popular routes, such as commuter trains along the Northeast Corridor, support as many as 2,100 passenger trains and 60 freight trains daily. Vacation-oriented routes, like those that run from Portland, Oregon, to Glacier National Park in northern Montana, host long-distance trips that span anywhere from 12 hours to the better part of a week. Amtrak is the country’s only national passenger rail provider.
Our team here at Salesforce had the chance to sit down with several members of Amtrak’s leadership team and hear how their enterprise-wide transformation effort moves America faster with a digital, modern mission.  “Amtrak is the country’s passenger railroad,” said Morrell Savoy, VP of Long Distance Operations. “Whether it’s a daily commuter train or scenic vacation travel, it represents the history of the country. As you meet more customers, you understand what you mean to their experience; you understand that we are a part of their experience.” There’s a sense of adventure that is unique to the Amtrak travel experience.
Born out of 1970’s Rail Passenger Service Act, Amtrak has a long-standing presence in the transportation industry. This gives the organization deep, detailed insights into trends impacting transportation, including those generated by today’s connected customer.
As mobile-ready business models have become the standard, people have come to expect personalized service when they engage with any organization. They assume systems and processes will move forward based on customer-centric data and insights, even in an organization the size of Amtrak. Amtrak recognized this as an opportunity; the organization embarked on an enterprise-wide transformation focused on the customer experience — an effort that included everything from window-clad observation cars to a digital-technology infrastructure.
Learn more about how Amtrak is bringing a modern, digital, connected workforce strategy to life in this self-guided tour of the Productivity Workspace — the environment that houses apps like TOPS.
“There are key pillars to the Amtrak mission,” said Sovan Shatpathy, Amtrak CTO, “(1) safety and security, (2) customer centricity — that is, a focus on customer needs, and (3) operational and financial excellence. Everything we do is grounded in those three pillars.”
“The primary challenge in front of me was ‘how do we take this railroad company, which moves close to 32 million people every year, and standardize things? How do we move it to a technology world that allows for our customers, partners, and employees to be happy and productive?’” Shatpathy continued. Referencing the famous Leonardo da Vinci quote, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” Shatpathy and his team focused on simple, intuitive, and scalable technology options, paired with an outcome-oriented mindset, to drive three objectives:
  Objective 1: Business process simplification and consolidation.                        
Amtrak had inherited a number of rail systems and management applications, which had proliferated as the organization grew. As the organization moved from mainframe to client server to cloud service providers, executives knew they needed to simplify the technology model. “We analyzed the entire application ecosystem and identified ways to potentially aggregate apps into logical bubbles, consolidating duplicative business processes along the way. These apps are in a wide variety of lines of business such as mechanical, engineering, safety, operations among others. Based on characteristics like time to market, ease of adoption, optimizing total cost of ownership, we came up with a phased approach which detailed out what apps could go as a part of the initial wave, what’s goes in next wave and so on..” The IT team rationalized each and every app against a distinguishable set of success criteria on a few select, strategic platforms, including Salesforce.
Objective 2: Experience enhancement and optimized total cost of ownership.
Following the consolidation effort, Shatpathy and his team established a competency center, a shared service technology group that focuses on standardizing the skills, processes, and infrastructure Amtrak needed to move from point solutions to an integrated, core platform strategy. The competency center serves as a strategic foundation that scales Amtrak IT, giving the organization the ability to support requests for new tools or services from internal customers — line-of-business teams representing various aspects of the passenger experience — in a timelier manner. “We’re not defining technology needs as much as we’re defining business needs, and then using tech to solve those problems,” said Shatpathy. “Fast and agile are key, as it’s all about business agility and time to market.”
Objective 3: Enable pervasive mobility, demonstrated by apps like TOPS.
Amtrak’s competency center empowered the company to support various business needs, fast. One such request came from the Chicago Union Station team where employees, 70% of which are entirely mobile, coordinate the many services and safety checks required to turn over long-distance trains.
“When the California Zephyr arrives in Chicago, it's the end of the journey for the 1,100-plus passengers on board. But it's the beginning of the train-servicing process. We are a rolling cruise ship on land, so to speak,” said Savoy. The slightest delay in any train turnover logistics, from safety inspections to restocking the dining car, can have big ripple effects. Keeping the schedule moving across such a mobile environment “is an incredible responsibility” said Savoy, who started at Amtrak as a train conductor in the Washington, D.C., Union Station, and has seen every side of servicing a train.
Built on Salesforce, the TOPS (Train Operations) app tracks the train servicing. Supervisors can log when their team is done with a given service, alert their counterparts of any issues or delays, and pull reports that capture performance stats, common disruptions, and more. The TOPS app opened up communications and visibility across the entire train turnover process, making it easier to understand, quantify, and replicate best practices that could otherwise get lost in an expansive workplace.
“We don’t have a tech-dominated workforce, so we needed an application that was simple enough yet innovative enough that it would be adopted without a ton of training,” Savoy continued. “At the end of the day, we’re a federally subsidized corporation, so we have to be good stewards of the taxpayer’s money. Becoming efficient is what we do, and we’re using technology to deliver this business need.”
  Amtrak institutionalized innovation management as a practice — as a service — on the cloud, using transformation objectives to define the modern mission.
The Amtrak team shares their perspective and experience on Our Digital Nation, Salesforce's podcast series exploring the intersection of government and technology.
Amtrak demonstrates five best practices in the organization’s work with the cloud:
1. Make the customer experience the #1 priority. Savoy, Shatpathy, and the rest of the Amtrak team turned to the customer experience to guide their decision-making process. Conversations started with questions like, “How do we enable a superior customer experience?” and ended with assessments like “We understand the customer holistically, giving us the context to better serve the customer base going forward.”
2. Develop an alliance between IT and line of business. By starting with the business requirements resulting from customer-centric priorities, and then using IT expertise to solve them, Sovan and his team saw “the actual value of cloud technology as it impacts our workforce and our customers. We have had a frontline view of how it applies,” helping Amtrak mitigate any future square peg, round hole conundrums.
3. Leverage subject-matter experts — via in-house and external partnerships. “For us, if it’s a choice between spending more time to optimize our workforce and develop actual business value using technology – as opposed to maintaining technology itself –the choice is clear. Cloud makes a great deal of sense for us.” By developing a repeatable set of core competencies, outlined by cloud subject matter experts, Shatpathy and his team were able to keep their focus on the mission instead of tasks more reflective of a technology company.
4. Find a platform that meets key success criteria. “How can we make the life of the conductor, the engineer, the people who are in the train cars, easier? How can we give them all the tools and technology they need, within a handheld device, and make them more productive while they go about the business of running our trains, serving our customers, and taking people from one place to another? At a high level, driving Customer 360 view creating loyal Amtrak customers for life along with enabling workforce productivity for happy and productive employees is what inspires me the most. This is a unique opportunity to drive them both,” Shatpathy continued.
5. Don’t shy away from a co-exist strategy. “We skipped reinventing some very old systems, and instead are building engagement layers on top of them. As a result, we are unlocking more value. This mix of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ technology platforms, enables us to support employees who are steeped in legacy system knowledge as well as newer hires who tend to be more familiar with modern approaches.”
Amtrak has worked to bring a forward-thinking approach to a mission immersed in safety, scale, and a quality customer experience. Amtrak’s investment in innovation is an investment in both its customers and its mission.
 



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",Travel Transportation & Hospitality,Amtrak
"“Everyone is used to the groan at the mention ‘data call’ because the government has so many statutory reporting requirements,” said Aimee Medonos, AnaVation Principal. “But we found a collaborative model for the day-to-day workforce where it makes it feel like the data ‘self-organizes’ for us.”
AnaVation (a name that combines “analytics” and “innovation”) is a Government contractor that provides technical services to Federal Government customers.  The team continuously supports a portfolio of current and potential customers with ongoing relationships, contracts, and capabilities. We use Salesforce to help manage internal collaboration  on the development and delivery of complex contracts and proposals while meeting the Government’s security compliance standards.  
In other words, “that easy-to-use, collaborative model still has to provide the level of security required to support the latest IT security trends. Like Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), which is becoming an increasingly prevalent criterion in order to qualify for DOD Government contracts, and we are expecting this to expand to the Federal Government at large,” Medonos continued. “The Salesforce Government Cloud Plus Platform enables our compliance with CMMC, giving us a security foundation, so we can focus our team on helping our customers meet their missions.”
As cyber-attacks have become more frequent and more sophisticated, the U.S. Department of Defense released the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). This new framework requires contractors, like AnaVation, that house federal contract information and/or controlled unclassified information to verify their IT systems’ ability to meet advanced security standards and adapt to evolving cyber threats via a third-party assessment — an exercise that could easily put the typical data call to shame. 
The AnaVation team referenced the Salesforce Government Cloud Plus Security Whitepaper throughout their decision-making process. Learn more about the background, guidance, and best practices that made their work an example for the industry.
The AnaVation team demonstrates a number of best practices in their adoption of the cloud. 



“Both large aerospace and defense contractors and small specialized service companies are preparing to meet CMMC. Anything in your IT portfolio that falls short of the Government compliance standards, creates a risk that you will not be awarded the contract,” said Kevin Schlosser, AnaVation Information Systems Security Engineer. “The amount of work you have to do ahead of time is tremendous. Maintaining servers, validating over 1,500 controls, onboarding compliance-qualified personnel, documenting a disaster recovery plan, and more before you even get to the audit piece.” 
“And, the combination of those U.S. Government requirements overwhelms 95% of the commercial software providers currently available in the cloud.” said Medonos, “This makes it difficult to securely provide real-time collaboration across teams who expect a modern web-based experience, built in data visualization, and use of mobile devices on-the-go.” 
AnaVation needed a security-driven platform that not only met CMMC requirements but also enabled the team to share the right information with the right employee so that more time and energy was focused on capturing the voice of the customer instead of wrestling with IT infrastructure.
AnaVation launched a CRM on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Government Cloud Plus platform, built on the AWS GovCloud (US) infrastructure. It gives Medonos, Schlosser, and their teammates the kind of modern, digital tools government contractors need to win contracts and deliver innovative services, all within an environment designed for CMMC compliance. Salesforce is also a capability that AnaVation securely deploys to Government customers.  Phillip Stasko, Director of CRM Programs, is a user of AnaVation’s internal system and has a team of developers supporting Federal Government deployments of CRM capabilities:
When Stasko is working to win a contract, he can enter information — details, meeting notes, relevant documents, etc. — into a profile-like record in Sales Cloud. This gives him a 360-degree view of the customer and their mission, “making it easier to pursue multiple projects and multiple activities at the same time. It helps us coordinate input and responses at multiple stages along the way, ” said Stasko. 
Integrated reports and dashboards make it easy for Stasko and the rest of the AnaVation Leadership team to summarize real-time status, forecast results, spot patterns, and pinpoint catalysts driving the business. “We can also flip between parts of the organization. We can drill down or roll up insights with pictures, graphics, and models with little effort, and literally visualize the state of our business,” Stasko continued. 
Once the contract has been awarded, Stasko can continue to update the profile for his customer with the latest information, as well as tag subject matter experts on specific questions, review history from a previous contract, flag important updates, push notifications to stakeholders, and more. This brings the whole of AnaVation’s expertise into a scalable, actionable view for directors like Stasko. 
It also makes much-needed compliance verification more accessible. “For instance, when the SolarWinds scare happened, it was so easy to provide the necessary information to the government. We just had to go to the Salesforce website, download the information packet, and send it over to the client. I received an email request around 9:00 a.m. the morning that hit, and I think I had the answer by 9:10,” said Stasko. 
Shield was layered on, enabling AnaVation to provide an additional layer of security. Configurations (instead of customizations) enable new applications to be launched in a quick timeframe, “with the same high confidence in the security posture of the product. That’s a win for me,” said Schlosser. “And I was introduced to the product cold. I had seen Salesforce, but never played with it. So I read the whitepaper, went through the user interface section, and within two weeks I was comfortable enough to say ‘okay, I can configure this and test it in a sandbox environment.’"" 
AnaVation’s CRM went live in just four weeks, and the leadership team uses it daily to coordinate internal and external customer engagement. Additionally, the team’s preparation “allowed for a seamless transition to working remote with the onset of COVID-19,” said Schlosser; AnaVation was able to maintain customer engagement metrics throughout course of the pandemic:
More than 100 Government Acquisition Industry Days
More than 50 RFIs and white papers
Real time recording and posting of customer calls, notes, and related files within the CRM
It also gives the team a foundation for the future as the company grows to support more contracts, which often means operating in more classified environments. 
Shortly after AnaVation pushed its CRM live, Salesforce announced Hyperforce, which is built to deliver an even more powerful and scalable platform leveraging the agility of the public cloud. This means AnaVation will be enabled to:
Choose to store data in a particular location to help support its compliance with regulations specific to their company, industry and region
Take advantage of the elasticity of a public cloud environment, accessing compute capacity as required to be more flexible and efficient
Leverage Hyperforce’s security architecture, which limits users to the appropriate levels of access regarding customer data and thus helping to protect sensitive information from human error or misconfiguration. Encryption, at rest and in transit, comes standard
“Our secure internal rollout models the same strategy we recommend for our customers to take advantage of a modern commercial offering in environments that are typically restricted to using yesterday's technology,” said Medonos. “It gives us the ability to spend more time on the mission, and more time building and maintaining innovative tools for our client.”



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",Government,AnaVation
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"The most successful business leaders know that to make it in a competitive marketplace, everyone in a company needs to focus on customers. To offer exceptional experiences, employees need to have easy access to information. There’s simply no room in today’s world for siloed data or a lack of transparency, so at Asana, customer focus is part of the company’s DNA. Asana builds software that empowers teams to do great things together. It’s the best place for companies to track your work with their teams, so they can drive projects to completion and produce great results. Asana is easy enough for anyone to use, and powerful enough for everything they are working on. Some of the best companies in the world — like Uber, Dropbox, and Pinterest — use it to run their companies, keep themselves organized, and do great things. When seasoned customer service professional Brian Boroff started leading the young startup’s customer support efforts, he knew that the team would need software to help manage customer service, so the company could maintain a customer focus as it grew. Still, he hesitated to make the investment. He was afraid of tying the team to traditional technologies that no one wanted to use, and that wouldn’t actually help them deliver on their goal of innovative and streamlined collaboration. Then he discovered Desk.com.
Asana chose Desk.com for customer support because the app makes it easy to communicate with customers through email, Web, Twitter, and Facebook — all in one place. The company quickly grew to love its ease of use and flexibility as well. “Any employee can get up and running on Desk.com in just a few minutes, so it’s really easy to expand the number of people interacting with customers,” said Boroff. “It helps our support team be more efficient, even during periods of extraordinary growth, and keeps everyone focused on customers.” And, with Desk.com, Asana’s team can quickly update workflow rules on the fly, so the company can easily respond during busy times or when a business process needs to be changed. Desk.com helps increase transparency and leverage customer insights around the company. The customer support team regularly reports on customer issues and shares feedback at company meetings, and works directly with the product management team to tweak existing features or add new ones. Boroff explained, “We use Desk.com to read and track every piece of customer feedback, which makes the support team instrumental in building a product road map that delivers what customers really want.” It’s easy for employees to share information so everyone at the company has a complete view of every customer and can deliver exceptional experiences — every time.



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",Technology,Asana
"Every Aston Martin car is unique. And now the luxury brand wants to bring that same level of quality and care to every customer relationship too. Thanks to Salesforce, Aston Martin can get closer to both its dealers and customers and unlock new insights to steer the company toward greater success.
In its 105-year history, Aston Martin has only made 80,000 cars. It would take a mass manufacturer less than a week to create the same number. “We don’t produce cars with robots; we produce them with human beings, craft, and skill,” said Dr. Andy Palmer, President and CEO.
In March 2016, the company unveiled the DB11, which brings together everything that Aston Martin stands for — exceptional design, excellent performance, and timeless luxury. The DB11 is the first product to be launched under Aston Martin’s Second Century plan, a six-year roadmap to create a highly valued global luxury brand.
“We no longer base decisions on our opinions; we base them on what our customers and business data tells us,” said Palmer. “With Salesforce, we can discover new insights into customer behavior and our brand that will accelerate growth.”
To unlock these insights, Aston Martin first needed to bring all its customer and sales data together — not just from its own business but also from across its global dealership network. The iconic British brand collaborates with more than 150 dealers in 40-plus countries to sell and service its luxury sports cars.
“We had various systems, surveys, and datasets, but they weren’t connected, so there was no single view of a customer,” said Dan Balmer, Director of Global Marketing. “People had to ask for information, and it could take days or weeks to get it.”
The information gap between Aston Martin and its 150 dealers meant there was no end-to-end view of the sales cycle. “We didn’t know if a new lead went on to become a new customer or not,” added Balmer.
In June 2015, all this changed with the deployment of Sales Cloud. “It took a matter of weeks to go from an ageing customer database that only 10 people could access to a collaborative solution that can grow with us,” said Balmer.
To help accelerate the implementation and adoption of Sales Cloud, Aston Martin’s IT team and administrators used Trailhead, which provides guided learning around the key features of Salesforce using interactive, online tutorials. “They fired through their trails; it was fantastic,” said Balmer.
More than 150 Aston Martin employees and 500 dealership staff now use Sales Cloud to share and track information about opportunities, leads, and customers. “We can all see the same thing; nothing is locked in someone’s inbox or head any more,” said Balmer. “We can stop sales falling out of the funnel.”
Aston Martin doesn’t just want to know about converted leads, it wants to know about lost leads too. “We want to be able to connect with individuals to find out why they decided not to purchase from us. This will help us make our products more relevant to more people,” explained Balmer. “Our customers like the fact that every car has its own story.”
Thanks to Aston Martin’s unique personalization service, Q, customers often play a role in writing these stories. From customized colors and trims to made-to-order features and accessories, the Q team fulfills hundreds of requests every year. And with Sales Cloud, it can now fulfill them faster.
By introducing a case management-based workflow, the Q team can progress and prioritize customer requests more effectively. As Laura Bowmer, Senior Manager of Engagement Marketing, explained, “Dealers can log and track requests centrally instead of relying on email. This ultimately means a faster and better outcome for the customer.”
With a central record not just for its personalization services but also customer sales, Aston Martin now has global visibility of its business. “We’ve replaced fragmented systems with integrated dashboards. With Sales Cloud, we can ask — and answer — important questions about the business,” said Balmer.
Thanks to the Salesforce mobile app, these dashboards along with customer records can be accessed by staff while they are on the road. “The regional teams supporting the dealership network spend a huge amount of time traveling,” explained Bowmer. “With the Salesforce mobile app, they have the data they need in the palm of their hands.”
Information sharing has also been improved through the use of Chatter. As Bowmer said, “Chatter makes it easier for our teams to communicate with dealers.”
Introducing new ways of working is just the tip of the iceberg for Aston Martin. The company also wants to embrace new ways of connecting with its customers. “Our customers expect a personal experience that singles them out as individuals,” said Bowmer. “With Marketing Cloud, we’ll be able to create dynamic and unique content for both customers and prospects.”
For example, when a warranty expires, Aston Martin will be able to use this as an opportunity to re-engage with customers. It is already using the Social Studio module within Marketing Cloud to listen and analyze conversations about its cars, services, and brand. “With Salesforce, we have the insights we need to drive greater revenue generation and deliver richer customer experience,” said Balmer.
In the future, Aston Martin plans to use Sales Cloud to capture customers’ “passion points,” such as fine wine or philanthropy, to help personalize existing relationships even further. It also wants to introduce a new customer community where people can update their own passion points, create a virtual garage for their cars, and engage with the company.
“Our customers already have an emotional connection with us, and Salesforce will help make those connections even stronger,” said Palmer. “The more satisfied a customer, the more likely they are to recommend us and that is more powerful than any ad.”



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",Automotive,Aston Martin
"Atlantic Diving Supply’s founder Big Mike--an avid diver in the Norfolk, VA area - has a belief that every individual should go diving at least once so that they might see the world looks like from underneath the water. While running a local dive shop that offers training and equipment rentals in Virginia Beach, some of his dive instructors (who happened to be Navy SEALs and military working divers) commented that the students had better equipment than they did when serving as members of the armed forces. Big Mike knew this was an opportunity to serve the community that serves the nation— working with his son, Luke Hillier, they were able to bring together their diving knowledge and applied it to the needs outlined by his Navy SEAL dive instructors to develop equipment solutions for use by the Department of Defense. That’s when ADS was born.
Today, ADS is a top 50 Federal Government Contractor. The company offers custom kits and mission-ready solutions that fit the unique needs of the Department of Defense, field medics, aircraft maintenance crews, State and Local law enforcement and firefighting agencies, and (of course) dive search and rescue teams.
As ADS grew, the company’s leadership “recognized the need for taking information out of emails, hand-written notes, or back-office systems and moving it into one, centralized enterprise platform,” said John Scardino, Business Analyst and Salesforce Admin for ADS.
The team turned to the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Government Cloud to deploy a modern, digital platform capable of supporting the organization as their business grew and their competitive landscape changed, enabling them to maintain a strict focus on the customers at the heart of the mission.



ADS’ IT services team started with Sales Cloud, developing an enterprise-wide CRM that gave the right employee the right access to mission-critical data exactly when the needed it. “We're really using all parts to drive collaboration internally, and bring together one complete value prop to customers and suppliers,” said Scardino.
They configured the CRM to support the company’s many functional areas, including its warehouse division, finance teams, and marketing organization. “Data is only as good as what you put in. Over time, we learned how important that is, and thus we’re very proactive about it,” said Chris Philbrick, Vice President of Marketing at ADS. “For years now, our mission as a team is to be one that is data-driven. Salesforce has really helped us make decisions based on data.”
Next, they layered on Service Cloud, including features like Knowledge which extend an intelligent, client-centric view to the ADS Customer Loyalty team responsible for providing quality, post-sale services. Since then, the company’s cloud footprint has grown to include Event Monitoring, Identity Connect, Sandbox, and more.
While the ADS story is chalk full of unique attributes and fun color spots, what stands out the most is the company’s earnest, genuine, personal commitment to their customer’s mission. Over one third of ADS’ staff has either served as a member of the Armed Forces or held a federal, law enforcement, or first-responder role. They understand how critical targeted insights can be to the success of highly specialized deployments, and feel how urgently service can be needed by field medics, first responders, and warriors on the front line. As a result, each and every action taken by each and every employee is guided by the ADS motto, “Our Purpose. Your Mission.”
“ADS believes we can provide the most value to our service men and women when we leverage the collective efforts of our whole organization. Moving everything to one open platform has allowed us to do that more effectively than ever before,” said Scardino.



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",Professional Services,ADS
"When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Elizabeth Whelan, senior manager of Business Development at BAE Systems’ Electronic Systems sector and her team knew that “this is as much time as we will ever have. This will be very finite, and we need to make the most of it so that by the time people are back to traveling, they have what they need.”
Whelan and her team support the larger Business Development organization within Electronic Systems (ES), enabling and empowering managers with the tools, processes, and programs they need to meet their mission: researching design requirements and best practices; developing program management plans; and bringing large-scale manufacturing projects to life for defense and commercial contracts alike as they work to support the company’s missions: We Protect Those Who Protect Us ®, and, We Innovate for Those Who Move the WorldTM.
Think: electronic warfare technology and aircraft survivability systems, advanced space electronics, tactical and broadband data link communications, flight control systems, alternative energy vehicle propulsion and power management systems, and more. “Big, complex projects that require a lot of detailed input from a lot of smart people spread across Electronic Systems. At any point in time, there can be several people talking to our customers about numerous topics as we work cross-functionally more and more,” Whelan continued. “In fact, this level of collaboration has become so foundational that one day I was asked by leadership if we had a sector wide customer relationship management tool to keep everyone aligned since our customers see us as one BAE Systems.”
The answer was yes, but it had been customized considerably over its decade of use, making it difficult for anyone to see a complete, 360-degree view of the customer.
It is a classic example of the technical debt scenario; the concept that describes the opportunity cost that comes with patching or fixing a dated system over and over again as new needs arise, versus investing in something new and advanced, much like it might be more cost-effective to purchase a new car instead of pouring more money into repairing an old one that is limping along – that has the power to impede any organization.
Instead of allowing legacy IT to hinder them, however, Whelan and her team took action. They kicked off an internal audit of the existing CRM system and started flagging custom objects, duplications, and empty reports. “It was a monumental task to detangle everything. Once we’re past the COVID-19 hurdles, and our teams are back on the road, we would not be able to repeat this effort. We needed a forward-looking solution.”
Conducting an internal audit is just one of many of the best practices Whelan and her team exhibited in their work. Get the rest here.
Whelan and her team re-platformed the applications and objects that survived their audit on the sector’s redesigned CRM system, built on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Government Cloud Plus. It gives the organization a single, secure system of record that brings the power of the ES engine to every contract. Here’s how it works:
Advanced customer service: Information about a given customer is stored in a profile-like record in Sales Cloud. Teams can use this to browse historical information, update various fields with notes from the latest meetings, tag subject matter experts on specific questions, and more. If one of those subject matter experts continues to stay involved in the account – let’s say it is one of the highly complex projects – they can update the record with the same ease as the owner, giving the broader team the right level of visibility to what might otherwise become offline or siloed conversations.  If a team or subject matter expert runs into a bigger picture question or challenge, they can search the CRM for key words and find information on common topics from other accounts. This empowers each employee to apply the perspectives, learnings, and best practices at an industry level to their individual account. “It gives everyone a better understanding of the customer’s challenges,” said Whelan. “If we want to deliver the best capabilities to those who are risking their lives, then we need to thoroughly understand the background, context, what’s working and what’s not, because that’s how we can be most actionable and most relevant. This strategy enables us to do that.”
Platform-level services: Shield’s Event Monitoring was added, giving Electronic Systems an additional layer of security. “You just can’t replicate some of the intelligence that comes out of the box. Now, if a new feature comes out, we can extend those capabilities to our users automatically because everyone is in the same design,” said Whelan.  
Data-driven insights: Using the same out-of-the-box functionality, Sales Cloud’s integrated reports and dashboards give Whelan and her team “a full understanding of the health of our business because the information isn’t static, pulled together over the course of several weeks from offline spreadsheets. It’s immediate, dynamic data that is pulled into our reports in real-time with the pace of our business. And that’s what we use to make decisions. Not dated spreadsheets.” Most recently, Electronic Systems layered on Tableau CRM, which will give them the ability to create a wider variety of web-style, user-friendly reports and dashboards, allowing them to review what deals are in the pipeline, look for trends or patterns that might indicate how to best move that deal forward, pinpoint catalysts, and report back up to leadership accordingly.
“It can be very easy to think of CRM as just a pipeline system,” said Whelan. “But it’s truly a platform, which we are using to translate information from across our organization into value for the customer. This enables collaboration, insights, and knowledge sharing with a much wider team because we’re not limited to email chains anymore.”
In their audit, Whelan and her team replaced…
74 custom-built objects
3,000 reports
Tens of thousands of records
…with one, modern CRM platform. They also consolidated over 200 security controls (sharing permissions, role-based visibility, etc.), enabling Electronic Systems to move faster without compromising sensitive information. “If we came across a user experience error previously, it would take us six hours to figure out the resolution because there were so many layers to navigate.  With this new model, we can figure out what happened within just one minute,” said Whelan. “We’re continuing to focus on driving efficiency and insight too. Recently I pulled together a new report in under an hour, which will save a team member two to three weeks of effort every quarter.”
The team is continuing to monitor the number of cases related to the re-platforming, gathering feedback, and refining accordingly.
“It’s been a different kind of busy this past year, but we certainly made the most of it,” said Whelan. “This project has been a great example that, even on the days that you feel like a small cog working from a home office, you are a critical part of a big wheel that is enabling business, engineering, manufacturing, and operations to produce the best innovations possible and bring people home safely.”



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",Technology,BAE Systems
"Barclays is seeking to tap a massive digital market in banking, relying on an array of Salesforce products to help it “wow” the customer.
From apps and artificial intelligence to automation and APIs, the banking sector and customer experience are being transformed by technology. Thousands of fintech startups have entered the market over the last couple of years, and established banks, such as Barclays, need to join the disruptive ranks to remain competitive.
Barclays is no stranger to innovation: It unveiled the world’s first ATM in 1967. And it’s been pioneering the use of technology across its business and customer base ever since. It has even created a team of “Digital Eagles” to help empower colleagues, customers, and local communities. “We want to create opportunities for people to rise,” said Jes Staley, Barclays Group CEO. “With Salesforce, we can exploit technology to revolutionize how we understand and respond to people’s needs. It turbo-charges what Barclays is all about.”
Barclays moves, lends, invests, and protects money for millions of customers worldwide. Despite the growing use of technology across its business and the banking sector, Barclays continues to invest in its network of 1,000-plus branches and 120,000 employees. “We actually have more tellers now than 50 years ago,” said Staley. “Human empathy combined with technology is what transforms the customer experience.”
Thanks to this powerful combination, Barclays is connecting with its customers more than ever before. “We used to engage with customers around once every six weeks when they visited a branch; now we have about 11 million customers engaging with us digitally every day in the U.K. alone,” said Ruchir Rodrigues, Barclays Senior Managing Director for Digital Banking.
This equates to around 2.1 billion customer interactions a year, which represents a massive amount of data — and a massive opportunity. “With Salesforce, we can augment our transactional data with insights into customers’ future needs,” said Rodrigues. “It opens up new possibilities and enables us to have more relevant conversations that map to life events, such as buying a house or planning for retirement.”
Barclays uses Salesforce DMP and Marketing Cloud to unlock these insights from a range of sources, including customers’ social media posts, colleague conversations, and digital interactions with the brand. This goldmine of data will enable Barclays to undertake personalization on a massive scale — the bank has 24 million customers on its books in the U.K. alone.
“Building emotional connections and having personalized conversations with customers is where the magic happens,” said Lisa Blythin, Transformation Director for Barclays UK. “With Salesforce, we can wow our customers by understanding and meeting their individual needs — and do it at scale.”
Barclays’ personalization efforts encompass every customer touchpoint — from popup ads on third-party websites and campaign emails to mobile app notifications. “A bank is now something you can carry in your pocket,” said Rodrigues. “With Salesforce, we can enrich the mobile banking experience and offer incentives, such as our Blue Rewards, to encourage greater customer engagement.”
Barclays can also enrich the colleague experience. It has developed a new solution, founded on Financial Services Cloud, which provides relationship managers with timely and accurate information on premier customers using a mix of artificial intelligence, social monitoring, and propensity models.
It’s estimated the solution will help reduce the time needed to prepare for a customer meeting by approximately 80%. With around 1 million premier customers and 900 relationship managers in the U.K., that’s a big saving. “The solution will transform how relationship managers work,” said Blythin. “Instead of having to look in multiple systems for customer information, they will have a single Salesforce dashboard at their fingertips.”
To deliver a 360-degree view of its customers and achieve its vision for truly connected finance, Barclays needs to bring together both disparate applications and datasets. “We have nearly every type of system you would expect of a bank,” said Rodrigues. “With MuleSoft, we can create seamless integrations that support open banking. It stitches together data and customer experiences, making it easy for us to do business with our customers and partners.”
Barclays managers can also tap into new insights about market trends, customer behaviors, and team performance, which are accessed via dashboards.
Despite its scale and age — the bank was founded in 1690 — Barclays needs to stay nimble and innovative, especially as more digital disruptors enter the market. “With Salesforce, nothing is off limits,” said Blythin. “Innovation at Barclays is like a snowball: It’s growing and gaining momentum.”
With Trailhead, Barclays can ensure its colleagues understand — and realize — the full potential of Salesforce. “Trailhead is a fun way to engage with new technology,” explained Doina Popa, CIO for the Salesforce Practice at Barclays. “It helps stakeholders from across the business increase their knowledge and see the opportunities.”
The bank has already demonstrated its ability to innovate at speed: The solution for premier relationship managers was launched in a matter of months instead of years. The managers were heavily involved in the design and testing of the new solution, which will be extended to other areas of the business in the future. “Our premier relationship managers are blazing a trail for the rest of the organisation,” said Blythin.
With its commitment to truly connected finance, Barclays is also blazing a trail for the rest of the sector. It doesn’t just want to be a bank for its customers, it wants to be a companion for everyone on their financial journey. “We want to be there digitally for people whether they have an account with us or not,” explained Rodrigues. “We need to stay relevant to customers, corporates, and partners who are looking at the world through a different lens.”
With technology, regulation, and customer relationships all undergoing massive change — one thing remains constant in the banking sector: the need for trust. “Barclays has an enormous responsibility to society, its customers, and local communities; we want to deliver our products and services with transparency and integrity,” said Staley. “With Salesforce, we can stay at the forefront of the finance sector and technology innovation. It is one of the five key partners that we have around the world.”



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",Other,Barclays
"The Bay Area Rapid Transit, better known as BART, is the Bay Area’s electric-powered, rapid transit, public transportation system. BART works to provide safe, clean, reliable, and customer-friendly regional public transit service that “plays such an important role in not just keeping people mobile and the Bay Area accessible, but also the financial well-being of the Bay Area community,” said Alicia Trost, Chief Communications Officer at BART. “When things don’t work at BART, things don’t work in the Bay Area.”
Trost’s comments are no exaggeration. In an area known for its record-setting traffic, BART transports over 420,000 riders a day, removing over 28,000 cars from congested highways during rush hour, saving an estimated 200,000 gallons of gas, and reducing commute times significantly. A BART disruption, especially during commute hours, causes a ripple effect that impacts the entire region. “People need us,” said Trost.
“The Bay Area is expanding, and we’re expanding with it. We passed a major bond measure that is letting us rebuild the system. We’ve opened new stations. We’re introducing a new fleet of cars. We’re taking old sections of track out and replacing it with state-of-the-art equipment that will last double, if not triple, the life time,” said Trost, “but there was a disconnect. No one wanted to talk about that. They wanted to talk about what we’re doing to address the quality of life issues and the resulting safety concerns that have been pushed into our system as of late.”
In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency after finding that roughly 2.1 million Americans suffered from opioid use disorder, contributing to more than 17,000 deaths and costing the country an estimated $504 billion. During the same year the rate of homelessness rose slightly nationwide, with spikes in a handful of states including California. BART’s enclosed stations and easily accessible trains make the system an attractive location for people looking for shelter.
But again, BART is a transit agency primarily funded by fare revenue from the riders.  Its budget is not part of a city or county that also has services for those in need. BART is not structured to address the health and human services costs and complexities that are currently impacting the customer experience in a very real way. This is BART’s reality.
Hear more about the strategy and big picture impact on episodes 13 and 14 of Our Digital Nation
Walk through the details of BART’s social media strategy and see how it integrates with the system’s cloud deployment.
BART serves as a prime example for departments and agencies looking become more transparent and more responsive. 

Trost and team started asking themselves questions like “how do we address these concerns and still deliver our key messages? How can we enable everyone to engage in a way that’s scalable and coordinated while also honest and personalized? How do we bring the human element into our infrastructure, since it’s becoming an increasingly human-centric conversation…all in 280 characters?”  
The answer: the cloud.
Trost and team built a user-generated engagement platform using Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio. It enables traditional outreach and engagement capabilities, such as social monitoring or post scheduling. However, it was then deployed using a set of criteria that fosters a true customer-centric communications strategy.
Easy: Social Studio’s social alerts function notifies Trost and team anytime key influencers @mention or talk about BART. If the commenter has an exceptionally high number of followers, is an elected official, or works as a reporter, the platform flags the message accordingly. It does the same for popular topics. “We use this to scale our efforts – to cut through the clutter, and identify the questions that are likely going to matter to the most people,” said Trost.
Trusted: the platform’s analytical capabilities enable the team to package up comments in a quantifiable manner, and validate big picture ideas with granular, contextual proof points. “We also use it to determine if people still care about certain topics – I have the data to show ‘this many people are talking about parking, this many people are talking about cleanliness,’” said Trost. “Before, issues were only tracked if they were raised via email or by calling in. We now have access to so much more information.” BART can trust their decisions, and can justify decisions with the public, by turning more insights into more data.

Fast: when a topic is especially popular, Trost and team can pre-package images, videos, and copy that fully explains the question and store it in the cloud. This allows any employee to pull the materials they need and respond in a timely manner, and at the same time “use the public’s questions and comments to market our key messages. It’s more effective in my opinion, because these are really important questions and we have really good answers.”
Faster: “I can take a Tweet and turn it into a case on Service Cloud, which then triggers an action in our separate maintenance request system. I can hit one button,” explained Trost. “Whereas on our old platform, I would have to take a screenshot of the Tweet, type it up in an email, send it to a manager, hope that they weren’t on vacation…”
Innovative: time saved is refocused on the customer experience. Trost and team take the time to research individuals, and incorporate their findings into each and every response. “We had someone comment about how we were prioritizing system upgrades. It was clear from his recent activity that he was just coming back to work from paternity leave:
  “When you’re able to show someone that you’re truly listening, not just responding to a couple key words, but that you truly understand what they’re asking about, it’s extremely rewarding for that individual to know that we heard it and that we provided a real response,” said Trost. “And you need the right knowledge base to do it.”

BART’s ability to respond in a timely, personalized, transparent manner is rewarding for the mission as well. Engagement has increased; in 2015, BART had a total of 13,000 mentions across major social media platforms. By 2017, BART had 60,000 mentions. “And that’s just people tagging us. We know there are people talking about us without tagging us,” said Trost.
It also helped to build brand affinity. BART has personal conversations in real time with people they might not otherwise have access to—people like elected officials, reporters that surface in social alerts, and the general public. “We’ve actually had people tell us the reason why they voted yes on our last big bond measure was because of our transparency. They understood why this funding was important, and the impact it could have on the overall system,” said Trost.
BART is partnering with riders to quickly address unsanitary conditions by sending reports comments from social media to clean up teams, speeding up the response time. “We’ve basically set up a 311--a “see-click-fix system”-- without the extra cost of a new app or adding staff,” said Trost. These same connected communication efforts have helped BART justify the need for increased security measures. The Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded BART a $6.8 million grant in August 2018 to fund police patrols and upgraded security cameras. “The public is offering more praise for our workers, and local media is picking up stories on our efforts. We’re essentially shaping the narrative by engaging in real time.”   
“We’re humanizing government, we’re making it responsive, and—most importantly—we’re being transparent. And we’re doing it on the public’s time when they want it and where they are.”



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",Travel Transportation & Hospitality,BART
"A wedding toast. An intimate dinner. A relaxing late afternoon on the patio. A fine wine shared with family or friends can turn any occasion into a special memory — from life’s greatest events to its quietest moments. Bespoke Collection strives to capture that kind of personal magic through a curated selection of premium wine, membership, and art experiences that make the most of their three unique brands: Blackbird Vineyards, Ma(i)sonry Napa Valley, and Recuerdo Wines. “Bespoke, in essence, is about tailored scenarios,” says Paul Leary, President and Partner.
And just as the creation of a great wine connects many different elements — from varietal choice to the terroir where the grapes are grown — creating the right experiences for clients requires just the right connections with customers, vendors, and employees. That’s why Bespoke and Salesforce are a perfect pairing. With Marketing Cloud, Bespoke can focus on attracting the right clients, building deeply-involved relationships, fostering long-term business via loyalty programs and membership, and understanding behavior.
“Sales Cloud helps us know exactly who’s joining us at Ma(i)sonry Napa Valley each day, and whether to say ‘welcome’ or ‘welcome back.’ And if they’ve bought from us previously, we can see if it was online or in one of our retail stores.” Bespoke’s team of more than forty users can tap into the Salesforce Platform, giving them instant, fingertip access to all its features including each customer’s lifetime value. “The guest reservations feature lets us begin a client lifecycle,” Leary adds. “We see the people onsite with us at our retail location as well as our highest value clients.” Leary continues, “When someone makes a purchase with us, the next morning at ten o’clock, they get an automated, personalized email.” It is in essence a quick thank you for their patronage and an invitation to join the Bespoke community. To optimize their multiple retail locations, diverse selection of wine and art, and client engagement, Bespoke Collection uses the Salesforce mobile app to their advantage.
The epitome of this was a recent scenario where two visitors came to their gallery in St. Helena. “They perused the space, spoke with two gallery consultants, and decided to purchase several pieces of art,” adds Leary. During the process, one of the gallery consultants recommended that the couple visit their wine and design collective in Yountville — Ma(i)sonry Napa Valley. Upon leaving, the couple mentioned they would visit later that day. Immediately, the gallery consultant used the Salesforce mobile app to alert the Ma(i)sonry staff of the upcoming visit, along with the clients’ preferences and other pertinent details. “Thanks to the Salesforce mobile app, we were able to keep these clients in our sphere, help draw them in as ambassadors, and truly showcase our ability to fire on all cylinders,” says Leary.
Investment in social technology has provided an in-depth look into customers beyond the frequency of their visits, and monetary value. It lets Bespoke add more personal, one-to-one, interest-driven content to their local clients and prospects for more predictive and tailored experiences. And that’s a big differentiator in a crowded marketplace. “By placing emphasis on relationship-based sales — instead of transaction-based — we’re able to increase customer retention and satisfaction, referrals, and order value. This is not possible without Salesforce and social technologies,” says Leary.



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",Other,Bespoke Collection
"500+ employee
Salesforce customer since 2017
 
Italy has long been an international hub for fashion design from as far back as the Middle Ages. More recently, the opening of Boggi Milano in 1939 helped spur an Italian fashion renaissance around the mid-20th century. Since then the “Made in Italy” label has become synonymous with elegance and quality.
Over the last 79 years, Boggi has been creating contemporary men’s clothing held to the unwavering standard of excellence demanded by their discriminating clientele. This Milan-based fashion house operates over 140 stores in more than 31 countries around the world, creating contemporary, modern, and cosmopolitan men's fashion designs.
By taking care of every aspect of the process — from production to distribution — Boggi can offer its customers a product with an excellent quality to price ratio. In addition, anyone who enters a Boggi Milano store feels part of a special world, where style meets professionalism, and where customers can always count on a complete and personal service.
Late in 2017, we spent several days in Milan talking with company executives about their amazing retail space, while getting a bird’s eye view of Boggi operations in action. We documented the innovations in this not-to-be-missed series of videos.
With help from Service Cloud, Boggi Milano can provide customers a seamless experience from discovery to service, no matter if customers are in-store or online. Customers can choose a method of engagement knowing Boggi Milano can adapt to their changing preferences and needs.
Here, a customer shops online, transitions seamlessly to a personalized in-store experience, and ends by chatting with a service rep through chat.
No new implementation can reach its full potential if the organization is not aligned. Boggi brought together stakeholders from across the company, who reported directly to its board, to drive its new omni-channel initiatives to success.
The company also introduced the Boggi Academy, an intensive program that trains employees on how to deliver a world-class customer-first experience.
With the customer journey as the new focus of the brand, Boggi embarked on a complete replatform to Commerce Cloud.

This enabled the next stage in its vision: to bridge the physical and digital worlds with omni-channel services like click and collect, reserve in stores, and more.
It’s the holy grail of omni-channel retail: unifying the customer journey by extending digital into the store. Boggi store associates are trained to leverage in-store apps like Endless Aisle to drive sales.
The result? Almost 12% of Boggi’s digital sales are made via apps in the store. Productivity among associates and satisfaction among in-store shoppers has never been higher.
To provide a connected service experience, Boggi uses Service Cloud to create a single, centralized customer service team that serves both retail and ecommerce customers. This team also works closely with in-store associates to maintain a seamless experience, no matter if the customer is shopping—online or in-person.
What offers and promotions are customers responding to? What are their post-sale service needs? By leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud, Boggi has a more complete picture and understanding of its customers pre and post-sale.
With a more complete and unified view of customer activity across the entire journey, Boggi can deliver a superior experience at every step.



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",Retail,Boggi Milano
"“I will never forget how critical and dire the COVID-19 situation was back in January, February, March of 2020,” said Tina Vidal, Executive Vice President at CDR Maguire. “In those early days, one of our customers with the State of Florida needed a certain amount of body bags within 12 hours. We were able to find a supply of them. More than they needed, in fact. They ended up purchasing all of them anyway, and as they did they said to me ‘we’re never going to use all of these, but we're going to go ahead and stock up.' And two weeks later came back and asked me to double that order.”
CDR Maguire is a government contractor that got its start as an engineering firm and has now expanded its scope to include emergency management solutions, disaster health and medical services, consulting services, and more. The company manages over $2 billion in construction and over $10 billion in disaster recovery, making it one of the country’s leading enterprise resource planning experts — largely in fast-paced emergency response scenarios.
“A disaster, in general, is a project that happens without much time to plan. It's not like, say, building a bridge where a client puts out an RFP and you have years to plan for that. A hurricane just happens, an earthquake just happens, a wildfire just happens. And so, by nature, our team has to find a way to build proactive strategies into reactive patterns if we're going to be successful. The cloud helps us do that,” Vidal continued.
Like many emergency response teams, CDR Maguire found itself in all hands on deck mindset with the onset of COVID-19.  The company was contracted with multiple labs as well as departments and agencies across the State of Florida to build testing and processing services at a time when much was still unknown and supplies were scarce. This created some understandable challenges from a planning and logistics perspective. “When we run into this sort of complexity, we apply our #getitdone mantra. We start by breaking down the scenario and solving the first problem at hand, and that gets us moving in a certain direction. Then we solve the next problem, then the one after that...no complaining, no ‘I can’t.’ Everyone is onsite and there to help 24/7, and the more people you have working on it the faster it gets done,” said Vidal.
But COVID-19 has proven to be different from other disasters.
Adding more people wasn’t a viable option because Vidal couldn't risk putting big teams in war rooms together, or stand up the usual thousand-person call center. Furthermore, several employees who were essential staff onsite were in and out of quarantine after learning of potential exposures, making CDR Maguire's ability to react quickly to breaking news especially crucial. “If you didn't know you were positive and you were still manning the call center, you were infecting multiple other people. So, the ability to get information out to both our staff and the people they were helping — quickly, at scale — became really important,” said Vidal. “And whenever you have to do something at such a large scale, automation is key.”
Vidal and team launched an emergency enterprise resource planning (ERP) system on the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform for Government. It gives CDR Maguire a single platform for managing, automating, and coordinating the various business processes that come into play when responding to a crisis like COVID-19.
Patient portal:
Vidal and team started integrating processes from the multiple labs it was supporting into a single user interface on Experience Cloud. This meant that anytime a resident registered for a COVID-19 test at any given lab, their information was captured in a personalized profile within the same system of record, giving the state a holistic view of outbreak potential.
It also gave residents a consistent user experience regardless of which site they happened to visit for their test. “People can now visit one website, or call one phone number to get and/or print their results, which is faster and less stressful than the piecemeal approach we’ve seen elsewhere,” said Vidal.
Contact center:
Soon, CDR Maguire found that it was answering as many as 200,000 calls per day. The team added Service Cloud to deployment, giving the team the tools they needed to easily communicate with the volume of callers, quickly. “Integrated interactive voice response features, automated callbacks, SMS capabilities, email, and more enabled us to share test results with the patient as well as the state’s reporting system the second they came in from the labs,” Vidal continued. “There was just this huge volume of people looking for information so that they knew where to go for a test, if they could go to work, visit loved ones in the hospital, safely go home to their families at night, and so on.”
Platform-level services:
        Shield was layered on, enabling CDR Maguire to add an additional layer of security to its         platform.
Integrated reports and dashboards are also being leveraged, giving CDR Maguire an easy way to roll up current status, surface patterns, pinpoint catalysts, and make data-driven decisions on a daily basis.
Last but not least, it is mobile-ready, out-of-the-box. “Test sites open and close. We’ve seen popup test sites. Mobile testing clinics, similar to a Blood Moblie. So, we really needed the hardware component of this ERP system to be as handheld and as mobile as possible. We were able to do that on Salesforce - no custom coding required,” said Vidal.
Extended use case - vaccine management:
As COVID-19 vaccines started becoming a reality, Vidal and team added options for residents to schedule their vaccine appointments to the ERP, modeling the workflow after the testing design. Vaccine data is added to the same profile that holds any testing events, helping to ensure that the individual’s vaccine data is managed and tracked in one place.
CDR Maguire demonstrates several best practices in its adoption of the cloud, which serve as a helpful “to-do” list for other organizations who might need to manage, automate, and coordinate enterprise-level projects at scale.
Since going live, Vidal and team have been encouraged by the ERP’s results, knowing what these numbers mean in terms of public health, safety, and overall well-being.
On the quantitative side, rapid test results are available in about 15 minutes. A text is sent out automatically to those who opted in, and a call is scheduled from the call center within the next 20 to 25 minutes. Ie: patients are receiving rapid test results in under 30 minutes. Polymerase chain reaction tests (think: nasal swab), the team is reporting test results in 16 hours on average for those coming from local labs, and 24 hours on average for those coming from out-of-state labs. In either scenario, the process is the same: once lab results are available, they automatically feed into the ERP, triggering a text message notification, email and, and phone call scheduling. To date, the ERP has managed millions of COVID-19 tests and supports 2 million registered patients, and that number is only growing as vaccine eligibility continues to expand.
Capacity and general performance
CDR Maguire’s emergency ERP system supports 2 million registered profiles and counting
Millions of COVID-19 tests have been conducted
Rate of error reduced from 30% to less than 5%
Testing
COVID-19 rapid test results are shared within 30 minutes
PCR test results are shared between 16 and 24 hours
Vaccinations
Vaccine appointments are booked at an average rate of 500 appointments per second
Over 2 million vaccines have been administered
Average vaccinations per day = 51,000
Average check-in time = 4 minutes
Average time onsite = 26 minutes
With respect to vaccinations, the system has been booking appointments at an average rate of 500 appointments per second and has been used to facilitate the administration of over 2 million vaccinations at the time of publication at a rate of approximately 51,000 per day. Once the patient arrives on site for their vaccination, the average check-in time is 4 minutes, and the total appointment is averaging 26 minutes including observation.
On the qualitative side, many of the processes that are behind the aforementioned numbers have been largely automated. Consent forms have been incorporated into the registration fields in the Experience Cloud portal when the patient books their testing or vaccination appointment, eliminating the need for manual data entry onsite. Drivers licenses or QR codes are scanned at check-in, freeing up onsite staff from having to enter name, date of birth, etc. “This not only reduces the amount of time patients have to spend on-site, but also reduces the rate of error. At the beginning of the pandemic, I can't tell you how many errors I saw because of accent barriers, language barriers, hand-writing, tired eyes that had read too many spreadsheets by the end of our long days, and so on. It caused a multitude of issues, including patients not being able to get their results because their date of birth didn't match or their name was misspelled,” said Vidal. “Since implementing our emergency ERP system, we've seen the error rate drop from around 30% to less than 5%.”
Vidal and team are also able to pull a wider variety of reports on a more frequent (often daily) basis, giving everyone better insights into the effectiveness of response efforts; how many vaccines have been administered, how sites are performing comparatively speaking, what staffing adjustments might be needed in order to maintain traffic flow, what resources — like tents, traffic cones, PPE — might be needed at which site, progress by demographic, and more.
“In the emergency management world, we have a saying: you can do things accurately, you can do them fast, or you can do them cheap. You only get to pick one in the face of a disaster,” said Vidal. “But the cloud gave us a way to deliver on all three, creating a turnkey system that has helped us be so much more effective in our COVID-19 response.”



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",Government,CDR Maguire
"Close relationships with customers are essential to running a successful casino business these days. The competition is heating up, thanks to growing numbers of local outlets and aggressive marketing of loyalty programs to bring in visitors. Caesars Entertainment is drawing on its long history of excellent customer service to win the game by building closer relationships with VIP clients and offering industry-leading service, with help from Salesforce. Through its 75-year history, Caesars Entertainment transformed from a humble bingo parlor in Reno, Nevada to a diverse entertainment company with resorts and casinos on four continents. Today, the company is going social to generate even greater customer value and loyalty. Caesars Entertainment aligns employees to better serve its most important guests by maintaining complete customer profiles in Salesforce, including hotel reservations, event attendance, and guest preferences. All to help the company build stronger ties with these important customers. “Getting to know our best clients on a personal level lets us give them a highly customized experience at any of our resorts around the world,” says David Koloski, Vice President, VIP Innovation & Operations.
With 40+ resorts and 70,000 employees around the world, Caesars Entertainment needed a way for its staff to coordinate across geographies and functions to provide stellar service to those key clients. The company depends on an employee social network to keep everyone connected and make it easy to share information like Celine Dion’s schedule at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace or the summer concert series in Lake Tahoe. “We bring cross-functional teams together in a way that wasn’t possible before,” explains Koloski. “Chatter makes work more personal and fun — and it’s a great way to collaborate.”



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",Technology,Caesars Entertainment
"For more than 75 years, Canon has been known for pioneering innovative imaging products. One of the world's largest manufacturers of cameras, copiers, and printers, the company maintains its leadership position by continuously innovating new features and technologies. And as it seeks to compete in a new social, mobile world, Canon is using Salesforce to connect with customers and employees, and focus its business around them. ""The world is in the midst of a paradigm shift and just being new is not enough,"" explains Haruo Murase, Chairman. ""Unless we capture what our employees and customers are thinking, we won't be able to take Canon to the next stage. Salesforce offers a way for us to work in this new world."" The company has a large direct sales staff, but hasn't always had visibility into the team's activities. Customer information wasn't captured, and there was a lot of wasted effort. With Salesforce, Canon can capture customer activity, while avoiding overlap—and managers and peers can view complete customer information and get key insights to what's happening on the front lines. In addition to being able to find everything they need in one place, sales reps can provide updates on customer engagements to supervisors from the field—in real time. Canon continues to pay close attention to new product announcements and track how they are received by customers. ""With Salesforce we can track how much business new products generate, and manage these new opportunities,"" explains Murase. The company has close relationships with many leading professional photographers and uses Sales Cloud to fulfill their requests to try new equipment and capture their feedback.
Canon also uses a Chatter social network to connect and collaborate with employees across the company to ensure that everyone is aligned around customer needs. ""Employees can communicate in real time,"" adds Murase. ""Salesforce has been key to helping us share information effectively so we can do more to help customers.""



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",Technology,Canon
"Since 1865, Cargill has helped farmers grow more produce. When its partners are successful, Cargill is successful. Together, they are building a strong, sustainable future in food, agriculture, and nutrition. They do so by combining new technologies with more than 150 years of experience.

To advance food safety and sustainability, Cargill learns what its customers need and then develops products to match.
Despite its customer focus, Cargill was spending much of its time and resources on operations and manufacturing. Cargill wanted to put its customers first. Research from Accenture found that 83% of buyers say a personalized experience significantly impacts their loyalty to a brand. Cargill wanted to boost brand loyalty by providing the best possible customer experience.
Cargill wanted to offer its clients two things: access to product research and the option to buy online. Most shoppers research products online before purchasing. According to the “State of the Connected Customer” report, more than half of customers expect to find whatever they need from a company in three clicks or less.

The ultimate goal was to make it easy for customers to do business with Cargill. Cargill needed a cloud-based commerce platform that could connect to customers on as many channels as possible. Salesforce could help Cargill reach its goal.
Cargill already used Salesforce to manage its data, so when the company was looking for ways to improve how it interacts with customers, Salesforce B2B Commerce made sense.

The company uses B2B Commerce in a headless environment to bring together content management and commerce, and integrate existing systems.
With more than 150,000 employees serving regions over 70 countries, Cargill has a broad range of customers. Cargill created customer personas to reflect the diversity of the businesses it serves. For each persona, Cargill mapped the customer journey, built prototypes and personalized content. The company also went fully mobile. Now it can help its customers anywhere at any time.
With the help of Salesforce B2B Commerce, Cargill now has:
Greg Hocamp, Senior IT Manager for Cargill says, “One of the core tenants of our business is to put the customer first. Salesforce B2B Commerce lets us do that.”







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",Technology,Cargill
"Over 100 million people around the world use Citrix products. The company’s mission is to power a world where people, organizations, and things are securely connected and accessible. Its technology makes it easier for people to communicate and access information securely anytime, wherever they are, and from whatever device they’re using. Customer support is critical to this. That’s why Citrix puts customer service front and center as part of its engagement strategy , making sure its customers can always get help fast.
   
Citrix uses Service Cloud to help its support team work efficiently and provide prompt, highly personalized responses to customers, regardless of the channel of engagement. Phone and email have traditionally been the primary way to communicate with customers, however, as part of its objective to make it easier for customers to engage, the Citrix support team decided to roll out Live Agent for chat support.
As part of the implementation, Kevin Kovalcik, Senior Manager of Services Systems at Citrix, asked his Salesforce Success Manager to set up a Live Agent Accelerator for the Citrix service operations team. Kovalcik’s team is composed of experienced citizen developers who had already configured the application according to the Salesforce documentation; Kovalcik knew from his previous experience working with Accelerators that these specialists could provide insight into best practices for optimizing the Live Agent Accelerator.

Kovalcik knew that an Accelerator would help his team delve into the product more quickly and deeply, learn about the value it offers, and design processes and practices to implement the product to meet specific business challenges. Accelerator Specialists not only bring project and process expertise but also share how other customers have resolved challenges and have been successful in their implementations.  
 
Salesforce specialists helped the Citrix team design, launch, and run a pilot program for a subset of users. This Accelerator engagement helped top executives, as well as call center agents, quickly understand how Live Agent could help improve overall customer experience.
 
“Having that secret sauce of someone who’s an expert on that feature or function, and has seen the best of what it can do for your customers, is the real value of Accelerators,” said Kovalcik. “It was the best possible way to get agents more comfortable with new ways of connecting with our customers.”
After just a few months, hundreds of customers began using Live Agent to request help or support. This resulted in a 3% higher Net Promoter Score for Citrix in the month after launch, and a 48% decrease in time required to resolve customer inquiries compared to other channels.
 
The success of Live Agent helped Kovalcik’s team gain the confidence of company leaders by showing how Salesforce could improve Citrix’s customer experience. “It’s really been a transformative year in how we use Salesforce at Citrix,” said Kovalcik. “Participating in the Accelerator program was essential to our success.”



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",Technology,Citrix
"Denver is experiencing a period of unprecedented growth. The city welcomes 1,000 new citizens each month, making it the fastest-growing city in the United States. Its job market, affordability, and quality of life recently earned Denver the #2 spot on the 2017 U.S. News and News and World Report Best Places to Live.
But managing such growth in the digital era is no easy task. Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s top priorities include keeping the city of 680,000 safe and sustainable while providing new opportunities for the community’s next generation of residents.
The Mayor’s top priorities include a focus on maintaining affordable housing, increasing transportation options, and improving mobility. “The mayor would like to create a customer experience that makes people say ‘I can’t believe this is government,’” said Christine Binnicker, Deputy CIO for the City and County of Denver, Technology Services.
In this new digital era, service models that are timely, targeted, and smartphone-ready have become the new norm. As a result, citizens expect 24/7 self-service and comprehensive engagement options whether they’re customers, employees, residents, or community leaders. “Citizens were demanding that they interact with us just like they do with businesses they engage with,” Binnicker said.
Like many departments and agencies looking for ways to navigate this increasingly digital environment, Denver faced the convergence of high growth and changing customer preferences. The City was being asked to support this deluge of new residents with higher quality services, and Denver “wanted a system that created a 360-degree view of our residents. We wanted a system that allowed for transparency, that allowed for multichannel integration, that allowed for them to be able to see ticket status,” Binnicker. “We wanted to offload calls from our 911 because non-emergency calls were flooding the 911 call center. At a time when the population is growing, the ability to offload such calls is very important.”
The city’s IT provider, Denver Technology Services, decided to move to the cloud because “we knew that if we wanted to keep pace with our customers, we had to deliver what they needed and we had to think differently about how we were doing our work,” Binnicker said.
Prioritizing a platform that was secure, affordable, and able to integrate with third-party systems, the team kicked off several mission-critical initiatives:
They took case management digital.
Their digital case-management system has a clean, user-friendly interface that encouraged employees to use the application citywide. This helped the city shave 23 seconds off the average call time, reduce duplicate data entry, and save money. “In one agency, our Department of Public Works, we’ve saved more than $7,000 by moving just 4% of cases to digital in the first six months,” said Binnicker.
They opened up 311 services.
Nonemergency 311 services no longer has to touch every case as they did before. Keyword routing sends inquiries directly from citizens — including those submitted via their mobile website, Pocketgov — to the pertinent agencies to complete the work via the case-management system. This makes it easy for caseworkers to update progress on the go and engage more residents, and for both groups to engage in bidirectional conversation. The front-end experience is integrated with back-end mission execution.
They developed data-driven processes.
Services like modern case management, digital 311, and Pocketgov do more than make it easier for Denver to answer community questions – they allow the city to capture more information about their users. Binnicker and her team can see which categories the community is reporting on, monitor which alerts folks are signing up to receive, and more.
“This information helps us determine where we should be dedicating our resources, and what things we should be working on to make it easier for our residents to connect with their government,” Binnicker said.



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",Government,Denver
"""Colorado is a vibrant state with a population that values physical activity and wellness,” said Governor John Hickenlooper in response to the United Health Foundation's latest America's Health Rankings report, an annual study that evaluates public health state by state. Colorado ranked seventh this year, demonstrating the state's drive to become the healthiest state in the nation.
United Health Foundation determines its rankings by looking at how several factors — community behavior, overall environment, care practices, outcome data, and healthcare policies — all converge to impact public health. It's a holistic approach that mirrors not only the industry's current “total health” trends, but also the strategy behind Colorado's health and human services programs. “The health of individuals depends on all sectors working together to promote policies and activities that support health. From jobs that provide a living wage and health insurance, to zoning and land use planning that creates healthy neighborhoods and areas for recreation, health is everybody's business,” said Dr. Larry Wolk, Executive Director and Chief Medical Officer at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CO DPHE), in response to the same study. Wolk's beliefs set the tone for not only the department he serves, but also the many sister organizations, including Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing.
In 2012 with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its resulting healthcare reform, Colorado saw an increase in the number of its residents eligible for Medicaid, one of the many programs run by the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF). At the time of the ACA's passing, HCPF's 10 agents managed phone calls, emails, and inquiries about the Department's portfolio of services for its customers statewide — 800,000 of whom were eligible for Medicaid.
“Our mission is to improve healthcare access and outcomes for the people we serve while demonstrating sound stewardship of financial resources,” said Christine Comer, Client Services Division Director at Colorado HCPF. “This means that we work to make our members healthier while getting the most for every dollar that is spent.” Scaling to support more customers without sacrificing quality of service, all in the light of new legislation, was imperative to HCPF's success.
Comer and team took this as a call-to-action, and began translating their mission into four key initiatives that focused each and every scalability effort on customer-centered performance management:
Delivery systems innovation: Health First Colorado (Colorado's Medicaid Program) members can easily access and navigate needed and appropriate services.
Tools of transformation: The broader healthcare system is transformed by using levers in the Department’s control such as maximizing the use of value-based payment reform and emerging health technologies.
Partnerships to improve population health: The health of low-income and vulnerable Coloradans improves through a balance of health and social programs made possible by partnerships.
Operational excellence: The Department is a model for compliant, efficient, and effective business practices that are person- and family-centered.
At the same time, CO HCPF received funding from State Legislature to fund improvements to its contact center, which had been running on an Access database. After comparing its current capabilities to the four initiatives they had established, Comer and team decided that migrating to the cloud would give contact center agents the modern, digital tools they needed to increase service capacity.
CO HCPF launched a new customer contact center, built on Salesforce Service Cloud, in just three months. It enables agents to deliver better service faster, opens up new service channels, and gives the Department as a whole a single platform that connects Medicaid clients and applicants, service providers, community partners, local government, larger public health programs, and more.
Open, innovative platform: The platform integrates with HCPF's eligibility systems and interactive voice response system, with plans to integrate with its budget system. This gives agents access to more information that might be pertinent to the question at hand, turning time spent putting customers on hold while they dig through forms into time spent answering questions, resolving issues, and helping the next in line. Knowledge, a feature of HCPF's Service Cloud deployment, surfaces relevant articles, FAQs, and information based on frequency of use, key search terms, recommendations, and more, giving agents fast answers to common questions.
Trusted: Bringing all sources of data together does more than empower agents — it also breaks down data silos that can otherwise mask the context typically relevant to a holistic, value-based program model. HCPF's new contact center platform unlocks historical data housed in back-office systems, adding a richness to the case at hand. It allows agents, management, and executives to run reports on outcomes, helping staff spot catalysts, isolate best practices. and more. It provides a degree of transparency and reliability that is especially critical to the value-based programs prioritized in HCPF's four initiatives.
Christine Comer, along with several of her colleagues in other departments and agencies across the state, shared more information about the strategies, practices, and benefits of working in the cloud. 
Fast: Comer and team configured the platform to streamline processes by creating a number of custom workflow rules. Inquiries submitted via HCPF's website are automatically turned into tickets in the case management system. Those tickets, as well as ones created by agents answering phone calls and emails, are then routed and assigned according to their various fields and tags. Response time is tracked (or flagged) as teams work to resolve a case, with specific learnings or insights noted for future reference. The result: faster service and better outcomes using fewer resources.
HCPF's customer contact center made the team more agile, more scalable, and more efficient, maximizing its grant funding in a way that is of benefit to its members.
While the benefits for HCPF's customers were of course the priority, the impacts were felt on a broader level. “Now, agents can complete a process in seven seconds that used to take seven minutes,” said Comer. “We can measure every transaction, define how long it takes, and then use the technology to maximize efficiency.” Agents were given visibility into the impact their day-to-day has on the Department's mission, the wins, and really on the livelihood of the Colorado community.
In its migration to the cloud, CO HCPF demonstrates some key best practices that serve as an example for other departments and agencies looking for ways to modernize the tools that transform the mission.
Programs are easier to connect, right at the point of contact between customer and mission. “If citizens are a member of PEAK [an online application tool that allows citizens of Colorado the opportunity to apply for benefits and manage their case once approved] they can chat directly with an agent, which helps them get answers faster,” said Comer. “Chat is far more efficient than calling because agents can handle five chats at a time.” Call-handling time was cut in half, going from an average of 12.5 minutes to six minutes. This correlated with call abandonment rate, which dropped from 54% to 12%, further signaling that the tool was helping agents reach more customers in a timely manner. Tasks that once took hours were reduced to minutes, and tasks that once took minutes were reduced to seconds.
CO HCPF's investment in innovation is an investment in its mission.



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",Government,Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing
"130 employees
Salesforce customer since 2017
Finding a new place to live can be stressful, especially when you’re renting in an expensive city and need to find roommates. Apartment hunting too often feels like a cross between a second job and an endless string of blind dates. Fortunately for city dwellers across the nation, Common is here, and it's using Salesforce to make co-living easier.
Founded in 2015, Common is a residential brand that designs, operates, and enables apartments for shared living. Headquartered in New York City, Common currently operates across seven cities, with a portfolio of 40 properties expected to at least double by the end of 2020. “We make the experience of living with roommates as easy as possible,” Eric Rodriguez, VP of Operations, said. “Everyone who lives at a Common home goes through background and credit checks, and our homes are fully furnished apartments.” Common even manages your utilities and supplies shared goods like paper towels and toilet paper, so there’s less for you and your roommates to worry about.
Creating an easy co-living experience for its residents means the team at Common manages a sort of supply chain for living. From securing real estate partnerships to designing and furnishing individual units to matching prospective renters to the right home and roommates, Common does it all. That’d be challenging enough in one major market, but Common is growing. As they began expanding to serve more renters across more cities, the company’s various teams realized they needed a better way to work together.
Before adopting Salesforce in 2018, Common suffered from problems that are all too typical in growing businesses. For one, the sales team was getting bogged down by manual processes that worked well enough in the early days, but slowed considerably at scale.
“One of the things that was really hard for our sales team was that they would need to manually follow up with every single one of the people that was looking to live at our properties,” Rodriguez said. As Common scaled, that meant pursuing thousands upon thousands of new leads — a difficult task, to say the least. Sales Cloud lets Common automate parts of the follow-up and nurture process, freeing reps to focus on high value leads while entering other prospects into an automated buyer’s journey.
Learn how to find new customers, close deals faster, and keep customers happy with the world’s #1 CRM solution.
Another problem was that information was getting trapped in silos, creating issues when prospective customers converted to paying members. Combining Sales Cloud with Service Cloud let information flow so everyone inside Common has a complete 360-degree view of each customer. “The baton passes from the sales team to the member experience team, and they’re not starting from scratch. They know who the member is and they can cater to that person’s experience because of Salesforce,” Rodriguez said.
Salesforce helps Common capture information about every lead starting from when they first visit the company’s website. Building member profiles so early in the customer journey makes it all the easier to match them with the right homes, and provide the best ongoing member service after they’re settled. “We have all the information about what they were looking for in a place to live so that we can make their experience better once they move in,” Rodriguez said.
Heroku also plays a key role in keeping Common’s operations running smoothly. The cloud platform lets Common’s developers build, deploy, and scale new features without worrying about the technical infrastructure itself. For a small business with limited resources available at any given time, that’s a huge burden lifted. “We don’t have to manage infrastructure or worry about our service being up because we know Heroku will take care of it for us,” Adam Gotterer, Chief Technology Officer said. “That saves us money on DevOps folks, too.”
One Heroku add-on, Heroku Scheduler, plays a particularly important role in Common’s technology stack, driving automated scheduling of property tours across the country. “It’s the biggest integration that touches all parts of the business,” Gotterer said. The broader ability to extend Common’s product functionality through AppExchange is also proving key to the company’s drive to continually improve its member experience.
It’s no secret that customer service is a great differentiator for businesses nowadays. For Common, the customer experience starts when a prospective member first visits its website, and continues well beyond their signing a lease and moving into a new home. As the company grows to add new properties across more cities, continuing to deliver a great experience to all its members is key to continued success. “If you don’t provide a great customer experience, your customers will go somewhere else,” Rodriguez said.
Salesforce helps Common offer a great experience through all phases of its members’ journeys. Automated lead nurturing, shared 360-degree views of the customer, and the worry-free power of Heroku combine to give Common the platform it needs to support a growing community of members looking for a place to call home.



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",Other,Common
"To increase efficiencies, reduce costs and improve IT services, Douglas County, Neb., and the city of Omaha merged their technology departments in 2003, creating a single organization. Today, that consolidated organization — the Douglas-Omaha Technology Commission (DOTComm) — provides technical support and consulting services to more than 70 governmental entities spread across 120 locations. Approximately 5,000 government workers rely on DOTComm’s services every day.
“We maintain and support all IT applications used across the city and county, including about 500 COTS and legacy mainframe applications,” says Vijay Badal, director of Web Applications and DOTComm leader. “But the fact that a lot of those applications are based on legacy technologies prevents us from delivering more modern experiences to agencies and constituents.”
DOTComm is not the only organization facing such challenges. For example, 10 of the federal government’s legacy systems most in need of modernization cost about $337 million a year to operate and maintain, according to the Government Accountability Office.[1] Those funds could otherwise be spent on more innovative, modern services. Legacy systems are also often less secure than systems built on newer technologies. While new software is constantly being updated to protect against security breaches, older software solutions may no longer be supported and can stop receiving security updates, making them a target for cybercriminals.[2]
While consolidating IT has provided Douglas County and the city of Omaha with numerous benefits over the years, the number of legacy systems still present prevents the organization from accomplishing more.
“As we go forward, we need to think about how to modernize our technology so we can enable workers to be more efficient and provide citizens the same high levels of application performance, ease of use and 24/7 availability they receive from private sector digital services — without sacrificing safety or security,” says Badal. “Citizens don’t want to go to an office and get in line to pay taxes or get permits anymore. They want to do that from their phones while they’re sitting at home. We have to make that happen.”
Recently, Badal and team launched several cloud-based proofs-of-concept projects. The success of those projects provided a strong argument for migrating more DOTComm applications to the cloud. One such system, built on Salesforce Service Cloud, is a case management application for the Douglas County Department of Mental Health.
In Douglas County, individuals with mental illness are encouraged to obtain voluntary treatment. If that person doesn’t obtain voluntary treatment, relatives can petition the Board for involuntary custody and treatment.
“Those processes involve 50 to 100 different types of documents and a lot of internal communication between the parties involved — including the county attorney’s office, the sheriff’s office, hospital administrators and physicians,” says Badal.
The new Board of Mental Health application aggregates all that data, creating a one-stop shop where all stakeholders can see the status of a petition, read related documents, and view approvals and notifications. In addition, DOTComm created a workflow-driven patient intake system. Now, once the patient intake process is complete, patient data is automatically routed to all stakeholders securely.
“It makes the whole process seamless and efficient,” says Badal. “It enables better team collaboration, and all communication is tacked to the patient, providing a comprehensive patient history that personnel can access at any time.”
The Board of Mental Health’s modern platform gives DOTComm flexibility to adapt the user experience based on the latest customer demands, bringing a degree of future-proofing to the platform that would not be possible on a legacy system.
“We don’t have to rely on the telephone game from one email to the next,” says Badal. “We don’t have to worry about documents being saved in or shared from offline folders or local drives.”
The application has also helped the Board of Mental Health move faster and in a more secure manner.
“This type of modern IT strategy has helped us accomplish more,” says Badal. “We have a foundation that offers advanced levels of security, supports new applications and delivers a better employee experience — all while reducing costs and complexity.”
Douglas County and the city of Omaha still run legacy platforms, but DOTComm plans to gradually transition more platforms to the cloud.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done, but moving to cloud gives us an opportunity to find creative, innovative, secure ways to modernize on a small budget,” says Badal.









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",Technology,DOTComm
"Design Within Reach (DWR) makes authentic modern design accessible. The company’s offerings of iconic furniture designs — like those by Eames and Noguchi — are stylish and built to last a lifetime. By transforming its business with Salesforce, the company has made data and information just as accessible.
DWR’s first customers were individuals with an eye for mid-century modern styles. Today the company serves everyone — from purchasing agents outfitting major hotels to small interior designers to individual consumers saving for an Eames lounge and ottoman. The DWR contract sales division works primarily with large architectural or design firms. As the company’s business expanded from residential to commercial, it needed to make it easier for employees to work together to help customers.
According to Bethany Kemp, Senior Vice President of Operations, “There’s a lot more competition online than there was in the early days of our business, so it’s more important than ever that we build close connections with all of our customers. We need to customize every communication and interaction. And we’re offering more personalized services — like helping customers design their spaces — to build loyalty and differentiate ourselves from other furniture providers.”
DWR initially tapped Salesforce to track opportunities and assign leads. Custom web forms ensure that new customers are quickly routed to the right person for a quick response and faster close. “Salesforce helps us promote the luxury experience,” said John Edelman, CEO. “We now know how many times a customer’s been in, where they live, and what they bought before. Anything to increase the luxury experience is huge for us. The client demands it.”
Salesforce also helps DWR’s service center manage cases, and keeps detailed records of all interactions to enable account executives to answer questions and solve issues as quickly as possible. “We’re using Salesforce aggressively when people have an issue because the best way to make a friend is to solve a problem. And the best way to lose a friend is to have a problem twice,” said Edelman. Salesforce’s social collaboration platform, Chatter, helps everyone stay connected and collaborate across every level of the company to help customers.
DWR’s sales reps can use iPads to show presentations, look up customer information in Salesforce, input quotes, and place orders. With Salesforce, they can easily manage opportunities and leads, check order status, and find product information. And they can quickly get answers for product-related questions — like dimension details, available finishes, or availability of a backordered item.
Learn more about Bethany’s journey with Trailhead.

DWR’s team members not only use Salesforce technology to help them improve sales, but ideally, improve clienteling — the retail term for the client experience — because when that’s improved, the sales will come. “When the client walks in, you start to mark that experience,” said Edelman. “It’s that moment, when you know what their taste is, if they had an issue, what quote you sent — everything. That’s the difference maker.”
Edelman concluded, “With Salesforce, we’ll take clienteling to a new level and offer the kind of personalized service our customers want.”
Customers don’t just want personalized experiences in the store, they want them everywhere they interact with a brand. Since today’s consumer spends more time browsing, buying, and seeking service on digital channels, DWR leaders knew they had to extend their high-touch, luxury customer experience to other touchpoints. Today, DWR delivers a unified commerce experience across its design studios and digital commerce site, all powered by Salesforce products like Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, the Salesforce mobile app, and Chatter.



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",Retail,DWR
"33,000 employees
Salesforce customer since 2003
Since its founding in 1802 in Delaware, the DuPont company name has been synonymous with scientific know-how and world-changing discoveries. Following the company’s merger with Dow in 2017 and subsequent separation into three independent companies, a new DuPont has emerged -- one that can build on its heritage of scientific innovation to create solutions to help the world thrive today. As a “new” company with a rich past, DuPont faced a new challenge: how to continue its history of innovation while transforming into a more digitally driven, customer-centric company.
With Sales Cloud as its foundation, DuPont is now building its culture around data curiosity through Tableau CRM and Einstein Discovery. The company is a B2B provider of specialty products in markets that include electronics, transportation, building and construction, health and wellness, and food and worker safety.
As a 15-year Salesforce customer, DuPont had long used Sales Cloud to manage its sales, service, and HR data. But in shifting its focus to customer growth, portfolio agility, and asset utilization, DuPont sought an analytics solution that would work natively with Salesforce data, while incorporating external data sources.
“Eight years ago, ‘digital’ used to refer to the chief digital officer, who was a digital marketer,” said Andi Le, DuPont’s IT Director, Digital Innovation. “That’s changed. It’s now industry 4.0. It’s now Einstein. It’s analytics, it’s supply chain, it’s employee empowerment with chatbots and robotics process automation. The possibilities are endless when it comes to the digital era, and Salesforce is a huge part of that for us on the customer side.”
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With Tableau CRM, DuPont is enabling sales, service, and HR to achieve deeper analytical insights. As a result, sales can make better decisions to help customers, and service teams can provide better responses to customer needs. “The goal,” said Le, “is to allow business users to find insights without having to worry about what system the data is coming from.” Centralizing and analyzing DuPont’s data across various sources provides greater data consistency, improved companywide visibility, and a holistic view of the business.
Data derived from beyond IT functions can empower business users, so they are more self-sufficient and better able to run their businesses.
“The aha moment was that we just had to do this and we had to do it quick and we had to be really agile about it,” said Le. “We’re an engineering company. We like to analyze things. I challenged my team to get this out there quickly. Get use cases. The data won’t be perfect, but let’s just use it and do it.” In just one month, analytics was deployed to all DuPont business units.
Intelligent data can drive better conversations, so that DuPont team members can gain a deeper understanding of processes such as supply chain yield and quality. When such insights are pulled back into Sales Cloud, a clearer picture of the entire customer journey emerges. That knowledge, in turn, can make valuable contributions to enterprise resource planning (ERP).
“For digital transformation, data is the currency,” Le said. “Our supply chain data is and our customer data is hugely important to us. So we’re going to take this to the next level, really bring in supply chain data, integrate ERP information and customer information to not only know what our customers want today, but predict what they will want in the future.”
Said Le, “Our role is to make our customers be the best they can be to their customers. We want them to make the best products they can with our materials. That’s what we’re going to be focusing on.”



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",Technology,DuPont
"Do the world’s best products come from one place? No, they generally come from complex supply chains that span the globe. So if you’re a supplier of parts that go into those products, you too have to span the globe.
Dynacast manufactures precision engineered metal components for leading brands like Gillette in virtually any industry — consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare — where quality, precision, and global reach are critical.
“Every single person that I meet picks up something every single day of their life that has a Dynacast component inside of it,” said CEO Simon Newman, who noted that the company delivers over 5 billion components globally every year from 23 facilities in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. These impressive numbers don’t tell the whole story of how a company from Charlotte, North Carolina, became a key partner to global manufacturers.
After its expansion through mergers and acquisitions, Dynacast had 23 separate sales teams around the world using different systems in ways that caused issues with forecasting, permissions, and keeping everyone — from a salesperson in China, to a manager in Germany, to the CEO in America — on the same page with the same data. What the company realized was that physical expansion alone wasn’t enough. To better connect with customers, it had to expand the ways it shared data, too.
Dynacast had been an early adopter of CRM, and global expansion made the need to move on from its legacy system clear. But what finally drove Dynacast to switch was dashboarding — or a lack thereof.
In their pipeline reviews, executives couldn’t see the information they needed to anticipate new equipment, plant expansion, and other capital expenditures. Mobile was the other breaking point. Dynacast also needed a new CRM solution that worked with any device.
Dynacast had become a global manufacturing force without a globalized way to share sales data and the reports its executive leadership demanded. The company needed a solution that would fix immediate problems and enable dynamic growth. After looking at a number of top vendors, Dynacast chose Sales Cloud. Now, everyone can look at the same data at the same time. “From a sales manager to a salesperson, an EVP to a VP, CEO to CSO — we’re all using exactly the same data,” said Chief Sales Officer Tom Kerscher.
This profound change has important consequences for customer relations. “Some of our customers have 200–300 manufacturing sites. We might supply them from 15 locations. They want us to feel like one company, not 15 different companies,” explained Kerscher, who noted that even small manufacturers will have design in one location and factories in another.
By sharing critical information on Sales Cloud, Dynacast creates the same feel for its customers everywhere around the world. But Dynacast is not stopping there. Because its sellers use Sales Cloud to easily capture customer data in the field on mobile devices, Dynacast models when to engage with the right people at the right time.
“When you map their buying process perfectly — and there’s data capture going on constantly — it makes your customer’s life much easier. It’s a much more friendly process to them,” said Kerscher.
The next goal, according to Kerscher, is to add Salesforce to its plants so that everyone who touches the customer — engineering, customer service, and quality assurance teams — is on the same platform. “When you can wrap your arms around the customer holistically,” said Kerscher, “you see more cool things with ROI and customer satisfaction improvements.”
Sales Cloud has helped increase customer acquisition, number of projects, and size of projects to the point where Dynacast expects to grow 7%–10% this year. Sales Cloud is also “powerful for future acquisitions,” said Kerscher. “Now instead of 24, 25, 26 sales teams, we’ll have one common sales platform going forward.”



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",Other,Dynacast
"Discover how to deliver seamless, unified shopping experiences that convert more customers.
See how leading brand Lacoste embraces digital innovation to connect with shoppers both online and in the store.
Discover how leading Italian brand Boggi Milano extends digital into the store for a truly unified shopping experience.
There is no question that stores are, and will continue to be, an integral part of the retail landscape. While digital commerce growth continues to far outpace overall retail growth, physical stores still account for more than 92% of total retail. To embrace this reality, leading brands are evolving their approach and empowering their associates with new technologies, effectively blurring the lines between the online and offline shopping experience.
ECCO is a 1.3 billion euro footwear and accessories company with 3,300 shops and shops-within-shops worldwide. After embarking on its initial ecommerce journey, ECCO decided to leverage technology to merge online and offline experiences, and put consumers at the center of all its engagements.

In early 2015, ECCO USA began a pilot test of Endless Aisle, a Salesforce B2C Commerce add-on that, among other things, helps prevent lost sales by allowing store associates to place orders against online inventory.

The driving force was not innovation for its own sake, but to leverage technology to better serve ECCO’s customers.
The company armed associates in its Burlington, Massachusetts, store with an iPad to help shoppers find and purchase merchandise either in store or online. To prepare associates — who can sometimes feel threatened by the ecommerce side of the business — ECCO trained its users to ensure they were comfortable using the app.
“You can’t just put a tablet in the store and expect it to be successful,” said Dana Schwartz, Director of Marketing and Ecommerce, ECCO USA. “There is a sea change in the role of the store associate and an opportunity to meet the consumer’s needs through Endless Aisle.”
The tablets serve as an extension of the associate, empowering them to offer customers greater product assortment, and to close sales on locally out-of-stock products they otherwise would have lost. In fact, ECCO found that a high percentage of digital transactions taking place in the store are because a customer’s correct size was not available on-hand.
“It’s about offering premium-ness,” said Schwartz. “We are a high-service company, and we don’t want to disappoint our customers.” In the past, she explained, transactions made at the point of sale were manual and time consuming. “Now, we can engage with the shopper anywhere in the store, and ship for free to provide a seamless and convenient shopping experience.”
ECCO was an early adopter of Endless Aisle and describes the implementation as “quite easy” with only a few customizations. After the initial pilot test, ECCO USA expanded Endless Aisle to six stores. Testing went so well that ECCO rolled it out to all 26 full-priced stores in the U.S.
One of ECCO’s successful customizations was a survey for associates to complete post-sale. Why did the customer engage with the associate in this manner? Was the store out of stock of the color or size? Was the customer traveling? Where did the store ship the merchandise?
From the surveys, ECCO gleaned valuable data and insight into its customers’ preferences and buying behaviors, and modified its merchandise accordingly store by store.
“It was a great result that we didn’t expect — an aha moment where we are now able to forecast better because we know more. I’m a big believer that merchandising is a point of differentiation. This data helps us understand what the customer wants and where they buy.”
Schwartz said ECCO sees tremendous promise in digitizing its stores, and that by year’s end it expects sales from in-store tablets to equal the sales of one physical store.
“We are still learning and on our journey toward becoming a consumer-first brand. We are not in the technology business. We are in the business of making and selling shoes, in an engaging and premium way through commerce.”






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",Retail,ECCO
"Each day, 250+ million people log into Facebook. More than half of these play games while on the site — creating characters, hunting for hidden objects, or competing in the World Series. The enormous popularity of social networking is just one of the trends — including the proliferation of games across a multitude of digital platforms, from consoles to mobile to social — that are fundamentally changing the gaming business. Publishers that want to successfully navigate this shift are adapting their businesses and changing the way they engage with customers. Electronic Arts (EA) is transforming its business to keep pace with innovations in gaming and engage more closely with customers throughout the lifecycle. According to Jeff Bradburn, Senior Director of Support Systems, “Building a great gaming experience is no longer enough. Publishers need to up their game and be totally connected with customers, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” EA — the juggernaut known for titles such as Battlefield 3™, The Sims™, and Madden NFL — has historically been a leader in selling packaged goods games at retail. Its primary customer touch points were around support issues. Today, with products like The Sims Social™ on Facebook, EA is responsible for the end-to-end customer experience: from payment to playing and support. As EA's business evolved, the company needed to provide a richer experience to customers, build stronger relationships, and capture feedback in real time to support iteration and rapid dev cycles.
Working with salesforce.com, EA’s Worldwide Customer Experience team created immersive, interactive websites to help customers quickly access up-to-the-minute status updates, engage with EA game advisors, and discuss hot topics with other members of the community. Most importantly, gamers can immerse themselves in the EA brand. With Salesforce, EA was able to grow its advisor staff from 400 to 1,600 in only 6 weeks. And, EA’s Worldwide Customer Experience websites were able to manage millions of hits per week during peak launch periods. “Salesforce helped us execute on our transformation at a faster pace than anyone thought would be possible,” says Bradburn. “The close relationships we’re building with customers are a real game changer.”



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",Technology,EA
"200 employees
Salesforce customer since 2014
For the team behind The Ellen DeGeneres Show, securing the right talent, brand content, and partnerships is crucial to audience engagement.
However, outdated manual processes that relied on email and spreadsheets to keep track of information meant that the members of Ellen’s brand content and partnerships team needed a new and more efficient way to store concepts digitally. With a recently expanded talent roster to keep track of, the team was also struggling to meet everyone’s requirements, from contracting to scheduling and script development.
For more than 17 years and 3,000 episodes, Ellen has been delighting daytime television audiences with its engaging mix of comedy, celebrity and musical guests, and human-interest stories. Boasting a large community of loyal fans, the show has won 63 Daytime Emmy Awards and The Ellen Show has won 21 People’s Choice Awards. Fans engage with the show via its website, ellentube.com, as well as social media channels, games, and apps.
In 2014, host Ellen DeGeneres partnered with Warner Bros. Entertainment via Ellen Digital Ventures, which expanded the television franchise into a robust digital business. Recognizing that the existing slow and inefficient manual processes required a revamp, the Ellen team turned to Salesforce for help. Together, they needed a platform that would support and allow the show to manage partnerships more effectively.
“Salesforce supports our business mission of focusing on incredible branded storytelling by helping to keep our business side organized,” said Stephanie Guerrieri, Vice President of Brand Content & Partnerships at The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “It helps us organize the team’s creative ideas, along with our clients, communications, and revenue.”
In the highly competitive entertainment world, it’s crucial to have a strong pipeline of creative ideas and campaigns that excite sponsors and corporate partners — not to mention audiences. Salesforce Platform allows the Ellen team to digitally store campaign materials such as mock-ups and visuals, ensuring that ideas are preserved for future use. It also means the team can refresh existing materials, rather than starting from scratch every time. That in turn helps teams and individuals become more productive. At the same time, the team is using a custom object that helps track proposals more efficiently, from the initial pitch for a piece of content, right through final approval.
“With Salesforce, we’re able to accelerate the business steps along the way to give our creative team the time required for them to deliver the best product for our clients,” said Guerrieri. “We no longer waste time trying to dig back into contracts and spreadsheets. Instead, with a click of a button, we can see a snapshot of our business.”
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Every day, Ellen receives requests for proposal (RFPs) from brands and creative agencies. In the past, these RFPs lived within the email inbox of the person assigned to manage an individual brand. Now, the team at Ellen has plans for the future to use Salesforce’s low-code Salesforce Platform to build a custom community for potential brand partners, to streamline the process.
When prospective brand partners access the community, they can find Ellen sales materials and submit an RFP. Once the RFP is submitted, the community will create a record in Salesforce that will allow partners to follow the pitch through its entire lifecycle. This will result in easier collaboration, as well as better tracking, communication, and results.
At the same time, Sales Cloud allows Ellen’s account executives to more effectively track pitches for brand content and partnerships in the market.
“With our brand content and partnerships team now on two different coasts, information sharing is more critical than ever in order to drive results,” said Stephanie Walters Kim, the show’s Director of Brand Content & Partnerships. “Previously, we had to call teammates individually to ask for a deal’s history, which took too much time. Now, we trust that everyone is capturing their pitch pipeline in Salesforce, so that at any given time, we know the exact status of any deal.”
As a growing digital business, Ellen Digital Ventures recently expanded its talent roster. New projects have included the launch of a digital program called Momsplaining with Kristen Bell, among others. While the team used to rely on spreadsheets to stay on top of things, they now use Salesforce Platform to track talent endorsements and brand approvals. As a result, the Ellen team has been able to streamline operations and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
“As our brand content and partnerships work evolves with more complexities and points of business, we are looking forward to layering in new business units — like experiential and e-commerce — and tech partners,” said Alana Calderone Polcsa, Senior Vice President of Brand Content & Partnerships at Warner Bros. Entertainment. “We know that the only way to scale is to add more connections, which will drive efficiencies and scale, and maximize momentum.”



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",Other,The Ellen DeGeneres Show
"“We don’t have an inventory of products, like credit cards, that we have to sell,” said Scott Brennan, Director of Sales at the FHLBank Atlanta. “We are strategic partners who find it really rewarding to build communities. Our work is tied to people’s livelihood.”
The Federal Home Loan Bank System (FHLBanks) is a cooperative structured enterprise that lends to commercial banks, credit unions, insurance companies, and various other financial institutions, helping ensure that they can serve as reliable sources of liquidity for communities nationwide.*
There are 11 FHLBank districts nationwide, including FHLBank Atlanta that covers Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Each FHLBank focuses on lending to institutions that build and strengthen the local community, yet each manages that mission independently.
“Because we are a cooperative, we’re owned by our customers. And in Atlanta, that mix includes everything from name brand commercial banks to a single-office credit union that supports a local church,” said Brennan. “We take our role as their trusted advisors very seriously; the guidance we give and the decisions we make will have long term implications not necessarily for the Bank, but more so for our members.”
This model creates a unique dynamic between FHLBank Atlanta and its members. Brennan and the rest of the FHLBank Atlanta team are solely focused on meeting members’ business and funding needs and on making smart investments that ultimately create more value for members.
However, Brennan and team have to compete against other entities if they are going to be successful in meeting the funding needs of the Bank's members. “Just because they own us doesn’t mean they have to work with us,” said Brennan. “As customers, our members are looking for the best option. And there are a lot of options for sourcing funding, so it’s really important that we understand who they are and what they need so that we can build lasting relationships.”  
And this mindset proved to be especially important coming out of the financial crisis in 2008.



“After the recession, we knew we wanted to intensify our focus on the customer as a way to rebuild trust in the financial services industry,” said Brennan. And at a time when smartphones were emerging as the next household staple, social media platforms were redefining what it meant to be connected to one another, and services were starting to be delivered at the speed of an app “data was the way to do that. [Members] expect as much information as possible throughout whatever service we are providing them, and so we had to demonstrate our subject matter expertise across multiple disciplines.”
The team started going down the path of business intelligence, capturing the kind of data they needed to better serve members. This effort included pulling together its own information—such as historical tranactions with a given member that happened to be stored in various systems across the Bank—along with more colorful information about the changing market, FDIC or regulatory data, information found on members' websites, news stories, and so on.
Next, the Bank had to determine how to best manage all this data, asking questions like what’s the best way to make any customer-facing employee aware of all details, at all times and what do we need to learn or leverage to make us faster, better, more efficient?
“We set out looking for the best CRM for FHLBank Atlanta, and it happened to sit on the cloud.”

Brennan and team partnered up with the Bank’s IT organization to build a relationship management platform on Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. It stores all information about a given member in a profile-like setting, addressing the Bank’s data management needs while also fostering collaboration among customer-facing employees and opening up mobile access – a mission-critical capability for teams like Brennan’s that spend an ample amount of time away from their desks.
Data management: the new CRM runs in parallel with the Bank’s legacy systems and maps to its data warehouse, giving Brennan and team a way to pull historical information into a single view. Marketing teams use this to gather insights about zeitgeists in the market, and fuel outreach efforts accordingly. Sales teams use this to establish not only their expertise with the customer at hand, but also their understanding of the market, strengthening the Bank’s relationship with its members. “If our reps are able to talk about what’s going on across our entire footprint, not just one community, it adds a whole lot to our credibility,” said Brennan. Together, customer facing teams demonstrate alignment, speaking with a stronger, more unified voice.
The line-of-business and IT organizations partnered up to build FHLBank Atlanta’s relationship management platform. This is one of many best practices demonstrated in the work.
Collaboration: “We meet frequently – we have sales meetings once a week with two different groups. And in those meetings, we go around the room and find out what’s happening in, say, Virginia that might translate to North Carolina. Those meetings were effective before, but not everyone was able to meet every time because they were on the road, and sometimes it’s hard to remember every conversation you’ve had with a member over the past week,” said Brennan. “Now, we’re continuing to have those meetings, but they’re based on data we’re inputting into the CRM real-time, so nothing is slipping through the cracks.”
Mobile access: “A few months ago, one of our sales reps was in Alabama for a few days for a customer meeting, which ended up getting cancelled. So, all of a sudden he found himself with a window of time and nothing to do with it. And he was out of the office, so wouldn’t have had access to pull the information he’d need to make a meaningful sales call,” said Brennan. “But with the new CRM in place, he was able to pull all the information he needed, contact the member, and set up a really productive sales call from his iPad on the fly. That never would have happened before. He may have been able to set up a handshake or update meeting, but not something that would have provided the kind of value he was able to provide.” 
Prior to the Bank’s move to the cloud, letters of credit used to take an average of six months to initiate, process, and issue. “That same process now takes only three to four weeks because it’s really clear who is owning each particular step in the process. It’s all captured in a tab in the record,” said Brennan. As a result, loans are confirmed faster, building starts sooner, and communities grow stronger, bringing to life the pride FHLBank Atlanta employees take in their mission.
Scott Brennan and the FHLBank Atlanta team join us to share more perspective, impacts, and takeaways this work has brought to its members, its community, and its mission. 
There were also noticeable benefits, internally speaking. All of the data the teams pull in preparation for a sales call—the aforementioned FDIC data, news stories, etc.—used to produce a stack of paper that was an inch thick. “The platform has cut all of that out, because it’s all pulled into our new CRM. Now, that prep doesn’t need to happen in office time – it can happen on a plane, at home, en route to a call,” freeing up more time and energy for the Bank to focus its efforts on the members and communities it serves, as opposed to the clerical work surrounding the mission.
“This all changed the conversation from being just about ‘how do we take member information to make sales and marketing better’ to ‘how do we take member information and make everything we do at the Bank better?’”



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",Other,FHLBank Atlanta
"1,000+ employees
During a recent drive to work in Southern California, Jeff Dailey felt a jolt on the side of his car. A piece of road debris had punched a huge hole in one of his doors.
An insurance claim of this kind previously would involve an insurance adjuster visiting him, recording the loss, and estimating the damage. It was a complex, time-consuming process that needed fixing, and Dailey was in a unique position to do something about it: He’s the CEO of Farmers Insurance.
“We’ve created a claims reporting platform using Salesforce technology with our customers top of mind,” Dailey explained. “The average time for Farmers to take a phone call to report a first notice of loss is approximately 12 minutes,” said Dailey. “With the Enterprise First Notice of Loss, or EFNOL platform, it can take as little as three minutes from start to finish.”
Accessible on the Farmers Mobile App or from a computer, EFNOL gives an agent assisting a customer or the customer alone the ability to report a loss and upload images so that a Farmers adjuster can be assigned to the customer’s loss, the customer can find a repair shop of his or her choice, get in a rental car, and complete the whole process quickly and seamlessly.
Embracing technology to deliver new products and services that today’s customers want — and now expect — isn’t new to Farmers.
Back in the 1950s, the Los Angeles-based organization bought one of the first available mainframe computer systems, and early adoption of remote data backup protected its operations from the ill effects of a destructive 1971 earthquake.
The organization’s openness to new ideas and innovation is driven by its commitment to constantly improve the customer experience from start to finish. And, that commitment begins with a greater understanding of customers’ needs. Farmers used insights gained from customers to redesign the website and upgrade its mobile app.
“In the last five years, there has been a dramatic acceleration of thinking about how the customer interacts with Farmers on multiple levels, and also the technology required to accomplish this goal,” said Mike Linton, Chief Marketing Officer. “When we invest in digital, we invest in customer service first, selling second, and marketing last, because that’s how consumers use it.”
Farmers has used Salesforce technology through the cross-discipline Salesforce Customer 360, which includes Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, CRM Analytics, and the Customer 360 Platform. The platform provides Farmers customers, employees, and agents with a single sign-on into Salesforce from 15 different entry points. It allows secure data and knowledge sharing, and in the future it will offer a single view of customers across their entire portfolio of insurance products.
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Farmers uses success managers, program architects, and signature success support teams from Salesforce Cloud Services to help customers get the most value from Salesforce Customer 360 in the least amount of time. “Our goal is to help make the customer even smarter about insurance and empower Farmers agents to improve that experience at each and every interaction,” said Ron Guerrier, Chief Information Officer. “Whether it’s from a phone via a mobile app or in person, technology could make all of that better.”
“Our goal is to help make the customer even smarter about insurance and empower Farmers agents to improve that experience at each and every interaction,” said Ron Guerrier, Chief Information Officer. “Whether it’s from a phone via a mobile app or in person, technology could make all of that better.”
This technology can help reduce time spent on routine tasks and provide Farmers agents with more time to develop meaningful relationships with customers, which is part of the Farmers “customer-centered, agent-powered” strategy. New technology and intuitive data also enable Farmers agents to better understand customers and deliver a faster, more efficient, and more responsive level of service. Technology will never replace the importance of human interaction, and engagement between a Farmers agent and the customer remains paramount. The personal relationship, however, can be enhanced by the benefits of technology. “At the core of our strategy, we’re trying to facilitate fantastic relationships between our customers and Farmers agents,” said Dailey. “We’re trying to do everything we can with technology to support that relationship.”
The Farmers Customer Self-Service (CSS) community now ranks as one of the largest Salesforce communities on Community Cloud launched to date, supporting millions of policyholders. While the CSS community offers Farmers a direct connection with customers, Salesforce also helps support the customer-agent relationship.
“As we look at Marketing Cloud and how an agent can elect to use it in their day-to-day operations, our ultimate goal is to provide tools agents can use to enhance their existing communications with customers,” said Amanda Reierson, Head of Digital. “At Farmers, we want to help customers come away feeling smarter about insurance. Salesforce allows the organization and agents to communicate more widely with our customers at scale through a variety of different channels.”



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",Other,Farmers Insurance
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"With its iconic salmon-colored paper, the Financial Times has been a leading provider of business news, commentary, and analysis for almost 125 years. In recent years, the FT has reshaped and adapted to the rapidly changing environment for news media. By embracing a channel-neutral strategy, the publication has ensured its authoritative, award-winning, and independent journalism is available to readers anytime, anywhere, and on whichever device its increasingly mobile audience might choose. Digital subscribers now exceed global print circulation among its daily global audience of 2.1+ million.
To underpin these changes, alignment of the entire Financial Times team to suit the new business landscape was crucial. Salesforce is used by many of the organization’s employees, including ad sales teams, journalists, and back office personnel. “The ability to consolidate onto one platform has had a big impact for us. It’s more cost-effective to maintain and support, and users only have to log into one place,” says Christina Scott, CIO.
With a common view of customer information, teams across the company are able to attract and retain advertisers and subscribers. Advertiser contact information and sales activities are tracked in Sales Cloud. The company also uses Sales Cloud to manage subscriber data, and is moving its billing system—for both businesses and consumers—into Salesforce for complete and detailed views.
As a subscription business, Financial Times knows that customer acquisition is just the beginning. More than 100 agents in call centers across the globe use Service Cloud to track issues and resolve them quickly. “From a service or subscription point of view, managing our customers on a single platform is critical to survival,” adds Scott.
The Financial Times has also moved many of its systems from legacy platforms into Salesforce, including contracts, directories, IT help desk, and order management. The Customer 360 Platform even powers the website for the company’s popular consumer luxury lifestyle magazine, How to Spend It.
The Financial Times uses social media channels including Facebook and Twitter to share breaking stories, cultivate online communities, and create deeper engagement with readers. The company also uses Marketing Cloud to monitor and engage with social customers. “Marketing Cloud lets us use social media to see how we’re doing,” says Scott. “Social media is the fastest growing traffic source to FT.com, increasing by 20 percent in the first six months of 2012, and is an increasingly important driver of new customers.”



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",Financial Services,Financial Times
"3,300 employees
As a premium appliance brand, Fisher & Paykel consistently challenges conventional design to create products tailored to human needs and inspired by how and where people live as well as New Zealand’s rugged landscape. The DishDrawer™ invented by Fisher & Paykel is a striking example. The modular DishDrawer, first of its kind worldwide, has revolutionized kitchen design and provided an ergonomic solution to dishwashing.
The brand continues to innovate with a vision to be the most human-centered appliance brand in the world. This necessitates a deep understanding of how people live along with respect for the planet and a commitment to sustainable design.
“We’ve always been focused on human-centered design and making products that are beautiful to use, designed to fit our homes, and deliver perfect results. We’re equally focused on ensuring our products are built to last and can be disposed of in a responsible way when the time comes,” said Rudi Khoury, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Digital Transformation at Fisher & Paykel.
Salesforce plays a key role in this innovation and is helping Fisher & Paykel get closer to customers and provide them with seamless experiences tailored to their needs.
Founded in 1934 in New Zealand, Fisher & Paykel now operates in over 30 countries, including the U.S., where it also operates the luxury outdoor kitchen brand DCS. In addition, the company has a large network of customers, including builders, designers, retail partners, and, of course, consumers.
Over the last eight years, Fisher & Paykel has been on a journey to transform itself and provide all of these customers with an experience that’s as luxurious as its products. The transformation started with the company’s use of Marketing Cloud to engage with consumers and personalize communications based on purchases they registered on the website. Through this, Fisher & Paykel began building out a single view of the customer which could be extended to other areas of the business — including sales, service, ecommerce — and given a digital presence.
“Our customers were telling us that they wanted to connect with us on more channels while our staff were telling us they wanted better tools and access to information. The Salesforce Platform was evolving in a way that met these needs and so it was a very organic relationship,” said Khoury. “Now our partnership with Salesforce means the technology is less of the focus and we can concentrate more on the customer, more on our people, more on our product. That’s really where the advantage is for us.”
Now all customers benefit from more personalized and streamlined experiences. This includes the sales team, which sells to retailers, builders, and designers, and is now armed with the right information to better serve its customers. On top of that, Fisher & Paykel is focused on building new tools to make it even easier for these partners to do business. This includes a new portal recently launched on Community Cloud which simplifies collaboration with retailers and enables them to track their own orders. Fisher & Paykel is also using CPQ to streamline quoting.
“It’s very much about us working hand in hand to deliver our products to market and putting the customer at the center of our day-to-day business,” said Nick Thompson, National Builder Manager at Fisher & Paykel.
Fisher & Paykel’s transformation has also made a tremendous difference to the post-sales experience for end users. In the past, many of these customers' interactions with the company were impersonal and inefficient. In-bound calls began with requests for serial numbers, and often involved customers repeating themselves as calls were escalated. Also, when an issue required an onsite technician, the customer would need to stay home for a half day or longer, not knowing when the technician would arrive.
Today, all of these pain points are reduced and Fisher & Paykel is using Service Cloud to provide smarter, more personalized support to customers all over the globe. With Service Cloud integrated with the brand’s call center technology, operators have instant insight into the customer at the end of the phone. They can also continue the conversation where the last operator left off — avoiding the need to ask the same question twice.
“One of the biggest frustrations for customers is being asked to repeat themselves. And while our operators would try and piece together information and avoid this, it wasn’t always possible before Salesforce,” said Khoury.
Now, operators can spend more time listening to the customer and troubleshooting new issues. Service agents can also book an onsite service technician, then and there on the phone, using Field Service Lightning. Appointment confirmations are sent automatically the evening prior and include a link where customers can track the arrival of their technician.
Once the technician has come and gone, customers receive a feedback form where they can rate the service provided. If the rating is less than ideal, it triggers a new case, allowing the business to find out what happened and resolve any issues.
These new processes have transformed the service experience for customers who no longer need to waste time repeating themselves or waiting for technicians.
“We know that sometimes things go wrong and products can have issues, but that’s why customer service exists. The most important thing we can do is make it easy and that’s been our strategy with Salesforce,” said Khoury.
While focused on the customer experience, Fisher & Paykel’s transformation has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on efficiency. Operators can use the same processes to service customers from all over the globe, reducing training from an average of nine months to just three weeks per operator.
“In the past, operators would need to learn how to use a number of different systems and switch between them to support customers in each region,” said Khoury.
Fisher & Paykel is already working on the next phase of its transformation and using Trailhead to optimize the use of Salesforce and solve new problems. One initiative has seen the launch of the brand's first website to be built on Commerce Cloud. While the site is designed for browsing rather than retail, the use of Commerce Cloud allows Fisher & Paykel to present its brand and products in a more engaging way.
Fisher & Paykel is now piloting Salesforce Customer 360 which will connect more of its data for a complete view of each customer. “Salesforce Customer 360 will unite all our customer touchpoints so we can understand our customers even more deeply and continue to provide them with products and experiences that fit their needs.”



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",Other,Fisher & Paykel
"Formula 1 has grown at the speed of an open-wheel race car. After being featured in a 2019 Netflix series, “Drive to Survive,” the motorsports company has seen its U.S. television viewership nearly triple. It’s not just how many people are watching, but who. Unexpected new audiences, like young people and women, make up more of Formula 1’s 1.5 billion viewers than ever before.

But what comes next may be just as remarkable. Now, Formula 1 needs to find ways to turn that sudden popularity surge into longer-term sustained growth and fan loyalty. One big key to that shift: Experiences that feel personal, like a front-row seat on top of your favorite team’s garage or an email that recommends the cap worn by that team’s driver on the winner’s podium.

Fan engagement like this requires lockstep sales and service powered by much more than legacy spreadsheets. Salesforce Customer 360 turns Formula 1 teams into a personal pit crew for each customer.

With a shared view of customer data and powerful real-time insights from Salesforce Data Cloud, sales, service, and marketing pros can delight fans with well-choreographed speed and consistency. Here’s how they do it.
Matthew Kemp, Senior CRM and Customer Operations Manager
1. Achieve 88% fan satisfaction by connecting sales and service data.
2. Make the perfect recommendations based on fans’ favorite drivers.
3. Expand the fan base with a sky’s-the-limit mentality.
4. Fuel net zero carbon emissions goals by 2030 with data.
Formula 1 interacts with thousands of fans over a race weekend. But service agents can feel overwhelmed if each inquiry appears to be a separate contact rather than a familiar face.

Matthew Kemp, Formula 1’s Senior CRM and Customer Operations Manager, had a vision for sales and service that anticipated fans' needs rather than functioning as a reactive call center.

“We’ve improved the processes, templates, speed of resolution, tooling, and how our teams navigate,” said Kemp. “In turn, that means the fan is getting a quicker response from a more knowledgeable agent.”

Now, fans can self-serve on a Formula 1 community page to report login and streaming issues on F1 TV, the brand’s live Grand Prix streaming service.

First-call resolution has also reached 86%, thanks to automated chatbots and refined processes agents can use to maintain consistency. Formula 1 service professionals have time to actually work on open cases instead of juggling new inquiries. This has allowed the brand to serve more fans in 2022 than the previous four years and even grow fan satisfaction from 70% in 2018 to 88% in the second half of the year.
Behind the scenes, Formula 1’s commercial sales teams were working in spreadsheets. Data was so out of sync that communication often lapsed between teams.

Today, Formula 1’s internal teams use Salesforce to communicate daily and create a sales process that everyone can understand. Reps have access to the same information, so it’s clear where prospects are in the sales lifecycle and what partners are responsible for at each event. And with service data connected in the same platform, sales has deeper fan insights to share with potential partners to scale growth.
Formula 1 has long wowed audiences with exciting motorsports action. But until recently, it had no way of knowing who its fans were — like the recent college grad who just purchased a Lando Norris shirt or the teenager who just watched her first Grand Prix.

Fan interactions differed across Formula 1 channels, including F1 TV, marketing emails, race-day pop-up stores, and social media, prompting a disconnected and inconsistent brand experience.

The data was there, but Formula 1 couldn’t connect in-person interactions with digital ones to draw the right insights and reach fans in the moment.

With Customer 360, Formula 1’s sales, service, and marketing data will live in one place, so fan and partner experiences never fall short, whether at the track, on screen, or in the inbox.

The catalyst that will turn the data into meaningful interactions? Data Cloud, which enables Formula 1 to connect fan data across properties in real time, delivering better fan experiences and creating customer loyalty.
For instance, when fans sign up for an event through the Formula 1 Paddock Club, an immersive, onsite luxury experience, brand representatives can know fans’ names, engagement history, driver preferences, and past purchases from the moment they walk in. Post-race, Formula 1 can personalize follow-up communications with mentions of their favorite driver or merchandise they might like based on previous purchases.
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Instead of executing its vision for in-the-moment personalization on its own, Formula 1 turned to Salesforce Professional Services to co-create a clearer roadmap of the ultimate fan experience, desired future state, and technology that will enable that vision worldwide.

With expert guidance, Formula 1 was able to go live in just five months. Using Marketing Cloud Engagement, Personalization, and Customer Data Platform, Salesforce experts are helping Formula 1 reach new fans and improve loyalty by:
Analyzing and segmenting its existing fan base to increase the number of known and contactable fans
Sending personalized email and push notifications to race attendees
“Salesforce Professional Services allowed us to supercharge this transformation,” said Marek Borowik, Global Head of Fan Engagement. “The team quickly learned our business, understood our vision and what we wanted to achieve, and helped us build out a future state to meet those needs.”
Harnessing engagement as its fan base grows is crucial, especially as Formula 1 adds new global events in 2023 and channels like an Esports virtual race series, podcasts, and even an F1 Arcade in London.

“We have over 500 million fans, and yet, less than 1% of them will actually attend a Grand Prix each year,” said Luisa Fernandez, Associate Director, Marketing. “It’s about increasing accessibility and opportunity to engage with our sport. We’re looking at the data behind those touchpoints and working with Salesforce to maximize our engagement.”
Sustainability is also top of mind for Formula 1 as younger fans express their expectations for responsible entertainment. Making racing sustainable is no easy feat, but with the ability to track, analyze, and report on carbon emissions, Formula 1 has pledged to go net zero by 2030.

One of the company’s largest sources of emissions is fan travel to events, which Net Zero Cloud will help monitor with predictions and reduction recommendations. In the future, Formula 1 could even connect the data with Customer 360 tools like Marketing Cloud to email fans tips to travel more sustainably.
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",Sports,Formula 1
"GO1 has carved out a niche in online learning by offering the world’s largest marketplace of workplace training courses. Vu Tran, GO1 Chief Growth Officer and co-founder, likens the company to Netflix for business training. Customers pay a subscription and get on-demand access to training as well as tools to create and deliver their own.
The model has proved popular with customers who no longer need to choose between different training platforms or manage multiple suppliers. Instead, they can use GO1 to access thousands of courses from world leading providers.
“Our goal is to help unlock the potential of people through a love of learning,” said Tran. “Salesforce provides a single engine to power our vision globally. It helps us manage different teams and selling into different countries with much more sophistication.”
With technology in the complex rehab technology (CRT) space seemingly at a standstill, it takes a bold spirit to move things forward. Numotion, the nation’s leading provider of CRT, is improving the lives of people living with disabilities by enabling them to actively participate in everyday life with the use of cutting-edge mobility devices. Its products offer innovative features like alternative drive controls (the ability to control a motorized wheelchair with your chin, tongue, speech, breath, and even eyes), which gives the power of mobility and independence to those who have struggled with legacy technologies.

“We don’t consider ourselves to be a product provider,” said Barczak. “We consider ourselves a service provider, and we're here on behalf of people living with disabilities. So, our entire company's purpose is to help people maintain mobility and independence and be able to live an active and daily life to whatever extent they choose. Numotion is a pretty rare combination where you can work for an organization with a tremendous purpose to the community and also have it be a successful business operation.”
Supported by Salesforce, GO1 has continued to grow rapidly. It has opened up new offices in South Africa, Vietnam and Malaysia over the last year and expanded its course offerings to meet the needs of new customers worldwide.
GO1 now estimates that every six seconds there is a customer somewhere in the world completing one of its courses. The company’s goal is to increase that measure to one course per second, and it has adopted Pardot to streamline marketing and widen its reach.
New campaign and landing page templates have been set up in Pardot which can be executed locally by teams in Australia, the United States, South Africa, Vietnam, the United Kingdom and Malaysia. GO1 can easily track engagement with these campaigns and determine which collateral is most effective.
To further improve lead nurturing, GO1 has used Pardot Connectors to be able to track attendance at webinars and events and send targeted follow up materials to no shows and attendees. It has also connected Pardot with Google Ads so that it can track where leads are coming from and use this information to measure ROI and optimise campaigns. All inbound leads are assigned to a sales person more than twice as fast as before.
“Now that we are managing sales and marketing on one platform we can more seamlessly nurture leads. Pardot also helps us work faster to launch campaigns for specific regions, so we can tailor our messaging without slowing ourselves down,” said Tran. “That speed is really important to us, because as a high-growth organisation we need the ability to move at a fast pace.”
Moving forward, GO1 plans to use Trailhead to help new employees get started on Salesforce and explore new capabilities. It also plans to use Einstein Analytics to gain deeper insights into customers which it can use to improve lead conversion. “Having a single source of truth in Salesforce allows us to diagnose and solve problems both locally and globally, and adding more analytics to that will make it even more valuable,” said Tran.



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",Technology,GO1
"There are a lot of factors that contribute to the success of a company. But customer service, in particular, is a crucial component for growing sales, revenue, and profits. So what happens when your service technology can no longer keep up with growing demand? When faced with either losing business and a stellar reputation, or investing in a better service solution — the choice is clear. At least it was for George P. Johnson.
GPJ, which takes its name from the founder’s initials, is the world’s leading event and experience marketing agency. “We take events that might seem kind of boring, and we turn them on their heads,” said Penny Davis, Senior Contact Center Manager at GPJ. “We make the entire experience more useful, more targeted, and more fun.”
By working with content teams to shorten speaking sessions and set up networking spaces and exhibit halls for vendors, GPJ makes sure events are relevant and interesting to attendees. Everything the company does is dedicated to making events as engaging as possible for customers and companies alike, no matter whether those events happen live or virtually.
When the world shifted from live events to virtual events in 2020, GPJ was already prepared for the change. The company had coordinated many successful virtual events in the past, and was ready to continue using many of the same strategies from those. 
The main shift was moving from viewing virtual events as add-ons for main events to seeing them as the main events themselves. “In many ways, it’s not all that different,” said Davis. “You need to make sure that everything you’re doing digitally still aligns with your branding, connects with your audience, and goes as smoothly as possible.”
In a normal year, GPJ employs about 20 customer service representatives in the winter months, and as many as 70 from spring through autumn. “It can vary greatly,” said Davis. “Right now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we only have 20, and it’s the middle of the summer when we’d normally be busiest. However, we’re ramping back up currently as our clients pivot to digital.”
Half a decade ago, GPJ was using a relatively outdated service system with a small contact center. The company realized it needed to connect service with the rest of the company, and as a result, the contact center grew exponentially. Based on that growth, it was clear GPJ needed a new service technology solution. The company solicited proposals from many different providers,  but “Salesforce was at the top of that list,” said Davis.
As an events company, GPJ is busiest in late summer and early fall. During the holiday season, the company doesn’t have the same service needs. “We needed flexibility between seasons, and we needed to ensure that a customer service representative working for one client did not have access to all of the information for our other clients,” Davis said. “Salesforce ticked off all the boxes for us.”
GPJ got up and running on Service Cloud quickly through Salesforce Jump Start. “With a team of just two people leading the charge, we got rolling on the Salesforce Platform in no time,” said Davis. “It was exactly what we needed to get everything working and get rid of the old system.” Davis estimated that if GPJ hadn’t used Jump Start, the company’s IT team would have had to do a lot of research — as much as five to 10 hours a week per person.
After implementing Service Cloud, “we found that it flowed really well, and it was extremely easy to train our customer service representatives on it,” said Davis. “Previously, we were counting emails by hand, so we’ve seen major benefits in efficiency for both agents and managers.” With the ability to easily generate detailed reports that weren’t possible at all before, the team now can accomplish the reporting process in half the time, or less.
When starting out with Salesforce, Davis said it’s best to write down all your current processes, identify what you’d like improved, and make those your key goals. “Our Salesforce representative was able to help us work toward those goals fast,” she said. “Trailhead is also a great resource for learning the right Salesforce terminology and understanding what’s possible with the platform.”
Now, GPJ’s IT teams are focused on special projects to continually optimize and improve the company’s use of the Salesforce Platform. “We’re doing lots of things to deliver higher-end service to our clients,” said Davis. ""Chat, automation, and self-service are all part of that, and we’ll be improving all those items throughout the next year of relative downtime.”
Once GPJ fully integrates chat, self-service, and automation with Service Cloud, Davis expects customer service representatives will be able to help customers in more depth than ever, with fewer clicks than ever. “We’ve already reduced the number of clicks and expanded the knowledge base for our customer service representatives, and that’s only going to continue,” said Davis.
GPJ’s Salesforce account team helped show how one of the many Accelerators included with its Premier Success Plan could provide expert guidance on a number of custom processes within Service Cloud. Davis expects to use Accelerators in the implementation of Live Agent, as well. “Having the flexibility to use the Salesforce Platform to accomplish what GPJ needs has been really important,” said Davis. “We’re very price-conscious, but we’ve found that [the Premier Success Plan] is completely worth it to us.”
“If you take the time to use Accelerators and make Salesforce the best it can be, you continue to reap the benefits of that year over year. It’s going to be a long road, but that’s what we plan to do with Service Cloud.”
Davis notes that GPJ already has several years of Salesforce projects lined up. For success when starting out with Salesforce, she said, “be sure to talk to your Salesforce representative and your success manager. They’ll help make sure you’re not too overwhelmed and that you’re using tools you might not have been aware of.”
Interested in learning more about Premier support and how it helps customers like GPJ reach their goals faster? Watch this special on-demand webinar.



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",Professional Services,GPJ
"Shoppers have come to expect the familiar General Mills brands they see on grocery store shelves. But consumer experiences now extend far beyond store aisles — to shoppers’ phones, social media accounts, and everyday lives. Today, consumers want deeper connections with brands who know them personally.
Yet, building consumer relationships can be difficult for manufacturers who sell through grocery stores and other retailers.
Thanks to its multi-pronged data strategy and suite of digital platforms such as Box Tops for Education, Good Rewards, Betty Crocker, and Pillsbury, General Mills has many ways to understand consumer spending habits. Yet, the company needed better tools to leverage its data to reach consumers on a more personal level while maintaining privacy.
With the power of AI + Data + CRM, General Mills has a clearer picture of its consumer data and a connected marketing technology stack to tailor communications to the right audiences, building lasting relationships. Here’s how.
Heather Conneran, Director, Brand Experience Platforms
1. Increase consumer engagement 3X using past purchase data to tailor emails.
2. Use personalized content to engage schools and serve more communities.
3. Improve retailer relationships with insightful analytics.
General Mills already had rich purchase and behavioral data from its online recipe sites and Box Tops for Education program. Capturing millions of recipe views and receipt scans, General Mills had the opportunity to connect and act on the data across digital platforms to recommend relevant content based on consumer food preferences, diet, geography, or household composition.
Now, all the purchase and loyalty program data it collects goes straight into Data Cloud. AI and automation help the company analyze the data, make one-to-one product and recipe recommendations, and predict an appropriate send schedule. General Mills can more accurately segment audiences and send relevant content through Marketing Cloud, like interactive quizzes or free samples based on past purchases or favorite recipes.
“Einstein AI does the heavy lifting to look at our audience and analyze the right email sending cadence,” said John Brandt, Marketing Technology Lead.
This has helped the company triple consumer engagement, increase known site users 170% year over year, and even save millions in paid media. Pillsbury and Betty Crocker brands have also experienced a 40% increase in “buy now” clicks in its user content.
Map every customer moment. In this in-depth guide, you’ll get:
Five sample customer journeys for growth, onboarding, engagement, retention, and support
Use cases from marketing leaders
Insights from the latest industry research

For more than 20 years, participants of General Mills’ Box Tops for Education philanthropy program cut out and mailed in proofs of purchase by hand to raise money for their schools. Then in 2019, the company took the program digital with an app for conveniently scanning receipts for proof of purchase to earn cash for schools.
Despite an increase in app downloads, General Mills’ user engagement waned. Participants forgot to scan their receipts and onboarding school coordinators to the program was a challenge.
With guidance from Salesforce Professional Services, General Mills created marketing journeys for different types of program participants.
Now, if an app user hasn’t engaged in awhile, Marketing Cloud can:
Automatically remind them to keep earning for their school
Trigger a message in another channel like social or the app
Share more relevant content like product recommendations based on users’ app settings or selected school
School program coordinators are more connected, too, thanks to welcome journeys, educational guides, and promotions General Mills automatically sends when a school enrolls. Thousands of coordinators can easily access helpful resources in a portal powered by Experience Cloud to personalize the program for their school and promote it to their communities.
General Mills sells its products through major retailers like Target and Walmart. Having easy access to consumer purchase data gives sales teams market insights to share with retailers as a way to strengthen partnerships.
“Salesforce helps us combine the first-party data we acquire from consumers with second-party data from trading partners to unlock growth opportunities in the marketplace,” said Jaime Montemayor, Chief Digital and Technology Officer.
Going forward, extending Data Cloud insights to Consumer Goods Cloud will give field sales reps better visibility into seller account history, forecasting, and even maps to optimize their territories. These insights could lead to optimized shelf presence and promotions to the region and store.
Easier account management will also mean time savings and increased productivity for reps while on the road.
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",Consumer Goods,General Mills
"What if a bank were like a close friend, with advice and suggestions you could trust? The leaders at Huntington, an Ohio-based regional bank with $56 billion in assets, want to have that kind of close relationship with their customers. That goal is driving them to make Huntington a customer company — to recognize all of the customers’ needs, offer relevant ideas and products, and provide industry-leading service to the company’s commercial, small business, and consumer customers.
The first step was to bring together customer data for 16 business segments. Previously, that information was fragmented in multiple CRM systems, resulting in inconsistent processes and customer experiences, as well as additional licensing, training, and maintenance costs. So management decided to move to Salesforce for safe, secure cloud applications and nimble compliance with constantly changing government regulations.
Huntington’s data is now consolidated on a single platform, and more than 8,000 employees, from branch tellers to wealth managers, can see a unified customer view. “Our colleagues’ view of the customer relationship is better than it ever has been. Having this information available to use in tandem with the sales tools that we’ve built in Salesforce has helped us not only recognize opportunities to help our customers immediately, but also to better plan their life journey,” said Jim Baron, EVP and Director of Retail Sales and Service. Huntington has customized and integrated Salesforce to make it easier to refer a customer between divisions to cross-sell services, such as automobile financing and other personal loans, insurance, or mortgages, and has engaged the campaign’s functionality to more closely manage these efforts.
Sales are also helped by Data.com, which delivers information to 300 business and commercial bankers right in Salesforce to help them find new customers as well as enrich their existing customer records. Highly targeted business data also helps the bank fuel email and direct-mail marketing campaigns.
Employee adoption of Salesforce has been high, bringing together 16 separate banking segments, while significantly reducing IT costs and time to deliver new functionality. Huntington has seen considerable improvements in cross-selling, customer interactions, and acquisition. “Salesforce helps us deepen our customer relationships while giving us a flexible and adaptive environment that can be easily tuned,” said Baron.



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",Financial Services,Huntington
"Number of Employees 9
Starting a business is hard. Starting one in the heat of the Texas summer, with just two laptops and a cardboard table in the garage, might just be a little crazy, too. But that's how ICS+ got its start.
“That wasn’t fun. But we kept trying to take care of our clients, and we’re still here 15 years later,” said Bernard Morgan, CEO and President of ICS+. Not only does the Austin, Texas-based company now have air conditioning in its offices, but its very first customer is still a client.
ICS+ builds customized automation control systems, specializing in audio and video solutions for commercial properties. “It’s like creating a universal remote for a building,” said Stephanie Morgan, VP and Co-Founder.
With clients that include hospitals, hotels, airports, educational institutions, as well as large residential estates, ICS+ has grown as demand for custom audio and video installations in commercial properties has increased. ICS+ wanted a business technology solution that would provide it with an integrated view of client data across the sales and delivery lifecycle. The company also needed a system flexible enough to change as its business changed over time, with no pricey external consultants required. Salesforce fit the bill.
Although ICS+ has fewer than 10 employees, it completes more than 100 client engagements each year. The company creates custom solutions for each customer. Although it had been using both enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, most of its project management and custom billing was handled manually or in spreadsheets. Employee collaboration and information sharing on projects took place largely through email.
Having information spread across so many platforms made it difficult for the ICS+ team to have a complete view of project status across its client base. Not having a single source of truth for client projects, in turn, became a drain on employee productivity across sales, project management, and accounting. Plus, the cost of subscribing to multiple business technology products was adding up.
Learn how to find new customers, close deals faster, and keep customers happy with the world’s #1 CRM solution.
ICS+ left its myriad business technologies behind, moving to a streamlined solution centered around Salesforce and Salesforce Anywhere. Straight away, Salesforce gave ICS+ a sole repository for client and project information, easily accessible to anyone on the team who needed it. “Salesforce has a place for us to put all of those details,” Stephanie Morgan said. “Employees can make decisions on their own because of Salesforce.”
Before Salesforce, email had become a real problem for ICS+. Between client communications and internal collaboration, employee inboxes were in a constant state of overflow. Enter Salesforce Anywhere, Salesforce’s collaborative productivity platform. ICS+ adopted Salesforce Anywhere internally and provided clients with access to relevant documents on the platform. Salesforce Anywhere built-in, real-time communications features helped reduce company email traffic by an average of 20%, while capturing precise details within one system of record.
“Understanding what the client likes and dislikes helps us know what to do next time there’s an opportunity with that client,” Bernard Morgan said. “Salesforce helps us put all of that information together so we can act on it.”
The move to Salesforce has paid off for ICS+ in several measurable ways. First, working capital is flowing. Thanks to more timely and accurate project management data within Salesforce, ICS+ can invoice and collect from customers faster, shortening its accounts receivables cycle by 15 days. Second, sales efficiency has increased by about 25% since adopting Salesforce. “We can achieve the same results with less effort, fewer things slipping through the cracks, more timeliness, and overall better service and connection with our clients,” Bernard Morgan said. Tracking opportunities within Salesforce lets ICS+ be more selective about opportunities it wants to pursue and close more deals.
Third, better collaboration makes it easier to get things done. “Our productivity has skyrocketed with Salesforce since we can communicate with Chatter and collaborate on Salesforce Anywhere,” Bernard Morgan said. He cited his team’s ability to work faster as the primary reason for the whopping 942% return on investment that ICS+ has seen on Salesforce to date.
Faster access to working capital, increased sales, and a near-tenfold ROI? Sounds like a big win for this forward-thinking small business.



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",Technology,ICS+
"“There would be nothing glamorous about what we do if we didn't have the right team and strong systems in place,” said Susan Guyer, Chief Communication and Engagement Officer for the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles. “Without the passion and enthusiasm of our people or the technology enabling them each and every day, our services would be stagnant.”
Especially over the past year-plus, which was defined by COVID-19.
The Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (IN BMV) is dedicated to serving Hoosiers by providing best-in-class driver and vehicle services in a timely and accurate manner while ensuring security and transparency. And Guyer and team bring this mission to life by offering a truly omnichannel service experience, such as issuing renewal notifications via email, extending services through 24-hour kiosks, and more — a stark contrast to the stereotypes most people think of when “contact the BMV” shows up on their to-do list.
“Our mission says nothing about speed or cost. It is 100% focused on providing a good experience every single time you visit the bureau. Thus, we strive every day to make the BMV experience a good one for everyone,” Guyer continued. “We’re not trying to force consumers into one behavior, rather provide options best suited to their individual needs. I don't want to mail you a preprint if you would rather engage with us online, just like I don't want to force you to only speak with us over chat if you prefer the familiarity of a face-to-face conversation. I want all of these options to be available and be a great customer experience.”




Guyer and team manage this kind of omnichannel experience using the customer engagement platform they built on Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It gives them the tools they need to deliver a high-quality customer experience via any outreach or communications channel, unifying the information that’s shared as the customer might move from one channel to the next. Here’s how it works:
IN BMV manages roughly 6 million registration renewals every year. Prior to implementing Salesforce, each customer would receive a pre-print renewal notice in the mail; a big envelope that would include a packet of paperwork as well as a return envelope for them to mail in their check.
Guyer and team started offering email as a replacement option, following a journey in Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder: “Let’s say I’m up for renewal. 60 days out, I get an email letting me know. If I renew, I am dropped from the journey. If I did not, I receive another email notifying me I have 30 days left, and that drop or continue pattern continues until I renew,” said Guyer. “And there was no greater glee than the day my boss received her renewal notification via email. She came into the office that morning so excited as she said ‘I got the email renewal! It’s working!’”
Email opt-in list grew by 400,000
Q1 2020: 230,187 email renewals sent. Q1 2021: 1,743,699 email renewals sent — a 1,513,512 YoY increase
Online engagement list grew from under 600,000 to 1 million
Unsubscribe = 0.127%
IN BMV’s C-SAT rating = 96%
IN BMV recently started offering the option for customers to opt-in via SMS as well on Mobile Studio. “We can’t just put up a sign that says something like ‘Text JOIN to MyBMV to get renewal notifications’ because we require personalized information such as your birthday or your driver’s license number. But we can encourage people to log in via our transaction portal online and opt-in to receive text message notifications, which is a great way for us to pilot this communications channel,” said Guyer.
By diversifying outreach and engagement activity, Guyer and the team have started to reduce the volume that needs to be managed by mail, at a branch, or over the phone, all of which require associate support. “And that has a big impact on the day-to-day. Instead of making our customer service representatives feel the weight of 'the clock is ticking — I need to rush through and answer your questions quickly and get you out of here so that I can move onto the next,' we've enabled them to dedicate the right amount of time and attention to each customer interaction, on any given day” said Guyer.
It has also helped the Bureau meet customer service expectations during the extraordinary times of 2020 → 2021.
Like the rest of the world, Guyer and the team were forced to suddenly shift their “anytime, anywhere” customer service mentality with the sudden onset of COVID-19. Indiana closed the doors of its BMV for 14 days, creating a backlog of service requests for those in-person preferences when the bureau was able to open its doors two weeks later. On top of that, social distancing guidelines and safety measures limited the number of customers that could be seen, further impacting service delivery timelines. Wait times went from an average of 30 minutes to above two hours, lines wrapped around the parking lot, “horror stories from other states that we never thought we’d see in Indiana,” said Guyer. “Plus, we have 1,100 associates that sit behind Plexiglas every day, serving the public in this difficult environment. And they've been doing it for a year-and-a-half. Helping those associates feel some sense of security and support is really, really important.
The team relied even more on their digital diversification strategy, redirecting as many communications as possible to email and text message, helping to bring the wait time back down to 20 minutes in April and 18 minutes in May, by encouraging customers to use out-of-branch options whenever possible. The efforts we put in communications were supported by “our associates who showed up every day, still as competitive as they were before COVID hit. Our teams know online or kiosks are a great options, but many of our customers prefer in-person. The branches can see how they are doing against other branches through metrics like customer service rating. They want to be at the top of that list. They continue to find ways to make it fun, support each other, and cheer each other on, even during this COVID time period,” said Guyer.
Outside of COVID-19, the Indiana State Legislature began encouraging some and implementing other more digital-first policies. The IN BMV has begun exploring mobile driver’s license as a service to its customers. In addition, the Legislature instructed the Bureau to implement electronic lien and title in an extraordinarily swift timeline, to implement a broad impact amnesty program, and more. Guyer and the team responded by adapting more programs and services to fit the direction of the larger state goal and are collaborating to build a plan to educate Hoosiers of the continual enhancement of services.
“COVID was just a reinforcement of what we already knew: that if you have the right team and you have strong systems to support them, you can weather just about any storm,” said Guyer.
 



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",Government,Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles
"“Our name alone — Innovation, Science, and Economic Development — embodies terms that are front and centre to what's going on right now in Canada and around the world,” said Chahine El Chaar, Director General, Digital Services Division for Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada. “We are a department that is looked to, if not expected, to be a leader that asks the right questions, surfaces the right ideas, and pinpoints the right solutions to help the country navigate crises like COVID-19.”
The Department of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada (ISED) works to improve conditions for investment, enhance Canada's innovation performance, increase Canada's share of global trade, and build a fair, efficient, and competitive marketplace. In other words, its goal is to foster a growing, competitive, and knowledge-based economy through activities like investing in promising startups so that they have the finances and channels to bring an idea to market, partnering with the country's many think tank-style superclusters to realize the potential from creative, “design thinking” projects, supporting research initiatives, and more.
“This work took on new meaning with the introduction of COVID-19,” El Chaar continued. “Like many other government departments across the globe at the moment, ISED has been thrown headfirst into an unknown and quickly developing crisis. It’s been an ever-changing situation that, all of the sudden, made adaptability, speed, and resourcefulness more important than ever.”
The sudden increase in COVID-19 patients combined with the very contagious nature of the disease caused the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) to skyrocket. At the same time, doctors and healthcare professionals attending patients while waiting for test results to come back from a lab — a process that can take a few days — have to treat each individual as if they are COVID-positive. That means teams are burning through gloves, masks, and other equipment perhaps unnecessarily, depleting supplies even faster. 
Face coverings
Cloth masks
About halfway through the crisis, Public Services and Procurement Canada announced that it ordered over 55 million face shields, 121 million+ N95 masks, 20 million+ liters of hand sanitizer, and more. Only 25% of the face shields, 10% of the N95 masks, and 33% of the supplies were secured.1
This was a call to action for departments like ISED, with expertise in out-of-the-box design thinking, to reimagine the nation’s PPE supply chain so that Canada could deliver more protective gear to teams that needed it. “Our supplies were shrinking while our cases were increasing, which is never a good trend,” said Stephan Belanger, Director General, Innovator Experiences Branch for ISED. “We started asking ourselves ‘what can we do? What else is out there that we don't know about?' We needed to find a way to tap into more resources, fast, especially with the possibility of a second wave of the virus looming over us."" 
El Chaar, Belanger, and team launched the ISED COVID-19 Call-to-Action Supply Portal on Salesforce, a Protected B certified platform. This website assists Canada in procuring material from businesses, manufacturers, and suppliers that either have a supply of PPEs, know how to source PPEs internationally, or are able and willing to retool their manufacturing process to produce PPEs. Here’s how it works.
Web-to-lead, a feature of Salesforce Sales Cloud, fuels a series of form fields capturing the details of a PPE donation; what the item is, quantity available, shipping details, and more is all captured by the web form and transferred using queue management to the appropriate team in the CRM. 
 
The ISED team uses the lead information to review and contact the lead in order to understand is this supplier ready to supply or does it still need support to start manufacturing? Does this supplier meet certifications or compliance requirements? Can this business scale up its supply if we need to call on them again in a hurry? Once the lead is approved, it is promoted as an opportunity in the CRM system and advanced to the next step in the workflow.
ISED then reviews the profile and uses it as background when reaching out to suppliers with additional questions. If the lead is approved, the next step is to facilitate PPE delivery. “It is an online, collaborative, transparent process that reduced email tracking and spreadsheet uploads, captured data in a structured fashion for easier sharing and reporting, and enabled us to focus more time and energy on high-potential leads,” said Belanger. 
The portal is available in both English and French to comply with Canadian laws.
The COVID-19 Call-to-Action Supply Portal went live in just two days — a time-to-value metric that has unlocked both quantitative and qualitative benefits. 
On the quantitative side, the portal has allowed ISED to secure over 70 million units of PPE from 4,500+ leads and 170+ confirmed suppliers, roughly 45 million surgical masks, 23.7 million gowns, 2.9 million face shields, 21,500 ventilators, and 300,000 liters of hand sanitizer. Ie: 4,500+ increase in potential suppliers, 170+ new supply resources, and 70+ million PPE units that ISED would not necessarily have had access to otherwise. 
 
Twenty-five integrated reports and four dashboards give everyone, from analysts to leadership, real-time visibility into the status of supplies across 20 PPE categories, as well as the lifecycle of a lead, where open opportunities are in the pipeline, and hot spots in terms of demand across the country. These reports and dashboards also give the team the kind of data-driven insights departments and agencies need in order to anticipate timelines and set realistic expectations so that partners in the mission can plan accordingly, which is especially important with the quickly moving, constantly changing nature of the COVID-19 crisis.
On the qualitative side, the team found a way to streamline the connection between government and industry, and encourage both sectors to work together in response to COVID-19. “Our experience serves as an example for any department or government organization, dealing with any crisis, that a strategy doesn’t have to be perfect — it just has to be fast,” said El Chaar. “Government has this mindset that says ‘resources are what they are,’ and ‘things have to move at this pace’ when, in reality, you can always be resourceful, rise to the occasion, and deliver meaningful projects much faster. That’s the outlook we need when dealing with a crisis of this scale.” 



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",Government,"Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada"
"“The Bank has a broad mission, and thus it can be tough to fully understand all of the things we do throughout the Latin American and Caribbean region,” said Federico Basañes, Knowledge, Innovation, and Communication Sector Manager at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), “but when you take a minute to really look at how and why we do what we do, you see the real benefit and real impact we bring to so many communities.”
The IDB works to improve lives across Latin America and the Caribbean: Through financial and technical support for countries working to reduce poverty and inequality, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) help improve health and education, government modernization, and advance infrastructure.
In other words, the IDB issues loans and grants that fund large-scale projects like bridges, highways, the training of teachers, and more. It partners with government leaders to develop strategic plans based on a given country’s priorities, and execute funding accordingly.
The organization consists of IDB public sector lending, IDB Invest (private sector lending), and IDB Lab (investment and research funding, grants).
“We are here to improve lives, and that includes the basics like bringing potable water to more homes or improving the accessibility of their region, as well as giving people the tools and information they need to be innovative; better schools, transportation lines, and more. Especially in the face of this new era – this new world – in which LATAM is living,”  Basañes continued.
While much of the world is learning to adapt to demands brought on by cloud computing and the digital era, LATAM (and the IDB itself) is learning to adapt to demands brought on by forces that are much more elemental.
First: climate change. Climate change has an especially strong impact on the LATAM region, “upending business as usual, leading to new policy priorities and the allocation of resources to previously underfunded areas,” said Alan Kind, Knowledge and Learning Lead Specialist. “Growing seasons have shrunk, coffee bean crops have had to move, climate-forced migration (as well as other reasons driving migration) further emphasize the resulting economic shifts; this is all influences the infrastructure that needs to be built and the services we offer.”
Second: gender equality is becoming increasingly important. In its work on the social-political factors that contribute to the health and well-being of countries, the World Economic Forum found that while “the lack of equality in economic opportunities is a serious issue in Central America that not only affects millions of women, but also limits the growth potential for whole countries,”[1] the region is recognizing, and acting on this. The most recent Global Gender Gap Index, an annual study conducted by the World Economic Forum on the magnitude of gender-based inequalities, found that several countries in LATAM have out-paced the rest of the world in closing the gender gap, reducing the economic risks that come from omitting half the ideas, skills, and labor resources from the workforce.[2]
“Plus, it’s become easier to access financing resources in the region, which means we can’t interest rates only. We have bring our top-notch technical expertise to assess countries and to facilitate a knowledgeable discussion on how to address complex challenges like climate change and employ an equally balanced workforce in order to create value for our clients,” said Kind. “The best way to do that is data. We need data-driven insights to deliver the kind of actionable, reliable advice our clients expect.”
The IDB team built a relationship management platform on Salesforce, a CRM knowledge base that delivers the collaborative intelligence of the Bank to any employee, working on any loan or grant, anytime, anywhere through three key functions:
Outreach and engagement: “We started with Marketing Cloud,” said Daysi Andrades, Lead IT Specialist for IDB. “We use it to disseminate information and to keep everyone up-to-date on what might influence their loan or grant application.” The team also uses it to manage social listening, keeping themselves up-to-date on real-time conversations.
Opportunity management: the IDB then added Service Cloud. Information from IDB’s research efforts, learnings from its email and social activities, and meeting notes from in-country reps are all gathered in a profile-like setting, creating a 360-degree view of the project as well as any resulting loans or grants.
Self-service communities: online community groups were launched on Community Cloud, giving Bank employees, their government clients, and partners in the region a 24x7, self-service access to report on a project’s status, check performance, and review ROI.
Collaboration: most recently, the team layered on Salesforce Anywhere, online documents that enable the team to share information, drive discussions, and take action directly from plans and notes.
IDB invited us to see the Serra do Mar project, firsthand. See how the team’s strategy turns investments in technology into investments in the mission.




“When we showed this platform to one of our Education specialists in Mexico, and he saw all the opportunities that his counterparts are pursuing in Ecuador – how they are tackling things like gender equality and climate change – his eyes lit up,” said Andrades. “He could see how these opportunities and discussions might apply to his work in Mexico, contact colleagues who had been there, done that for advice, and access information he otherwise wouldn’t have known existed. Our strategy collapsed silos immediately.”
IDB’s cloud strategy also freed up more time and energy to focus on the work that is mission-critical. Serra do Mar, a mountain range between Sao Paulo and the Southern Coast of Brazil, is home to the largest remaining stretch of Atlantic Rainforest. After seeing the damage illegal inhabitation had done to the delicate ecosystem, the State of Sao Paulo decided to relocate entire communities giving the park a chance to recover while also providing people with better access to water, electricity, housing services, and more. The State called upon the IDB for funding and support, and together the teams were able to relocate each and every family without using force. “It’s a complex solution because some of these people have been living there for decades,” said Basañes. “You need to understand the people; what drives them, what their concerns are. And technology gives you a way to capture all that information in an actionable, scalable format.”

“When we find ways to navigate the small stuff, unlock synergies, and be more coordinated, we get to do more work like this – work that matters,” said Basañes.



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",Financial Services,Inter-American Development Bank
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"Buying life insurance used to mean meeting with an insurance agent, filling out a lengthy paper application, then waiting up to 40 days for approval. John Hancock wanted to simplify that experience for its customers. In 2014, the financial services company turned to Salesforce to create more modern, digital experiences.
Partnering with Salesforce has helped John Hancock improve customer experiences. Today, prospective life insurance customers can go to John Hancock’s online portal to quickly get a quote, submit an application, and sign it. Long-term care insurance customers can now submit service claims online instead of by fax.
Find out how a Salesforce architect helped John Hancock’s team eliminate a major pain point.
Rethinking customer experiences and established business practices is a difficult task, especially for a brand with a 155-year legacy. “We’re prepared to take some risks along the way, innovate, and understand the path that the customer wants us to follow,” said Len van Greuning, VP, Technology Officer.
Before John Hancock implemented Salesforce, the company used several legacy systems, some of which were duplicative and nearing end-of-life. However, the systems didn’t provide the CRM capabilities John Hancock needed or provide a single view of customers.
The company decided to implement Salesforce and decommission the legacy systems. Today, John Hancock uses Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to give employees information about customers in one place. The company also uses Salesforce Shield, a feature of the Customer 360 Platform, to encrypt personally identifiable information (PII). John Hancock recently began using Salesforce Connect, another Platform feature, to connect Salesforce with a legacy data store, minimizing the need to replicate data across different systems.
In 2016, the company worked with a program architect from Salesforce Professional Services, which offers expertise and resources to help customers achieve their goals with Salesforce faster. “We really wanted to have heavily experienced professionals embedded into our teams and really work side by side with us,” van Greuning said.
The architect helped John Hancock’s team innovate faster, speeding up technology releases needed to support online applications such as the life insurance application portal. “In the past, deploying a new version of this application could be a four-to-six-week process. Having the Salesforce team there, we’re now able to do it twice a week,” van Greuning said.
Working with a Salesforce architect helped John Hancock launch its new online life insurance application portal, which allows customers to get a life insurance quote and submit an application quickly online. The new online life insurance portal has also improved experiences for John Hancock employees. Previously, processing a life insurance application required 140 manual steps. Today, all but a handful of steps are automated, which gives employees more time to focus on sales and customer support.
John Hancock also uses Salesforce to improve the experiences for long-term care customers. The company launched a long-term care portal with Salesforce Communities, which allows customers to upload images of receipts for service claims instead of faxing them.
One of the most significant changes John Hancock has experienced is gaining a single view of the customer. “Getting a single view of the customer has been very transformative for us,” van Greuning said.
In the past, the company managed customer information in 15 to 20 different locations. Today, John Hancock integrates customer information into Salesforce, which allows it to manage all of its customer data on a single platform. That means service agents no longer need to swivel between applications. They can access all of the information they need in Service Cloud to better serve John Hancock customers.
Len van Greuning’s advice for starting on your journey with Salesforce.
John Hancock’s journey with Salesforce isn’t over yet. The company plans to continue automating processes and exploring what’s possible with the platform. Connecting with the larger Salesforce community has helped John Hancock solve challenges and answer questions quickly, van Greuning said. The company’s architect reached out to his network of Salesforce experts to help John Hancock find answers. John Hancock’s Salesforce admins have expanded their knowledge with Trailhead online learning modules.
And for those looking to follow in John Hancock’s footsteps, Len van Greuning had one thing left to say: “My single point of advice to anybody starting on the journey is understanding all of the resources that Salesforce can offer you and tap into those, whether it’s an architect, professional services, Premier Support, or even the learnings of the Trailblazer community.”



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",Other,John Hancock
"To Johnny’s Selected Seeds — a purveyor of produce and flower seeds, tools, and supplies — growth is everything. That includes the business and its customers’ green-thumb skills.
Partnering with Salesforce, JSS launched its ecommerce store. It gives customers a way to quickly find the best products and discover educational content. Now customers spend 33% longer on the site and look at 29% more pages.

JSS has always adopted technologies with true benefit to customers. It launched its first online store in 1995. Today JSS implements revenue-driving tools that keep the site running reliably and personalize experiences. The company also uses AI to lead customers to products and lessons most relevant to them.
It all comes together to help JSS in its mission to grow food, knowledge, and communities.
Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.
",Retail,Johnny’s Selected Seeds
"When the world was hit by a once-in-a-century crisis, many said how lucky we were to have technology to help us work from home and stay connected to friends. But for some industries, it wasn’t that simple.
By the second week of March, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines were allowed to run just 10% of scheduled flights, leaving passengers stranded across the world, families separated, and trips on hold indefinitely. And that was just the beginning of a rollercoaster of changing regulations, travel bans, and closing borders throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When the U.S. announced the travel ban, customer support cases spiked from 5,000 daily cases to 50,000 – with 200,000 more in the queue,” recalled Véronique van Houwelingen-Visser, Salesforce Product Owner at Air France-KLM. “At a time when customers were panicking, Salesforce helped us react quickly to handle record-breaking volumes of cases as fast as possible.”
KLM has been transporting passengers and cargo for more than 100 years; it’s the oldest airline in the world still operating under its original name. The Dutch airline flies to destinations all over the world and has global customer services offices from the Netherlands to Dubai and Manila to Kuala Lumpur.
The service team of 350+ handles cases from eight social media channels, proving 24/7 support to customers in 10 languages. “Agents have a central console in Service Cloud where they can speak to customers on their platform of choice – in China customers use WeChat, while Japanese customers use Line, and Koreans use Kakaotalk. Other regions reach out on WhatsApp, Messenger, Apple Messages, Facebook, or Twitter,” explained Renske Siersema, Head of Owned Channels and Partnerships.
The airline launched its omnichannel service strategy with Salesforce in response to the Icelandic volcano eruption in 2010, which grounded around 100,000 flights across the world. When the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in 2020, KLM worked closely with the Salesforce team to put together a strategy to handle spiraling volumes of cases.
“Our Salesforce success manager proactively reached out to offer us support. When she heard that cases had jumped to 35,000 a day, she sent four Salesforce architects over that afternoon,” said van Houwelingen-Visser. “We knew we had to react quickly, so we pulled key stakeholders into a meeting room and came up with a plan.”
KLM has a close partnership with Salesforce, so the customer account team had thorough knowledge of the airline’s platform, strategy, and customers. At Salesforce, Customer Success is one of the core values. “As soon as I heard about the U.S. travel ban I realized the impact that would have on KLM, so I organized a task force (including Solution Engineers, a Program Architect and the Sales Regional VP) to help,” said Linda Tahboun, Principal Success Manager at Salesforce. Part of the task force visited the agent center to alleviate immediate pressure on the customer service agents. They streamlined processes and built a prioritization model to help KLM manage cases in a customer-centric way. “It was a unique experience working around the clock alongside the KLM team in the midst of a world crisis. We achieved phenomenal results in such a short timeframe and truly experienced KLM “Blue Heart” culture,” explained Linda Tahboun.
Before the pandemic, KLM worked on automating responses to frequently asked questions according to data captured in Salesforce, but the team quickly identified they could use bots to help triage cases and take out-of-date tickets out of the queue, help customers to self-serve for basic questions such as how to seek a refund, and prioritize the remaining cases according to urgency.
The team then defined a nine-step model to prioritize the remaining cases. Questions relating to flights due to leave in the next four hours were pushed to the front of the queue, followed by cases containing keywords such as ‘urgent’ or ‘tomorrow’, and flights due to leave within 12 hours.
While maintaining business as usual was the top priority, setting the airline’s recovery strategy was crucial for survival in the future. Via an integration with AI solution DigitalGenius, cases were flagged as medium urgency if they related to new sales opportunities or the customer had not yet responded to a payment link. 
Finally, customers who were already in conversation with an agent and loyalty card holders were prioritized above the remaining queries. “Every decision we make is in the best interests of the customer, and that means serving the most urgent cases first and letting customers at the back of the queue know that we’ll respond to them when we can,” said van Houwelingen-Visser.
This priority model was not new to KLM, it already had a simple model in place. However, the flexibility of Salesforce meant it was easy to adapt and scale up the model to cope with the latest challenges, and the approach was so successful the team rolled it out to Air France as well.
With cases prioritized, KLM still needed to deal with a huge volume of queries per agent, so it turned to anyone and everyone who’s role at KLM had been disrupted by the pandemic. “KLM is like a family – we have what we call ‘blue spirit’ – we value our customers and we value each other, so we pulled together and even had cabin crew and pilots handling cases when they weren’t flying,” explained Siersema.
The company ran training sessions to upskill colleagues on how to use the service console. Luckily, thanks to a user-friendly interface and previously time spent optimizing the solution, staff were up to speed in just a few hours.
With support from their colleagues, the service team grew to up to 1,000 people, and resolution times began to shrink in just 12 hours. Having such a  global team also meant agents could serve staff in multiple languages across different markets.
“Our success manager helped design a list view for simple cases and training materials for our temporary agents,” recalled Siersema. “We used Chatter to support each other, and complex cases were routed to more experienced staff.”
To keep things simple, the team adapted the Salesforce console to give temporary users more limited functionality so they could only carry out the basic tasks that were required of them. “Colleagues got so into using the console they started making suggestions for enhancements, it was amazing to have that level of buy-in from people,” said van Houwelingen-Visser.
During peak times, the team switched dashboards from monitoring how many cases each agent was handling and in what language, for example, to making sure channels had the right level of capacity.
“Salesforce is really adaptable, which is brilliant in a crisis,” added van Houwelingen-Visser. “During the first weeks of the crisis data became more important to us than ever, and we put together a team to process data and pull daily reports and dashboards to find out which topics are trending so we can make smarter business decisions.”
And the data looks promising, with growing volumes of queries from people planning on making a trip in the near-future and customer satisfaction levels returning to their pre-pandemic levels. 
“We were very happy we had Service Cloud in place at the start of the pandemic. If we hadn’t been able to react immediately we would never have been able to manage the unprecedented spike in case volumes,” said Siersema. “Together, we got a solution in place and upskilled our team rapidly. Salesforce was a key part of our survival during the worst crisis that’s ever hit our sector.”



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",Travel Transportation & Hospitality,KLM
"In the travel industry, points are the currency of loyalty programs. The longer you stay, or the further you fly, the more points you earn. And, as everybody knows, those points translate into free nights and free flights. When Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, which pioneered the boutique hotel concept in the United States, wanted to revamp their loyalty program, they had a loftier goal in mind. By focusing on creating “ridiculously personal experiences” for each of its guests, Kimpton has grown rapidly into a portfolio of 62 hotels and nearly 70 restaurants, bars, and lounges in 26 cities, each offering tailored experiences for guests. Guests have responded by rewarding Kimpton with the highest customer satisfaction scores (93%) and emotional attachment scores (89%) of any hotel company in the United States, according to Market Metrix Hospitality Index™. So rather than design a one-size-fits-all loyalty program, Kimpton set out to devise a sophisticated CRM and loyalty program, delivering more personalized experiences to build brand loyalists for life. Armed with survey data that showed its guests highly value experiential rewards, the company developed Kimpton Karma Rewards. Building the new program on the Salesforce Platform and Marketing Cloud, the hospitality company was able to infuse Kimpton Karma with opportunities to surprise and delight members in ways that felt always personal — but never intrusive. “Our goal is to ensure that our digital experience aligns with our hotel experience, and the feeling that you have when you walk into one of our hotels,” says Kathleen Reidenbach, SVP Marketing. “Marketing Cloud enables us to personalize each customer touch point with tailored content, offers and more, sending travelers on a delightful and fun journey.”
Inside Karma, a proprietary algorithm uniquely awards guests by taking into account not only a member's stays and purchases, but also less obvious actions such as whether a member books their stay directly on the website, attends the hosted evening Wine Hour, or interacts with the brand through social media. The potential for surprise is one of the hallmarks of Kimpton Karma. That “little extra” Kimpton awards to its members is deliberately randomized, which can change what is normally a quid pro quo into unexpected delight. Chatter allows hotel staff across the country to directly communicate and input information about guest preferences so these perks and surprises become even more personalized across all Kimpton properties. ""This allows us to truly treat individuals as individuals,"" says Reidenbach. “We find unique ways of delighting guests when they least expect it.” For example, a guest recently posted an Instagram photo of Kimpton’s fun yoga mats in her room. A week later, she came home to a new Kimpton yoga mat waiting at her doorstep. “But we don’t promise anything,” Reidenbach emphasizes. “If people are expecting a gift, it’s not as much fun.” Kimpton is setting the standard with amenities like these but the company’s leadership is careful about never getting too comfortable in its ways. “We’re continuously innovating and listening to our guests. We want to keep finding ways to make travel and life at home better. We are a lifestyle brand that builds long term relationships with our guests — our journey with the guest extends far beyond their travel,” Reidenbach shared. The company prefers the insights gleaned from its personal interactions with guests to the broad trends produced by big data. “People change and it’s important to get to know them on a one-to-one basis so we can understand their evolving needs and interests,” says Reidenbach. “The better we know our customers, the more relevant we can make their experience.” The ultimate goal of Kimpton Karma is to increase guest retention. The key is wowing guests who are making their first or second stay with Kimpton. Kimpton’s proprietary formula, enabled by Salesforce, automatically identifies guests who are prime candidates for conversion and alerts the property where they’re staying or dining.



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",Travel Transportation & Hospitality,Kimpton
"For KONE, keeping people moving is at the heart of its business. A global leader in the elevator and escalator industry, the business provides elevators, escalators, moving walkways, and automatic building doors to more than 550,000 customers worldwide. More than 1 billion people use their products every day.
With the company running many mission-critical business processes on the Salesforce Platform, KONE recognized they needed an application that was stable, fast, and scalable. To Deliver these benefits to end users, customers, and partners using the Salesforce Platform, KONE drew on personalized, proactive expertise provided by Salesforce’s Signature Success Plan team.
Here are five lessons from KONE’s development journey you can use to maximize the value of your next digital investment.
1. Use a customizable solution to achieve your specific goals.
2. Choose trusted partners to ensure the stability, performance, and scalability of the Salesforce Platform.
3. Work with specialists to overcome development and implementation issues.
4. Ensure the project stays on track with round-the-clock support.
5. Preempt problems with proactive services.
To achieve their goal of streamlining their field service operations, KONE developed a management application using a customizable field service solution.
The solution weighs criteria including technicians’ skills, distance to travel, and the severity of customer issues to generate optimized schedules for the company’s maintenance technicians, available via a mobile app. Technicians can also use the app to access other information, such as work orders and service history, and to submit paperwork from anywhere.
For additional peace of mind, KONE also built a backup system for dispatching maintenance technicians using Heroku, a Salesforce software development platform. In the unlikely event that the company’s primary field service management solution is unavailable, this system ensures the company’s dispatchers can send a technician to assist in an emergency.
“Field service management is mission-critical for us,” said Christophe Poirier, Salesforce Platform Architect at KONE. “We have to ensure that if someone needs help, they can get through to our call center and that the call center can quickly dispatch a technician.”
Solution Owner, Field Service Operations

To realize the full potential of their Salesforce Platform, KONE’s project team drew on the proactive, personalized expertise included with the Signature Success Plan.
This included access to a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM). The TAM worked closely with the KONE team to help them realize their vision by providing invaluable technical guidance, unlocking exclusive industry-based insights, and acting as an advocate for KONE at every step.
By leveraging the TAM’s advanced technical knowledge, the business was able to resolve problems faster and accelerate overall time to value.
For example, when a scheduled refresh of two of the company’s systems took 10 days, the TAM was able to explain what the problem was and suggest a solution. This allowed the team to take steps to fix the problem and reduce the time needed for the next refresh.
By sharing his technical and industry expertise with the KONE team, the TAM has also improved the team’s technical maturity.
“Our Technical Account Manager has been super helpful on countless occasions,” said Poirier. “I consider him part of our team. His objectives are very much driven by ours.”
Calling in specialist expertise when needed helps ensure that minor hurdles don’t become significant roadblocks to progress. For example, KONE was able to access specialist knowledge across the Salesforce ecosystem throughout the project.
This was made even easier with the assistance of the TAM, who was able to act as a go-between and quickly connect KONE to the Signature Support Engineers when needed.
“Before we had the Signature Success Plan, the time needed to resolve problems was much longer,” said Jörg Knochenhauer, Head of Maintenance Application Management at KONE. “Now, with the help of our Technical Account Manager, we can go directly to the resources we need. He can explain the problem to the Salesforce experts and get the right people on board immediately for a faster resolution.”
Access to round-the-clock technical support and expedited case resolution can help minimize downtime and downstream impact during development and implementation phases.
To mitigate disruption from technical issues, KONE’s development team took advantage of 24/7/365 technical support and emergency response support included in the Signature Success Plan. This allowed the team to log a ticket about a business-stopping issue online and receive a response within 15 minutes, with updates every 30 minutes.
The fast response times proved to be invaluable in supporting the development team to move quickly to help teams on the ground. If needed, a Salesforce expert immediately opened a bridge call with the local team, working closely with them to find out what was causing a particular issue. Through support management oversight and participation, KONE was able to experience the fastest, most seamless resolutions.
“The support from our Signature Success Plan is a last line of defense for us,” said Pyyhtiä. “It gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that if there is something that our internal support organizations are unable to solve, then there is another level of support that we can reach out to for specialized help.”
Salesforce developers were also on hand throughout the project to optimize custom code and provide guidance and support pre-production.
Proactive Services such as continuous monitoring, early alerts, remediation, and annual technical health reviews can be helpful for preempting problems.
With the help of their trusted advisor, KONE used proactive capabilities included in their Signature Success Plan to strengthen the stability and performance of their Salesforce Platform.
For example, proactive monitoring enables the application management team to identify early indicators that a threshold is likely to be exceeded and address the problem before it occurs.
Meanwhile, pre- and post-release assessments act as an additional level of security by helping to identify errors that have been accidentally introduced into the code as part of a new development or enhancement.
Salesforce Platform Architect

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",Technology,KONE
"Larger in population than 41 U.S. states, L.A. County is home to over 10 million people. In fact, nearly one-third of all of California’s residents live, work, and play within its 1,433-square-mile area. From both an environmental perspective and a lifestyle perspective, traffic is one of the biggest issues the area faces; a study conducted by INRIX shows that in Los Angeles alone, drivers spend more than 102 hours a year stuck in traffic during peak travel times (compared to the national average of 41 hours per year).* And, the lower price of motor fuel and cars in general relative to recent years, combined with an increase in the number of driver's licenses issued, has brought even more traffic to L.A.'s freeways, contributing to the existing congestion. 
“We know traffic in L.A. is the worst in the nation, and we want to fix that by getting people off the road and into public transit, drive green efforts instead of driving cars, and make better use of L.A.'s infrastructure,” said Robin O'Hara, Executive Officer responsible for customer experience in the regional TAP Transit Smart Card Program at Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro). “TAP is responsible for providing a fast, secure, and reliable transportation payment system with flexible choices for our clients and customers — we are committed to giving people living in L.A. County a better quality of life.”
With this kind of volume comes equally large variety. “L.A. County is extremely diverse,” O'Hara said. “Whether someone holds a 9-to-5 job or works off-schedule hours, commutes in from the Valley or is just trying to get across town, prefers to check schedules and routes via an app or still finds printed directions more reliable, we have a huge number of people who need to get around. And they do so very differently.”
O'Hara's comment reflects a dynamic common across many communities, nationwide.
As digital, tweet-happy millennials have redefined what today's generation considers to be fast, high-quality service, organizations have been similarly impacted across all major industries: They must adapt their service models accordingly if they are to stay relevant, while also catering to more traditional transit riders who prefer paper tickets and engagements via email or phone calls — all on the lean, mean budget typical of the public sector. For transit organizations specifically, this is all in the shadow of an industry that has been completely disrupted by ride-sharing business models. 
“If we are going to attract people to busways and railways, we need to provide a fast, easy, friendly customer experience for everyone. Those who like to drive, those who have the means to take a Lyft or Uber, those who want greener or more active choices, and those who appreciate the familiarity and accessibility of a traditional transit system. We have to think about equity,” said O'Hara. 
O’Hara and her TAP team knew they needed to offer more choices if they were going to retain existing customers and attract new riders, and they needed it to be a one-stop shop: all available on TAP.
TAP is the County's regional transit program that gives riders a single, reusable, reloadable card that works across L.A.'s 25 public transit agencies (of which L.A. Metro is the biggest). It runs on a Cubic system called Nextfare and is read by an RFID-style device on trains, buses, and so on “The TAP cards work really well; they interact in less than half a second with our hardware, and are perfect for the instant access that is needed as millions of people conduct millions of transactions a day when boarding our buses and trains. However, as you can probably imagine, that ‘card + hardware’ experience is difficult to replicate with account-based transportation options like bike sharing or ride sourcing. You can't just add a hardware device to those experiences. We asked Lyft; they told us no,” O'Hara laughed. 
As more transit organizations are looking to modernize their services, certain cities are starting from scratch and building entirely new account-based systems. But O’Hara consulted with TAP’s consultant, Mark Kroncke of Invoke Technologies, who recommended not throwing the entire transit system infrastructure out. Rather, he outlined a plan that (1) kept the hardware infrastructure since it was working well,  and then (2) added a digital layer, enabling seamless connections between TAP’s wallet function and account-based platforms like Lyft’s. The result: TAPforce — an engagement layer on Salesforce that turns the TAP card into a TAP account, allowing Metro customers to take part in ride-share experiences and more traditional public transit services alike.
Account-based service: Service Cloud gives TAP a platform that stores data about a customer in a profile-like setting for each TAP user. This gives employees one, central place to review sales history, see an account’s balance, address customer service inquiries, manage cases, and more across both hardware-based transit and account-based transit.
Enterprise platform services: Publicis Sapient, Metro’s implementation partner, was brought in to ""configure the engagement layer to integrate with third-party systems, like Metro Bike Share, allowing patrons to pay for partnering services with one account,” said Publicis.Sapient’s Chad Kaltenstein. “We also configured it to integrate with TAP’s website so that patrons can register and reload TAP cards online, apply promotion codes, and more — all over desktop or mobile.”
Marketing and outreach: Marketing Cloud was layered on as a tool to help the team get their messages out in real time, enable opt-in marketing choices and reach their customers via any digital platform. Email Studio automates and executes email outreach based on the same profile datasets. “This has given us a lot of flexibility,” said O'Hara. “For example, if we want to incentivize people onto Bike Share, we can adjust the price in TAPforce in minutes by offering coupon codes or other discounts, and then communicate that out, drawing people into new forms of transportation that they might not have tried before.”
Data and insights: Tableau CRM gives TAP integrated reports and dashboards, which pull datasets from different systems — discount groups, third-party systems, payment methods, social platforms, and more — into a single view. Clickable, web-style interfaces allow users to click into details or roll up to summary views, giving staff the tools they need to analyze results, surface trends, pinpoint key events, and apply learnings to future activity. 
Instead of building a single-purpose solution, the TAP team deployed a strategic platform. With a keen understanding of their customer profiles and innovative thinking, the team “used the cloud to transform a card-based system into a hybrid, account-based system that keeps all the legacy benefits while adding new flexibility for growth,” said O'Hara.
Robin O'Hara walks through the platform, the resulting integrations, and overall benefits in detail.
The platform's flexibility has opened new doors, created new efficiencies, and reinforced L.A. Metro's commitment to equity. 
In the same way TAPforce can now speak to third-party transportation modes, it can speak to third-party payment systems, offering new ways to pay. People can now fund their TAP Wallet using cash. “Before, you needed a credit or debit card. But now, un-banked customers can use their phones or computers to download or print a simple bar code and take it into one of over 1,000 convenience stores and local businesses that are set up with the PayNearMe cash payment system — and load cash to their account via the cashier,” said O'Hara. “You can still pay via credit or debit card, or PayPal now. But with PayNearMe, we're just better equipped to serve those who haven't previously been able to participate due to not having a credit or debit card.”
The team also set up a loyalty program. “Our customers will soon be able to earn points as they make purchases using their TAP account, which can then be cashed in as credit toward their service of choice.” Although the functionality is built, the TAP team is still working on the redemption model, which will be released before the end of 2019. “We aim to include Bike Share, parking, microtransit, and more,” said O'Hara. “When you go into Starbucks with your rewards points, they don’t just hand you a black coffee. They let you pick from a menu of options. We have built our rewards program based on that same model.” This kind of functionality is only possible with a user-centric, account-based, comprehensive platform.
Most importantly, the success of these new services is starting to show in TAP’s numbers. On the first day Bike Share registration opened, over 1,000 Bike Share accounts were registered by new customers. Visits to the TAP website have doubled, thanks to new functionalities such as program signups. “The new functionalities were introduced as a soft launch, so no advertising was associated with their introduction. Customers have obviously found the changes intuitive, easy to use, and beneficial, so needless to say we are very excited to see what kind of success we get once we launch our ad campaign, coming this spring,” said O’Hara.
“We're incentivizing people to get off the roads and into public transit, shared services, or active transport,” O’Hara said. “We can now offer incentives to be green, and reduce strain on L.A. County. We're demonstrating how to transform the customer experience, incorporate modern transit options, and really think regionally.”
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) is unique among the nation's transportation agencies. Created in 1993, Metro is a multimodal transportation agency that transports about 1.3 million passengers daily on a fleet of 2,200 clean air buses and six rail lines. The agency also oversees bus, rail, highway and other mobility-related building projects and leads transportation planning and programming for Los Angeles County.



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",Other,transit
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"LanguageLine is no ordinary Salesforce customer. Its real-time interpreter services operate 24 hours, 365 days a year, and keeping the platform online can literally be a matter of life or death.
“We serve more than 25,000 customers, including law enforcement officials, 911 operators, and emergency room staff. They all depend on us, and if we’re offline, lives are at risk,” remarked Jeff Cordell, Chief Information Officer at LanguageLine.
In recent years, LanguageLine started moving its operations into the cloud, using Salesforce technology to route audio and video calls to the right interpreters anywhere in the world.
LanguageLine relies on the Customer 360 Platform for its proprietary geo-redundant, highly available transaction processing and Salesforce’s highest level of service and support.
The initial plan offered to LanguageLine provided escalated phone support, but most agents weren’t familiar with the specific, unique ways LanguageLine used Salesforce. Whenever they needed to bring a new agent up to speed, it cost time they didn’t have.
Also, while the plan guaranteed 1-hour response times, LanguageLine felt the nature of their business required something faster. So, they decided to upgrade to Mission Critical Support (MCS).
MCS gives Salesforce customers access to a highly agile team that knows their specific business, and is available 24/7. With Mission Critical Support, Severity 1 issues get a guaranteed response within 15 minutes, with personalized updates every 30 minutes. It’s ideal for customers whose uptime is essential and can’t be compromised.
“We promise 99.99% uptime to our customers, which equates to less than one hour of downtime in a year,” Cordell added. “We have to work very closely with Salesforce to ensure we beat that uptime guarantee and offer as close to 100% uptime as possible.”
At one point, LanguageLine was seeing high latency in its platform. They needed to fix it. Their Salesforce primary engineer — part of MCS — decided to move their operations to a new Salesforce instance that offered better performance, and accomplished the migration with no downtime.
“Before, processing a call on our system could take as long as six seconds. Now it’s performing well under 100 milliseconds. That was a massive difference for our customers when seconds count,” noted Cordell.
MCS has helped LanguageLine reduce risks while maximizing their Salesforce platform performance. As LanguageLine develops new unified communications contact solutions, Salesforce continues to be a partner in the process, making sure they have the support and platform they need to succeed.
“I see our Salesforce designated support team as advocates for our success. They look out for us and make sure everyone understands our platform and industry-specific needs, and that’s invaluable for our business,” added Cordell.



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",Communications,LanguageLine
"When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Larimer County found itself in an all too familiar position: looking for ways to stand up brand the new emergency response programs and services we have seen dominate headlines the past year; contact tracing, vaccine management, and more.
Larimer County is located in Northern Colorado, about 100 miles outside of Denver. It is home to over 350,000 people. It’s IT Department works to enable programs and services through the use of modern technology, “which helps us be good stewards of public resources,” said Joseph Schreurs, Application Services Manager, Larimer County Information Technology Department. “We partner with other departments across the county to deliver solutions that help us all be more efficient. And COVID-19 only reinforced the importance of this as a guiding principle. It made us zero-in quickly and answer questions like ‘what can we do with that we have, right now?’”
“COVID-19 was this emergent need that we as a team have to take action on right away at each and every step,” said Joseph Schreurs, Application Services Manager, Larimer County Information Technology Department. “So we started off by managing processes and data collection via Google Docs. As you can imagine, when there's one or two cases, sure, that can work, but it doesn't scale well. We would have had to double, triple, or quadruple our staff just to meet the workload demanded.”
But it takes time to hire double or triple staff, and it takes budget – two things departments and agencies do not have the luxury of when managing a crisis. Instead, Schreurs and team got creative and shifted employees from roles that had come to a standstill into new, high demand positions. They turned restaurant health inspectors into contact tracers and office managers into clinic operations leads, “which meant we in IT had to find a way to enable new programs and train a new workforce with no time to spare,” Schreurs continued.
On the people side, Schreurs and team needed to give staff the right tools and information to take action on public health direction. They needed to consolidate information from various Google Docs into a personalized case record, and then make that available in real-time without sacrificing compliance requirements so that staff track the case and could meet service level agreements. “If the county is going to guarantee that we will notify people of their test results in 24 to 48 hours, we need to enable that at the system level, otherwise staff can’t make that happen” said Schreurs. ""We had to give them the tools to simplify the navigation process so that they could focus on the mission-critical work.”
On the program side, Schreurs and team needed to translate public health needs into an actionable workflows. “Early on, it become very obvious that our non-English-speaking populations were going to especially struggle with this crisis,” said Katie O’Donnell, Public Information Officer for Larimer County Department of Health and Environment. “Thus, we had to make data collection efforts and public service announcements available in multiple languages. The last thing we want is our more at-risk populations not understanding what we're asking them to do.”
As the pandemic continued to evolve, and we not only learned more about the virus but also the levers with which we could address the fallout, O’Donnell and team needed the tools and system used by their teams to be as agile. “We had to start collecting ethnicity data and race data because that's required by the State of Colorado for testing. And then as we’ve continued that for vaccines, we’ve had to be able to pull and report on our own data so that we could answer questions like ‘are we equitably distributing doses?’ and ‘how at risk are our communities?’”
Before the pandemic hit, Larimer had deployed a comprehensive application on Salesforce for the County’s criminal justice department that had several similarities to the system requirements demanded by COVID-19.  “We had cases and portions to show public data for the jail population, and saw that contact tracing really followed very similar principles and practices. So we got the team together, used their spreadsheets to identify inputs and outputs, and built a model. Then we met with outbreak management and did the same exercise, and then the vaccine distribution team…and a week-and-a-half later, we went live.”
Schreurs, O’Donnell, and team launched a comprehensive COVID-19 Response Management System on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Platform. It is an agile emergency response management system that Larimer County is using to manage communications, testing, contact tracing, outbreak response, vaccine distribution, clinic staffing, reporting, and location operations and logistics. Here’s how it works:
Communications
Larimer County residents start with the public website where they can look up information, like the number of cases or hospitalization rate that has been aggregated from contact tracing records, in English or Spanish and determine current level of risk. “Let’s say I decide the risk is low enough and I go ahead and go to the grocery store. And, wouldn’t you know it, two days later I am not feeling so great,” said Schreurs.
Testing, tracing, and outbreak management
Joe can return to the same website and register for a COVID test. He fills out the screening questions (what symptoms he is experiencing, which store he went to, and so on), enters his data on his demographics, enters his contact information, notes any onsite language requirements, and selects a testing appointment from a list of open time slots available at the locations nearest his house. Joe’s information is captured in a personal profile record, and he receives a ticket via a print-ready prompt and email.
Once Joe arrives onsite for his testing appointment he presents his ticket and gets checked in. His sample is collected and sent to the lab for processing. Once his results are available, the lab uploads them into Joe’s profile record and the system notifies Larimer County staff so that they can follow up accordingly. “I tested positive, so they send me an isolation order. I also get a call from a contact tracer within 24 hours to find out who else I may have come in recent contact with so that the team can issue quarantine orders,” said Schreurs.
Vaccine management
Joe recovers, and later learns he is now eligible for a vaccine after receiving an automated email notification from Larimer County that used his same profile information to flag him and assign a PIN. “PINs have been really important to us because they give us a little more control over ensuring eligible people are the ones registering for vaccine appointments,” said O’Donnell. “If someone tries to register with a PIN that doesn’t match the email address with which that PIN was issued, the system won’t allow them to book an appointment.”
Joe returns to the same website and uses his PIN to book a vaccine appointment. The system sends you an automated email reminder complete with check-in ticket, following the same user experience that Joe went through for scheduling his COVID test a while back.
Once Joe arrives onsite for his vaccine appointment he presents his ticket, gets checked in, answers a series of vaccination-specific screening questions which are captured in the same profile record, and receives his first dose.
When Joe arrives back home, he finds an email notifying him that his second appointment was booked automatically in the recommended time frame, triggered when the onsite staff confirmed his first vaccination event as successful. Joe can either confirm that appointment or reschedule as needed. Joe’s second appointment is managed in the same way – email reminders, contactless ticket check-in, and vaccination data entry.
The Larimer County team launched their emergency response management system in just two weeks by going through a series daily sprints, backed by proven best practices. The team joins us for a webinar presentation to show us more.
Three weeks after going live, Larimer’s onsite staff was fully enabled to take action and collected data all in one place. “This gives us the ability to track where we are at in terms of overall level of risk, rate of spread, rate of vaccination, and more. We can also pinpoint where our bottlenecks are and address them right away. For example, we brought our contact tracing response time down to just under the 24-hour mark,” said Schreurs.
“At the larger, emergency response management level we can also track our no-shows, look for patterns as to why that might be happening, increase the number of reminder emails, report on whether or not we hit our thresholds, and more – data that would have otherwise been anecdotal,” added O’Donnell. “At the more granular, program-specific level we can see this all in real-time, program by program, which means we can watch a running tally of no-shows throughout the day and contact the next eligible people to try and come in as we go. We're not waiting ‘til the very end of the day to try and rush 50 people in all of the sudden.”
To date, Larimer County’s system has managed over 31,300 contacts. The team is also expanding its partnerships beyond its own staff, reassigned from paused departments to include health care providers and school districts. Those groups are each running their own clinics in the same environment, extending the team’s ability to get more targeted and more timely with their response efforts. Most recently, FEMA and the State of Colorado also onboarded with the system, using it to run their mass-vaccination clinics they stood up in Larimer County.
“We’ve taken this big, complex problem and broken it down in a way that enables everyone to take action and help us in this fight,” said Schreurs.



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",Healthcare & Life Sciences,Larimer County
"For 140 years, Lilly has been a leader in the pharmaceutical industry, having grown from humble roots into a global company with 38,000 employees — and it’s still based in its hometown of Indianapolis. Lilly’s storied history includes being the first drug manufacturer to mass-produce lifesaving medications such as penicillin, insulin, and the polio vaccine.
Trends in both technology and healthcare economics, however, suggest that the future for pharmaceutical firms will call for increasingly specialized and personalized forms of treatment, requiring a deeper understanding of, and involvement with, patients than ever before.
“Our goals are to meet the needs of the future, which are increasingly upon us today,” said Mike Meadows, Chief Technology Officer and 33-year Lilly veteran. That future includes enhancing customer engagement and improving internal processes by building a robust reference architecture. And Salesforce, Meadows acknowledged, is a big part of that effort.
“For us, the journey of change in terms of communication and connection with our customers has been pretty dramatic over the last five years,” said Rob Brown, Chief Marketing Officer. “It's really a matter of us evolving from a customer-focused company to a customer-centric company. That's a hard thing to do, especially for a successful company [with 38,000 employees] around the world. That's the journey we're on.”
When it comes to customer service, “we’re trying to change that experience within the world of pharma, which is a pretty new endeavor,” said Meadows. The goal, he adds, is to “develop a personal connection and provide personalized service to an individual that feels cared for.”
It’s an approach that has special relevance for Lilly because many of the company’s new medications — particularly infusion- or injection-based products — can be challenging for some patients to manage. Changes in healthcare funding laws have further incentivized healthcare providers of all kinds to boost patient compliance with treatments for chronic illnesses in order to avoid painful and costly relapses.
Customer-centrism requires a single platform across all lines of business. “With Salesforce,” said Jo Taylor, Chief Customer Officer, “we have a connection to a company that can help us understand what are some of the most flexible, reliable, and secure platforms that we can use to... ultimately make it so that the consumer has a better experience in managing his or her own illness.”
Achieving these higher levels of customer-centricity requires improved internal coordination across departments and locations — and Salesforce has been of help there, as well. Using both the Customer 360 Platform and Heroku, Lilly’s IT department is able to quickly develop and deploy critical applications to global teams. Lilly employees have built more than 50 apps on the Customer 360 Platform — including enterprise and citizen developer apps. One such app streamlines the arduous and stringent process of scheduling meetings between healthcare providers and Lilly reps to contract physicians. The app brings together vast data management systems and improves workflows while complying fully with medical privacy regulations. By using agile methodologies and an MVP (minimum viable product) approach, the platform development process at the company transforms ideas into apps in under seven weeks, on average.
“Salesforce has not only allowed us to advance the experience we're trying to provide for our customers at a more personalized level,” said Jen Oleksiw, Vice President of Information Technology, “but it is also helping us improve our relationships with our internal business partners. We're able to work with them and use agile methodology in order to deliver on what they need for their customers, and also what they need to do their jobs better each and every single day.”
One prominent feature of the Patient Connect Platform app is a daily online survey that records how well patients are feeling, both physically and emotionally.
As Meadows explained, the purpose of collecting and analyzing this survey data within Salesforce is to give Lilly the ability to anticipate a patient’s needs, and “meet those customers at a point of need, as opposed to meeting them at a point of request or requirement.” Thanks to predictive data analytics, patient care always runs ahead of patient needs, ensuring the best possible experience.
“We want to be able to understand our customers better than they understand themselves,” said Oleksiw. “We have an opportunity to really take a look at the data we are collecting and predict what they're going to need in the future. And, more importantly, to continue on that one-to-one relationship vision that we’re going after, and provide a personalized experience just for them.”
But the value that personalization brings doesn't stop at better understanding and predicting patient needs — it also extends to doctors, too. Outreach to busy physicians has become increasingly difficult using traditional means, as physicians no longer make themselves available to pharmaceutical reps. Yet Lilly’s first digital sales campaign targeting physicians has shown promise as an alternative.
Bamforth credited Salesforce with stimulating new thinking on his team while developing digital marketing campaigns. “Having somebody in the room that is seeing this sort of digital development across industries and challenging our thinking and challenging the paradigm is incredibly, incredibly valuable,” he said.



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",Other,pharmaceutical
"Now in its 25th year, M1 is a vibrant and dynamic digital network operator that has brought numerous innovations and achieved many firsts in the Singapore market. Since the launch of its commercial services in 1997, M1 has become one of the first operators to be awarded one of Singapore’s two nationwide 5G standalone network licenses. It is also the first operator to offer nationwide 4G services as well as ultra high-speed fixed broadband, fixed voice, and other services on the Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network (NGNBN). M1 also successfully rolled out 5G services for its consumers, offering access to 5G services for all.

In 2019, M1 was privatized and became a key pillar of Keppel Corporation’s connectivity business, which includes tapping M1’s digital solutions and 5G network to enhance the Group’s suite of solutions for sustainable urbanization. Working closely with Keppel, M1 embarked on a digital transformation to digitally overhaul all M1’s processes and offerings, with a customer-first approach.

“Our vision is to become a digital-first telco and provide new made-to-measure personalized experiences for our customers. This will involve driving new digital capabilities into the business and reimagining our ways of working so that we can add more value to every interaction. We also want to set a new standard for what a digital experience looks like in our industry, ” said Nathan Bell, Chief Digital Officer, M1.

With the hyperspeed deployment of Salesforce, M1 is on the path to achieving these goals and deepening engagement with its 1,500 employees and more than 2 million customers.
M1 set out on its transformation believing it would be a gradual journey, but as COVID-19 began to spread, the urgency increased. “In the current climate, digital transformation is essential rather than a choice. We needed to provide these digital experiences not only to make life easier for customers and employees, but to make things safer,” said Bell.

Going paperless became a priority and M1 partnered with Salesforce to accelerate the move to ebills and to digitalize contracts and invoicing. Communications Cloud (formerly Vlocity) offered an ideal solution right out of the box, incorporating product catalogue, order management, and quoting with CPQ.

The digitalization of its activities and offerings means there are no manual checks required or need for employees to rekey data between systems. M1 is also able to ensure that teams are only handling tasks by exception, rather than handling all orders from verification to validation and order creation.

Additional results of the digitalization include an increased percentage of self-service transactions. M1 expects this to grow from between 15–20% currently to around 90%. M1 is also automating the complex order provisioning process and estimates an 85% reduction in human touch. Bell said this means teams can focus more on managing order fallouts or failure, as opposed to the repetitive, uninteresting task of cranking the handle for every single order in every single way.

“When implementing new technologies, adoption is typically a push exercise and you have to convince people why they should get onboard. In this case, it was different. Everyone wanted to know what they could do to help get this out to our customers fast. Salesforce enabled us to deliver an incredible outcome and one that’s sustainable as we move into the new norm,” said Bell.
To remain continually relevant in this rapidly changing market, M1 knows that it needs to be relevant to its customers and provide customers with a great service experience, no matter what channel they want to engage on. Consistency is key and M1 is using Salesforce to connect different touchpoints to hyper-personalize the customer experience.

M1 has rolled out Sales Cloud to B2B sales reps and is using Service Cloud in its contact center. It is using Tableau CRM to empower its business teams with rich data insights they can use to provide customers with personalized recommendations.

Tableau also allows teams to self-service their own analysis and surface insights in real time rather than waiting days for reports from data analysts. This enables teams to act on data insights and make decisions faster.

This move to self-service has involved a journey of enablement, with workshops and support to help the business team gradually become more self-sufficient. As this journey comes to completion, the data analytics team will be freed up to focus on identifying patterns in data that other teams may not have realized. M1 will therefore be able to realize the right balance between empowering the business and leveraging analysts’ time and expertise to tackle new analytics challenges rather than creating repetitive reports.

Most importantly, this outcome will support M1 in always seeking to improve the way it serves customers, enabling business teams to accelerate decision-making and increase relevance while realizing its goal to be a digital-first telco.

With a goal to become a fully cloud-enabled digital services provider, M1 also plans to leverage Marketing Cloud to provide customers with hyper-personalized offers and promotions. Combined with Datorama, this will also empower its team with real-time insights so it can adapt campaigns based on the changing needs of the market and customers’ individual interests.
To realise the full potential of its digitalization, M1 has used MuleSoft to integrate Salesforce with its Operations Support System and other technologies such as its billing system. Future integrations will support M1 as it works to break down data silos and consolidate 150 legacy applications down to 30. This will ultimately enable a 360 degree view of the customer and more connected customer experience. It will also increase standardization and scalability across its systems.

“Omni-channel is being redefined and we see increasing fluidity between channels with customers moving more frequently from one to the next. Salesforce will help us keep pace with our customers and ensure a consistent experience, no matter which blend of channels they use,” said Bell.

The digital transformation journey at M1 was supported by its partnership with the Salesforce Professional Services team, who helped the telco innovate faster by making the right design decisions at crucial stages. Planning for long term success was always part of the strategy, with an early adoption of best practices to make it easy to maintain, scale, and grow into the future.

“At M1, our new brand and promise of providing hyper personalized experiences and services for our customers is supported by our digital transformation. With our partners, we want to focus on building an innovative and forward-looking technology infrastructure to keep M1 at the forefront of building Singapore’s digital economy while driving real value to our customers,” said Bell.

Of course, all of this innovation would not be possible if not for M1’s employees, and it has helped them to expand their skills by delivering training programs with Salesforce and promoting self-learning on the Trailhead platform. It is also establishing new capabilities in data proficiency and coding, and encouraging employees to embrace more agile ways of working. This drive toward a culture of continuous learning supports the complete digital transformation project.

As the transformation reaches maturity, customers will look to M1 as a source of innovation as they themselves prepare to take the next step of their digital journey.

“More and more of our customers are looking for solutions that they can procure remotely and are available as and when they need them. We want our customers and also our partners to know that we are there to support them in their time of need and that we can evolve to meet their ongoing requirements and exceed their expectations,” said Bell.



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",Communications,M1
"According to Megan Smith, Senior CRM Campaign Manager at Manheim, the company’s challenges were exemplified by one particular incident. “I remember trying to prepare an email campaign informing our affected customers of a server outage,” she recalled. “It took us hours to complete. By the time we finished, the outage was already fixed.” Incidents like these showed Manheim it wasn’t using its Salesforce tools to their fullest—which meant thousands of salespeople and marketing staff worldwide were less effective than they could be. “We knew the Salesforce platform had a lot of powerful features that could do what we wanted, but we didn’t know where to start,” Smith noted. “We were trying to do a lot of complicated things and needed guidance.”
To fill these knowledge gaps, Manheim’s Salesforce Success Manager recommended Accelerators, which are part of the Premier+ Success Plan. Essentially, Accelerators are goal-oriented engagements designed to teach companies like Manheim how to best use their Salesforce Platform.
“We worked with our Success Manager to identify the big metrics we wanted to move. Then she helped us discover potential solutions and the Accelerators that could help us do that,” said Smith.
Manheim also gained access to an Accelerator Success Specialist, a Salesforce expert on the Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud platforms who provided guidance and implementation support.
Manheim’s first goal was to maximize its Marketing Cloud productivity. Their Accelerator Specialist recommended a Marketing Cloud Connector Accelerator.
The Accelerator taught Manheim how to link data extensions across its Salesforce Clouds and provided templates that demonstrated best practices in data management.
After completing this first Accelerator, Manheim decided to pursue the Journey Builder and Email Segmentation Accelerator in order to improve agility and save time when preparing marketing and sales campaigns.
Manheim learned how to automate certain campaign creation steps and maintain email targeting best practices.
The Accelerator Specialist also built templates that could be used for nationwide and local campaigns alike.
“As we learned from each Accelerator, our confidence started to grow,” said Smith. “Each Accelerator built upon one another and the methods we learned have saved us countless hours in otherwise tedious processes.”
Ultimately, Cloud Accelerators brought newfound productivity and agility to Manheim’s email campaign operations.
“Sending out a time-sensitive email campaign no longer takes hours, but instead just minutes. We’re more agile and productive than we were before and can respond to customers on-the-fly,” remarked Smith.
Manheim plans to continue developing its Salesforce Customer 360 platform, and its Success Manager and Accelerator Specialist are standing by, ready to help.
“Our Success Manager and Accelerator Specialist really cared about our short-term needs, long-term plans and vision for platform success,” Smith added. “They’ve given us an impressive understanding of our platform, along with templates to use in our future endeavors.”



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",Technology,Manheim
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"When it comes to air travel, people talk more about the airline experience and less about the airport experience itself. But airports, their operations, and the people hard at work behind the scenes each and every day all play a huge role in easing the all-too-familiar stress involved in a day of travel.
The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) is responsible for the operation of Washington Dulles International Airport, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and the Dulles Toll Road, as well as the construction of a portion of the D.C. Metrorail system. MWAA employs 1,500 people who serve over 45 million customers a year, managing functions like central administration, logistics and operations, and MWAA's very own police and fire departments.
“We have a lot of messages we are trying to deliver in a consistent, timely and relevant manner across several distinct campuses,” said Goutam Kundu, MWAA Chief Information Officer, “which means we need to maintain an expansive yet targeted communications plan.”



“We also need to maintain an extremely responsive communications plan,” said Saurabh Sharma, Program Manager for the Business Innovation Group at MWAA, “so that we can address everything from the ordinary to the extraordinary.”
With respect to the ordinary side: MWAA serves as a lessor to the many shops and restaurants that populate its airports, meaning that retail tenants have just as big an impact on the customer experience. A study from McKinsey & Company, which looked at one airport in particular where executives asked travelers to identify factors with the biggest impact on their overall experience, found that retail cost and speed of food and beverage delivery (experiences that are controlled by the retail tenant), leave just as big an impression on travelers as do traffic flow, bag delivery, and more (experiences that are controlled by the airport lessor).* These complaints are a high priority, and teams at MWAA have a very short window in which they can recognize a concern, communicate with its merchant, address the issue, and resolve it with the traveler before he / she / they boards their flight. In ordinary situations, speed is critical.
With respect to the extraordinary side: “Safety is our number one priority. And if you look back at any sort of incident, there is usually some sort of indication on social media before it happens,” said Sharma, “which means we need to be active listeners. And if we hear something, we have to be able to move fast.” In extraordinary situations, speed is paramount.
Sharma and team deployed an outreach and engagement platform on Salesforce. It combines social media listening, customer service, and advanced analytics capabilities into one system, giving MWAA the tools it needs to track a question, concern, or incident from inception to closure.
Social listening: Sharma and team deployed Marketing Cloud's Social Studio, which is used to identify conversations containing key words, hashtags, specific handles, a certain sentiment, and more (including but not limited to those managed by MWAA directly). “We use this as a way to bring situational awareness to our efforts. We receive tons of feedback across many  channels, and thus need to isolate the questions that are most urgent,” said Sharma.
Advanced analytics: Tableau CRM was layered on to evaluate which category a given question or comment might fall into — lost and found, shopping, dining, or internet access, for example — and tag it accordingly, allowing the team to pull reports that reveal important metrics like how often a certain type of question is asked.
Case management: Feedback from public-facing websites and surveys integrate with MWAA's Service Cloud instance, turning multi-channel customer feedback into cases within a single system. Service Cloud's profile-like setting creates a 360-degree view of the case, giving MWAA the visibility to case status at any point in the resolution process. “We also trigger email notifications to the customer so they know their comment didn't disappear into a black hole, and assign them a point person to be accountable for closing the feedback loop in a timely manner,” said Sharma.
MWAA built an accountability element into their cloud-based strategy, one of five best practices that came through in their example. Get the rest in the team's checklist.
Outreach and communications: “We also use Social Studio to schedule time-sensitive promotions and announcements — such as the introduction of a new air carrier, or advertising the opening of the new Sleepbox Lounge at Dulles,” Sharma continued. Information stored in Service Cloud is used to shape and direct future conversations, time posts, and keep a consistent message going out across all channels.
“We are using the cloud to be in the conversation, and reach people when it matters most,” said Sharma. “And produce and track actionable data from customer engagement,” added O’Brien.
The capabilities delivered by this platform have benefited MWAA and its customers. The customer service groups have adapted to the new system and are efficiently working through the cases. As an example, during the three most recent two-week periods, an average of 395 customer feedback cases were logged, with an average of 93% resolution rate at any given time.
The capabilities delivered by this platform have also benefited MWAA's employees internally, which in turn brings additional benefits to its customers. “Our customer service groups now have the data-driven reliability they need to be decisive, all from a single platform,” said Sharma. This reduces the amount of time employees need to spend on tracking down answers and connecting the dots between one system and the next. It also helps customer service groups better understand the big picture surrounding all customer experiences, so that they can apply resulting insights and apply them proactively to future scenarios.
At the management and executive levels, “we can pull reports and see how customer service groups are responding to certain requests in aggregate. We can see what actions were taken, pinpoint strengths (or weak spots!), and repeat best practices across all service categories,” said Kundu.
“This kind of data-driven insight has also helped us reach customers like never before: by age, by preference, by frequency of the traveler,” Kundu continued. “This makes the customer experience more relevant, more engaging, and more meaningful — exactly what we want to provide to someone kicking off a busy day of travel.”



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",Travel Transportation & Hospitality,Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority
"Salesforce customer since 2016
A lot is said about the disruption that the digital revolution has caused to the manufacturing industry. Oftentimes, we point out the inability of manufacturers to adapt their structures to new conditions, which require flexibility and agility. However, technology offers the industry leaders a huge opportunity to resolve one of their historic difficulties: the distance that separates them from their enormous and quickly changing customer base. With digital technology, there is an opportunity to strengthen close relationships with customers, who are more and more connected and have ever increasing service expectations.
The Michelin Group has seized the opportunity by launching an ambitious, revolutionary global program called ENGAGE, which relies on new processes and the Salesforce Platform. It enables the various Michelin entities and their customers to collaborate in real time, using a single tool. By placing the customer at the center of the architecture, this program offers a user-friendly, integrated approach that encourages sharing.
""Keeping our lead in terms of product quality and performance is essential, but it isn't enough to guarantee success. So, what's our new focus? Offering an excellent customer experience,"" said Florent Menegaux, COO and Senior Executive Vice President.
Sales staff and retailers in the North American market have used ENGAGE since late 2016. Originally, the challenge confronting Michelin was making the whole organization more agile. To accomplish this, it developed an innovative new tool with Salesforce aimed at making all of Michelin's data — tire references, sales history, and more — accessible in real time. Along with this new platform, the tire manufacturer took another look at its processes. The combination of these two factors allowed Michelin to simplify communications between sales staff and customers. The platform now influences the way sales staff manage their leads, delivery times, and even product complaints.
Michelin’s new platform will change the game in the U.S. by offering a unique entry point for orders, tire distribution by wholesalers, fleet managers, and more. ""We are simplifying our processes and taking advantage of Salesforce to aggregate data and share a 360-degree view of the customer,"" said Sophie Foucque, Director of Michelin's B2B Digital Factory. In one sense, Michelin is seizing the opportunity afforded by digital tools to establish a personal relationship with each customer.
Soon, everyone will be able to connect to the same portal, built on Community Cloud, in a single, central location for finding the right Michelin tire. From after-sales service to the fleet manager to the sales team, everyone will be able to collaborate on the same platform and interact more efficiently. ""It will make interacting with the customer easier and smoother. The Salesforce Platform will also enable us to create an improved and more intuitive interface,"" said Foucque.
Salesforce has made daily tasks a lot more fluid for Michelin's sales team. Thanks to this platform, they can access data from each point of sale, sales history, and order tracking. They can also consult this data while on the go, create and modify sales opportunities, view sales targets, and more on the Salesforce mobile app. Partner apps available on AppExchange let Michelin's digital team offer a steady flow of innovations to benefit sales representatives. For example, they can organize their sales appointments using MapAnything. All of these features make everyday activities more efficient and encourage all teams on the ground to adopt the tool.
Incredibly, Salesforce was rolled out in a very short time — less than six months. Today, less than a year since the launch of this solution in North America, 85% of sales staff have already adopted it. ""The platform makes work much easier. It makes all of our tedious, time-consuming obligations with no real added value, like administrative tasks, go faster. That means more time with our customers,"" said Foucque. ""For example, 70% of our sales staff use the mobile tool, which is another reason to be satisfied. They can connect more easily and access information more quickly. They don't have to use their PCs to connect anymore.""
This means more time can be dedicated to assisting and advising customers on their search for mobility solutions. ""Salesforce is transforming the way people work with and at Michelin,"" said Foucque. It's not just the North American market: In 2017, the solution was also rolled out in Europe, with other markets to follow in 2018.
Innovation has been one of Michelin's core values ever since it was founded. ""What counts more than this vision of digitization is our speed of innovation in this ultra-competitive market,"" said Eric Chaniot, Chief Digital Officer.
What's more, Salesforce opens up new perspectives on the marketing front. In the future, by gathering all of the data in one place, the platform will enable employees to better understand customers, their usages, and their needs, and it will make implementing targeted marketing activities easier.
In the future, thanks to connected tires and the artificial intelligence provided by Salesforce Einstein, ordering new tires may even happen automatically.



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",Manufacturing,Michelin
"Over 100 years ago, D.J. De Pree founded Herman Miller to push the standards of office and home furnishing design. From ergonomic chairs to sustainably made products, the company pioneered industry classics that are synonymous with modern design.
Today as MillerKnoll, a collective of design brands including Herman Miller and Knoll, there are two threads that run through every decision the company makes:
Be good stewards of the earth’s resources.
Ensure each product and experience is exceptionally designed.
“What I do at MillerKnoll is look at the choices we make through the lens of sustainability and ask, ‘Have we made the best choice possible?’” said Gabe Wing, Director of Sustainability. “My job is to help make the world a better place through the design of our products, our processes, and our places.”
But a company can’t know where it’s going if it doesn’t know where it is. That’s why data fuels every decision, from materials used in products to electricity consumption at each global location.
MillerKnoll uses Salesforce Customer 360 to share carbon emissions data with its commerce, marketing, and service departments, so the whole company can work toward shared sustainability goals. Let’s take a look at how Wing and team are putting this data at the center of every business decision. 
Step 1: Swap spreadsheets for real-time carbon emission views.
Step 2: Make ecommerce experiences as well-designed as products.
Step 3: Engage customers beyond the purchase.
In this video [3:37], hear how MillerKnoll went from managing its environmental footprint on spreadsheets to creating real-time energy and carbon emissions reports it can act on across the business.
By 2030, MillerKnoll plans to reduce its carbon footprint by 50%, eliminate single-use plastic, reduce all waste, and use 50% or more recycled content in its products.
At first, the company tracked its footprint through disjointed Excel spreadsheets that were thousands of rows long. Wing’s small team input everything it could get its hands on, including utility bills, distribution invoices, expense reports, and even spreadsheets from other departments.
MillerKnoll also knew the SEC may one day require publicly traded companies to provide comprehensive, up-to-the-minute reporting on their carbon emissions data. The company’s manual tracking method wouldn’t be able to scale.
With that in mind, MillerKnoll implemented Net Zero Cloud, which works behind the scenes to convert spend data into total carbon dioxide output (tCO2) to track and manage carbon emissions. This means that instead of ballpark estimates, the company can quantify how each chair or desk directly impacts carbon output.
“At the push of a button, we have our annual carbon footprint, so at any given time of the year, we can know where we’re at compared to our goals,” said Wing.
Advice from MillerKnoll’s Gabe Wing
Start small. Determine where you are today and what you can control.
Assemble the right team. Let people know what you’re doing and harness their passion.
Adopt the right tools. Use your data to create actionable insights, not another database.
Share wins. Tell success stories internally and externally to gain momentum and scale.
The company can now track sustainability data faster and at global scale, which is especially handy for troubleshooting. When emissions data for one of its 15 global locations suddenly seems high, the company can quickly throw red flags and investigate further. Is the carbon footprint rising because of increased production volume? Or is equipment malfunctioning?

MillerKnoll brands prioritize eco-friendly materials in their entire product portfolio. The company even uses an ""environmental calculator"" that allows customers to see the exact breakdown of every product. With so many products to choose from across such brands as Herman Miller, Design Within Reach, and HAY, it's important to make the shopping experience across sites as seamless as possible.

That’s why the company shifted gears when it discovered its online shopping experience didn’t match the high-quality design of the products it sells.

With help from Commerce Cloud and partner expert Capgemini, MillerKnoll built a scalable solution that has helped launch multiple sites. The partnership has also helped MillerKnoll accelerate B2C experiences with clickable images for direct purchase, redesigned checkout flows, and tailored recommendations. Apps like Klarna and Affirm help enhance the ecommerce experience even further with automated chat and payment solutions, while 6sense and Bynder’s DAM app drive team efficiency by providing sales intelligence and an easy way to manage ecommerce product imagery.

Together, these partner apps have helped enhance the MillerKnoll ecosystem, resulting in:
When ecommerce demand suddenly grew 313% in 2020 because of the pandemic, MillerKnoll was ready with a faster site that showed off its modern designs.
""The pandemic really allowed us to push innovation, especially through our digital experiences,"" said Kristen DeLap, Director of Digital Product.
Now, MillerKnoll can wow customers from the first moment of design inspiration to the digital storefront and beyond. When shoppers across its brands express interest, MillerKnoll easily markets and communicates with them across geographies multiple times per day. Whether through email or SMS, MillerKnoll tracks and nurtures buyers along complex customer journeys.
Just three years ago, MillerKnoll ran merchandising operations manually, which took extra time to sort products and continually rebuild customer interactions. Now, MillerKnoll uses in-depth customer insights and AI to build personalized emails and recommendations the company can improve with regular testing of which copy performs best.

Even after purchase, MillerKnoll continues to engage customers and build loyalty with helpful support across channels. Now, marketing, commerce, and service can access customer data in a single source of truth. That way, agents have the foresight to resolve customer cases quickly, inform new marketing journeys based on service interactions, and uncover new cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
“Imagine if the customer service rep has all the information about the customer,” said Neeraja Venkatasubramanian, Manager of Digital Product Portfolio. “It makes that interaction much more seamless.”
The company even extends website support with live chat, so shoppers can easily connect with a design expert if they need inspiration. And Customer 360 gives MillerKnoll the framework to deliver on customers’ expectations for fast, personal, and responsive shopping.
But people now expect more than impeccable sales and service. They want their money to support brands that champion social justice and environmental responsibility, too. To meet these expectations, Wing believes companies must find where their values intersect with customers’ values.
“The better we understand where our clients want to go from a sustainability perspective, the better we can enable our clients to achieve their goals,” he said.
With sustainability, commerce, and service data under one roof, MillerKnoll can rally its customers and partners to champion responsibly designed products that benefit the planet.
",Manufacturing,MillerKnoll
"“People forget that affordable housing is a spectrum. When we talk about affordable housing, we’re not only talking about people who are homeless; we’re talking about senior citizens living on a fixed income and families that are trying to buy their first home. The type of housing a person needs may look different based on their circumstances, but ultimately all people need access to a safe place to call home that is affordable to them.” said Karin Wilbricht, Business Lead, Salesforce Implementation for Minnesota Housing.
Minnesota Housing provides access to safe, decent and affordable housing and builds stronger communities across the state. As the state’s housing finance agency, (Think: the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at the state level) it offers funding solutions and services to help Minnesotans buy and fix up their homes and to stabilize neighborhoods, communities and families. It also supports the development and preservation of affordable rental housing through both an annual competitive financing process and long term asset manage­ment. It has pioneered a successful model for supportive housing that helps stabilize the lives of some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens. In 2018, Minnesota Housing invested over $1 billion in programs that helped 66,000+ households maintain a stable living environment.[1]
“Housing is a basic human need. If you don’t have a stable place to live, it’s hard to think about your job, your health, your education,” added Chris Larson, IT Product Manager for Minnesota Housing. “While our mission focuses heavily on serving Minnesota’s most vulnerable, it also looks at how we make sure that there is affordable housing for everyone.”
Minnesota Housing serves as a prime example of how departments and agencies can build a more automated and transparent case management process. Turn its best practices into your to-do list.
“The need for affordable housing is becoming part of the main stream conversation. We are hearing politicians talk about the incredible need regularly in the news, recognizing that housing is key to thriving communities,” said Wilbricht – an observation that reflects trends surfacing across the national level as well as the state and local level.
In a 2018 report, Pew Research found that “the relatively large number of housing measures on the ballot this year reflects a national sense of urgency amid rising housing costs, housing analysts say. A lack of federal action and cash-strapped state and local budgets have contributed to the crisis. Citizens are showing up at town halls and city council meetings demanding action, they say.”
As this phenomenon intensifies, it brings more attention and scrutiny to how organizations like Minnesota Housing allocate resources and support community development. Wilbricht, Larson, and the team had to be ready to answer hard-hitting questions about various housing development projects – a two-year+ real estate development timeline – and support those answers with data in order to ensure funding in today’s environment. “If we can’t show outcomes from our value chain, and the flow of money stops as a result, it’s not us who pay. It’s the families who need our services,” said Larson.
The team began looking for a tool that would allow employees to work in real-time with their customers and partners – in this case, primarily real estate developers, cities, counties, nonprofit organizations, and other government entities on the development side of the mission – so that Minnesota Housing could demonstrate its ability to serve as good stewards of taxpayer money.
In other words, the team began looking for a tool that would focus on the people and the experience behind each step in the loan process.
“We ended up building a loan origination and servicing system on Salesforce,” said Wilbricht. Built on Sales Cloud and Community Cloud, this case management-style system gives Minnesota Housing a platform for processing funding requests, answering questions, closing on a loan, and distributing the financing to support the development of new affordable housing units or rehabilitation of existing units.  
Outreach and intake: “We went from a paper-based application process to a completely digital process,” said Wilbricht.
Execution: New features are piloted in a test environment and promoted to their production environment after business sign-off.  The cloud based application allows for system-level updates to be pushed automatically, as opposed to their on-premise systems that require staff to spend a lot of time and energy applying patches, testing, and troubleshooting. “Licenses can also be added as needed, allowing us to scale up as we build out new features and functionality or expand to other parts of our business,” said Larson.
Relationship management: Data about a given Minnesota Housing customer, including their loan history, status updates, and more, is stored in a profile-like setting, giving Minnesota Housing employees a 360-degree view of each individual. “Our customers can use Community Cloud to check on the status of their application and  know exactly what they need to do in order for us to be able to close on a loan,” said Wilbricht.
Analytics: Integrated reports and dashboards provide real-time count of mission-critical details, such as the number of applications submitted, where each of those applications are in the approval process, which region they represent, new construction vs. rehab, and more. Chatter allows Minnesota Housing staff to collaborate with their customers and partners, track decisions, and manage relationships more efficiently
The system turned Minnesota Housing employees into a knowledgeable source of answers; “In the past, there wasn’t a quick way to see how many applications were in process and their respective status,” said Larson.  “Today, we use dashboards to communicate the statuses of all our applications.”
This newfound subject matter expertise came through in Minnesota Housing’s numbers. Since going live on the cloud, Minnesota Housing reduced its annual funding round set-up time by 98.5% ( from 200+ hours to 3 hours).
It also opened up mobility, allowing staff to work remotely, log status updates while out on a site inspection, take advantage of more flexible scheduling, and more – achievements that were recognized not only by Minnesota Housing’s stakeholders, but also the industry. In 2017, the Agency received the National Council for State Housing Agencies’ award for program excellence in the Management Innovation for Technology.  
Lastly, the system has improved the experience for Minnesota Housing’s lending partners. John Rocker, Senior Underwriter and Loan Officer at Greater Minnesota Housing Fund noted, “this strategy has dramatically improved the efficiency of reviewing applications. Standard naming conventions, the ability to filter documents, read communication, easily download files, and quickly jump from one application to the next have allowed Greater Minnesota Housing Fund to spend more time evaluating the applications and less time hunting for documents.”
“As someone in the IT field, we don’t always see how we’re impacting the communities with the work that were doing,” said Larson. “But with this approach, we can get to the finite detail of exactly what it takes to get an application processed, and as a result make decisions that are most efficient and most effective.”



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",Government,Minnesota Housing
"The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications’ (DoITT) mission is to provide sustainable, efficient, and effective IT solutions for its sister-agencies across the city, “and the vaccination effort that we have undertaken over the past several months has been the single most impactful of any of these initiatives,” said Jessica Tisch, Commissioner and Citywide CIO for DoITT.
When COVID-19 began surfacing in the United States, New York City quickly became the country’s epicenter – so quickly, in fact, that Commissioner Tisch and team refer to it as a sneak attack. As hospitals became overwhelmed, ICU beds filled up, and morgues hit capacity without much notice, DoITT suddenly found itself taking on additional responsibilities. It was managing planned, strategic projects like modernizing New York City’s 911 system and accelerating the City’s 5G rollout while now also building new service requests in to the City’s 311 system so that uninsured patients could get connected with a doctor, and standing up new technology that facilitates the delivery meals to homebound individuals and food insecure New Yorkers across the five boroughs; “our Get Food program, which recently delivered its 200 millionth meal,” Commissioner Tisch added. 
“We've worked tirelessly over the past year to build technology solutions that help New Yorkers deal with the pandemic,” the Commissioner continued. “So now, to finally be at the point where we are figuring out how to distribute [COVID-19] vaccines, is joyful for us. It is the solution that will get us out of the trauma, the pain, and the suffering that so many have experienced over the past year.”

The City went to work, identifying communities that were hardest hit by the pandemic and flagging locations for vaccination sites accordingly so they could have a more meaningful impact, fast. The result: dozens of locations to manage, fueled by a multifaceted decision matrix designed per the City’s public health guidelines, that have to serve a diverse set of 8.4 million people. Twice, depending on which brand vaccine the person receives. 
“Feedback from the community was that people needed an easy way to schedule a vaccination appointment,” said Commissioner Tisch. “We have so many locations where people can start getting vaccinated, each with their own scheduling tool. That can make it overwhelming to find and book an appointment, especially the groups that we were prioritizing first. Many of them are not the most digitally literate.”
DoITT was asked to consolidate these scheduling tools on one platform that could scale to support all City-run sites with a consistent user experience. “However, what we ended up building was so much more than a simple calendar app,” said the Commissioner.
DoITT teamed up with technology partner MTX and launched vax4nyc, an end-to-end case management system built on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Government Cloud platform that is configured to support the unique needs of distributing COVID-19 vaccines – from scheduling the first appointment, to conducting onsite health screenings, recording and reporting the vaccination event, and scheduling the next dose. Here’s how it works:
On the front end, New Yorkers start by creating a profile with vax4nyc, using Experience Cloud. Here, they are guided through the City’s data entry requirements: eligibility questions, health screening and attestation, pertinent personal information, and more. Once the person has created their profile, they are shown available appointments across all of New York City’s clinic locations, and able to book the time and place that works best.
On the day of their appointment, the person receives a notification to fill out their daily screening questions and medical consent form via Flow Builder, which allows the City to check for things that may impact their ability to safely receive their dose. Once the person has completed their screening and consent they are checked in for their appointment, similar to how a traveler can check in for a flight in advance and skip the in-person ticketing counter at the airport altogether.
Once the person receives their vaccine, the event is recorded in the patient’s profile, the information is sent to the City’s Citizen Immunization registry, and the second appointment is booked during the brief adverse reaction monitoring period.
On the backend, this information is captured in a personalized, profile-like record in Service Cloud, which officials use to confirm eligibility and report on progress by zip code, demographic specifics, and more. It is also used by staff at the clinic where the person booked their appointment, minimizing the amount of information that needs to be collected onsite and helping the entire process move faster, with fewer contact points. 
Shield was added, helping to bring an additional layer of security to the system and to enable DoITT to comply with applicable data privacy and security laws, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). MuleSoft’s integration and API capabilities facilitate email communications to people regarding their appointments, as well as help data dependencies across the vaccination process run smoothly.
vax4nyc went live in just three weeks, and (at the time of publication) had supported the delivery of over 650,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses in just two months. When appointments are made available based upon the City receiving its next batch of doses, DoITT is seeing people schedule appointments for themselves in under three minutes. And, as the Federal government makes more inventory available, the City has the foundation it needs to scale up distribution and receive more allotments for its residents. 
The DoITT team is also offering vax4nyc as a service (VaaS, if you will) to healthcare providers citywide who want to use it to schedule vaccine appointments for residents, further delivering the kind of consistent customer experience that inspired vax4nyc in the first place. “Our staff is also benefiting from vax4nyc’s modern user experience. Our clinicians might be EMTs, nurses, etc. who don’t work at the clinic all day every day. They have other jobs. vax4nyc doesn’t require a huge amount of training to bring someone up to speed, which means someone can start using it on day 1,” said Commissioner Tisch. 
“Seeing this platform in action, and seeing vaccinations happen doesn’t just give me hope. It brings me joy,” Commissioner Tisch continued. “This past weekend, New York was alive again. And I said to myself ‘it’s working. I am seeing this city come back to life.’”



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",Government,DoITT
"Switch your energy contract to a renewable supplier. Recycle household waste. Walk and shop local. Eat less meat. Fly less often.
There is much that every U.K. household can do to help the country meet its ambitious target of becoming carbon net-zero by 2050. But there are some things that can only be done at a national level. Diversifying our energy supply is one.
Opening up the U.K.’s energy grid to new suppliers is arguably the greatest incentive to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. And it’s working. In 2019 the U.K. experienced its cleanest year on record. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the amount of zero-carbon power outstripped that generated from fossil fuels.
More and more renewable power is connected to the electricity network. The U.K. wants smaller, more local suppliers to join. Yet connecting to the electricity network is complex. If the U.K. can reduce this complexity and demonstrate a quicker time to value for suppliers, the pace of change may accelerate.
“Over the past three years alone we have seen a four-fold increase in requests to connect, mainly from renewable and green sources like solar, wind, and battery,” said David Adkins, ConnectNow Product Manager, National Grid. “But it also throws up challenges for an engineering business traditionally used to connecting huge gas, coal, and nuclear power stations. The process is full of detailed specifications, detailed language, and pages and pages of rules.”
ConnectNow is National Grid’s attempt to simplify this process. It aims to streamline the process of onboarding new connections through a single portal delivering an end-to-end experience. This portal is built on Salesforce Sales Cloud and Community Cloud.
National Grid recognized that the diversity of its new customers — customers who are literally linked to the grid — would change the very nature of its service posture. Seen as a conservative, albeit reliable operator, this always-on engagement would require National Grid to be dynamic and proactive.
“We knew ConnectNow would require a different mindset,” said Richard Wiles, Digital Architect, National Grid. “We wanted to be faster and more iterative in our development approach, quicker to absorb feedback and quicker to make improvements.”
Salesforce enabled National Grid to deliver the first stage of ConnectNow in just five weeks. “With such customer diversity, the only way we could produce ConnectNow was by putting something in front of people every four to five weeks. We needed rapid development cycles,” explained Wiles. “Salesforce gives us native web standards and a really rich developer experience. It means the distance from sandbox to production is much shorter.”
“With such customer diversity, the only way we could produce ConnectNow was by putting something in front of people every four to five weeks. We needed rapid development cycles,” explained Wiles. “Salesforce gives us native web standards and a really rich developer experience. It means the distance from sandbox to production is much shorter.”
At some points, Wiles continued, his team was releasing new versions every three days with 10–15 customers giving live feedback. “Salesforce enabled us to work very closely on the production code, with real data loaded in, and almost-live feedback. We were doing in five weeks what would usually have taken five months.”
ConnectNow went live in September 2020. In the first phase, 240 mostly historic customers were onboarded. By May 2021 National Grid expects all new connections to be managed entirely through ConnectNow. The portal provides transparency across the connection process, allowing customers to view milestones along the way. Customers can check their application progress or see a breakdown of their finances in real-time.
It is the product of more than 200 hours of customer interviews. As a consequence of being able to demonstrate it was not just listening but acting upon these interactions, National Grid’s customer satisfaction scores have risen from 7.6 to 8.35.
“ConnectNow draws its information from Sales Cloud and the Product Portfolio and Project Management tools. It establishes a single source of truth,” said Wiles. “This allowed us to develop a scalable, componentized architecture for the customer portal which focuses heavily on providing the best digital experience to customers.”
This also delivers a productivity boost: It is quicker and easier for National Grid to identify viable connections and speculative inquiries. “It means we can spend more time with potential customers and less time chasing inquiries that would go nowhere,” Wiles explained. 
The portal launched without a hitch, Wiles added and was developed by teams working entirely remotely. “For a launch of this sign, there’s been very little noise or drama. It hasn’t required a great deal of upkeep or maintenance. As an engineer, I take personal pride in producing a stable, scalable piece of development.”
The success of the launch has had a profound effect on digital culture and ambition. “It is easy to underestimate just how transformational this is, not just for our customers but for our own people too,” said Hedd Roberts, Head of Customer Solutions, National Grid.“It is easy to underestimate just how transformational this is, not just for our customers but for our own people too,” said Hêdd Roberts, Head of Customer Solutions, National Grid.
The portal has become the go-to project for all other digital initiatives within National Grid. Wiles added, “It’s the best-in-class UX design within the organization. Every other team that is developing within Salesforce has come along and stolen some components. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
National Grid now has a digital team capable of delivering future digital initiatives in-house without consultancy support. The business is now exploring more ways to use digital technology to help automate the connection process, ideally with many of the processes becoming self-service. The aim is to bring connection times down from 22 months to one day. 
Raised ambitions are vital if the U.K. is to realize its net-zero targets. Adkins said, “This lower barrier to entry smooths the path for more renewables to connect. Around 90% of the new generators we are supporting are delivering greener, cleaner energy.”
“This might not be attainable, but it is an example of the ambitious goals we’re prepared to set ourselves,” Wiles added. “The use of Salesforce and the success of ConnectNow are lighthouse digital initiatives. This project has reimagined our appetite for risk.”



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",Other,National Grid
"“Naloxone is a medication that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. It saves lives,” said Dr. Stephanie Woodard, Psy.D., Senior Advisor on Behavioral Health for the State of Nevada, Department of Health and Human Services. “If we are going to help people most at risk for an opioid overdose, it’s important to understand the barriers to receiving Naxolone doses.”
The Nevada Department of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) mission is to promote the health and well-being of Nevadans through the delivery or facilitation of essential services to ensure families are strengthened, public health is protected, and individuals achieve their highest level of self-sufficiency. In other words, DHHS sees the citizens of the state as clients, thinking about their needs, expectations, and preferences, while working to best serve all Nevadans, especially the most vulnerable.



Before the medical community fully realized how addictive opioid pain relievers could be, the drugs became a popular prescription starting in the late 1990’s because of their level of effectiveness. Today, an estimated 29% of patients misuse their prescriptions, an estimated 12% develop an addiction, and an estimated 6% slip into more serious drug use. It is an national medical crisis that is responsible for more than 130 deaths a day, and has cost the United States over $78 billion a year.[1]
In the State of Nevada, the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s last annual survey found that there were 412 overdose deaths involving opioids. While that number has been declining since 2010, and it translates to a rate below the national average, it is still a concerning figure since 276 of those deaths (67%) were the result of prescribed opioids.[2]
“States have been receiving funding from Federal agencies to fight this crisis and much of it is Congressionally appropriated, which means they are not ‘forever dollars’ and the funding comes with a huge amount of scrutiny,” said Dr. Woodard. “Purchasing a bulk amount of Naloxone isn’t a great strategy because it has a shelf life of 18 to 24 months. But purchasing small amounts over and over, using one funding stream at a time, is more difficult to monitor, report on and ensure it makes it to those who need it most. We needed a solution that enabled us track results on the business side (funding, distribution operations, and reporting), and the mission side (saving lives).”
Dr. Stephanie Woodard and team shared best practices from their work with the cloud. Use this as a ""to-do"" list as you start modernizing your own inventory management processes.
As a solution to track results, Dr. Woodard and her team deployed the Naloxone Virtual Dispensary, an inventory management application developed on the Salesforce Platform. It tracks the state’s funding levels and distribution of Naloxone, giving leadership the kind of data granularity that serves as the first step to solving any complex, larger-than-life problem.
Distribution centers (law enforcement, emergency medical services, community based organizations, etc.) participate in an onboarding process, and are invited to register an account where they can submit requests for Naloxone doses. Centers can specify regular shipments -- much like any standard subscription model, or request large orders for special events, such as an information night, training event, or education fair. Each shipment is logged in the application against its funding source(s), providing information on which dollars are being used where, all across the state.
As the distribution center draws down their inventory, they can note it in the system. “This helps us be proactive; we get trigger notifications when a supply is low, prompting us to contact the distributor and ship more doses before they run out,” said Dr. Woodard.
The team can also pull a report that identifies a distribution center’s inventory as it relates to previous periods in time, compare one center to the next, and glean real-time, data-driven insights.
“If we notice that one center has an abundance of Naloxone, and another is uncharacteristically low, we can coordinate the transfer of doses. This ‘just-in-time’ redistribution keeps Naloxone from expiring on a shelf, and saves us from having to order more at the federal level, which saves taxpayers money,” said Dr. Woodard.
On the business side, the results are impactful. Collecting timely and accurate data related to the number of Naloxone doses has helped Dr. Woodard and her team show how well the state is using funding while demonstrating responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars. It has also helped them build a solid case for sustained federal funding, and, when those dollars are no more, support a specific request of the state legislature.
Adoption of the dispensary application was intuitive, as many of the distribution sites administer ""hundreds of doses a month, so staff could easily see how this would help them get more Naloxone off the shelves and into the hands that need it."" This freed up time and energy for teams to focus on more foundational training – how people developed an addition in the first place and ways to help them overcome the stigmas that often serve as a barrier to getting help.
On the mission side, the results are incredible. While DHHS does not require its customers who are receiving Naloxone to report back, the Department has received valuable information and voluntary accounts of what happened to the first dose should someone ask for a second, third, or even fourth. Those reports, which were previously unrecorded, are now captured in the dispensary application.
“We had 856 spontaneous reports of opioid overdose reversals through this distribution program alone. To date, the team has dispensed a total of 11,861 naloxone kits to its distribution sites, 4,942 naloxone kits to first responder agencies, and moved roughly 150 kits between entities. That’s 856 lives saved,” said Dr. Woodard, “And that doesn’t include law enforcement or EMS uses, which are tracked through channels associated with their job scope.”
“This has been an opportunity to act on an issue of which the public is painfully aware, change the narrative, and address the subject at its core.” 



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",Healthcare & Life Sciences,Naloxone
"“We realize, that there are a lot of challenges ahead, and we as a team are working very hard to meet those,” said Sue Anne Athens, CIO State of New Mexico’s Department of Workforce Solutions. “The team is committed to the public service we provide our citizens who, in this small state, are our family and friends.” 
New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions (NMDWS) works to educate, empower, and employ residents statewide to improve employment rates, reduce poverty rates, enhance services for employers, and ensure fair labor practices and protections for the (citizens of) New Mexico. This includes running efforts such as- business outreach and support, facilitating delivery and disbursement of federal services,  and —with the current onset of COVID-19 — managing the surge in the state’s unemployment insurance program. 
“Our work has changed significantly in light of this crisis,” Athens continued. “The increase in the unemployment claims combined with the expansion in pandemic-specific financial relief programs offered by the federal government hit the state within a matter of weeks. The team found itself receiving as many as 900,000 calls in just one day — a huge jump compared our average of 4,000 calls a week.”
The country’s unemployment rate has skyrocketed in light of COVID-19, forcing teams like Athens’ to find a way to expand call center capacity overnight in an effort to keep up with the demands for help in the face of widespread unemployment. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimates that 47% of Americans who can work are currently unemployed,[1] and the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that unemployment benefits claims filed by citizens seeking immediate relief and services-have reached almost 47 million in the a period of 14 weeks alone.[2] In New Mexico specifically, NMDWS estimates that as of August 2020 nearly 103,000 people were unemployed, resulting in an unemployment rate of 11.5% statewide.[3]
And the emotions that are behind this intensify each and every conversation. Many face uncertainty about when they will return to work — if they will be able to return to the same job at all — as shelter-in-place protocols are ever-changing. In addition, the magnitude of this pandemic has forced many people out of work, indefinitely, for the first time, leaving them to navigate an entirely new process. When someone does finally reach a call center agent, after waiting in a in queue or dialing in 100’s of times, more often than not this all comes pouring out. 
“When COVID-19 hit, we only had 100 active call center agents,” said Athens. “We assigned all of our staff to working the phones. We borrowed employees from other state agencies that suddenly found themselves on a pause (like tourism) to try and mitigate burnout from all the long hours. We hired temporary agents, and we increased our call-center capacity to over 300 agents in fewer than two weeks. Despite all of this, we still couldn't answer every question.” The team had people and process in place to manage the effects of this crisis — and now needed a technological platform to support it.
Sue Anne Athens shared more perspective on the ways she and the NM DWS team are supporting New Mexico’s residents through  the COVID-19 crisis in Episode 2 of our Global Government Summit.
Athens and her team took their contact center platform — which was launched on Salesforce Service Cloud a few years prior — layered on Chat, and moved it to the FedRAMP-authorized Government Cloud Platform. The Einstein-powered chatbot solution takes down basic information, suggests self-help resources, categorizes questions so that they can be tagged and routed for follow-up, and more.
The team named its bot Olivia and integrated it across NMDWS’ customer service channels. One week later, Olivia was answering standard unemployment questions, offering up information on the new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, and reducing the number of calls overall.
Employees have been able to work remote, allowing Athens to fully empower both full time and borrowed staff from anywhere, at anytime, eliminating potential COVID-19 exposures. “We are keeping our workforce home, healthy, and productive,” said Athens. “Being user-centric in our solutions while also addressing the immediate needs of our customers was paramount.”
In the first few days, Olivia managed over 65,000 chat conversations, and is now averaging 7,500 chat conversations per day. Following the success of Olivia, Athens and team launched a sister bot, Dorothy V, to help with technical support and agent interaction (think: I forgot my password can you help? I can’t log in). Dorothy V has managed over 100,000 interactions, proving the strategy’s success for the second time around.  Dorothy V also provided the ability for citizens to get transferred to a live agent for technical support.
The additional scale and capacity brought on by Olivia and Dorothy V. has enabled Athens and team to continue to manage the workloads and begin the process of returning borrowed staff to their respective departments, and focus more time and energy on delivering the kind of details, personalized customer experience any service needs — let alone one focused on such an emotional journey. To date, Athens, her team, and her chat bots have processed unemployment insurance applications for over 180,000 New Mexicans, and are continue to manage this workload on a weekly basis.  In total the Agency has distributed over $1.5 billion dollars in benefits.. 
“By focusing on the people at hand, the processes involved, and the technology supporting both, New Mexico was able to meet the unprecedented demands on the mission,” said Athens. “We were able to rise to the occasion and support citizens though the pandemic.“








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",Government,New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions
"In a time where physical interaction is still limited, the New Mexico Human Services Department (NM HSD) has found a way to work within the restrictions of COVID-19 and continue meeting the needs of families statewide. With approximately 45% of New Mexicans enrolled in public assistance programs; speed and agility are of the utmost importance. “We’ve seen an increase in the need for the services and programs that we administer at the department. And with that is a real need for our customers to get access to information quickly and to get the assistance that they need to be enrolled in these programs to help them survive”, stated Sean Pearson, Chief Information Officer, NM HSD.
The NM Human Services Department (HSD) manages a budget of approximately $7.7 billion dollars of state and federal funds and administers services to more than 1 million  low-income New Mexicans through programs such as(*):
Medicaid
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
Cash Assistance
Energy & Utilities Assistance
Child Support
Behavioral Health
The department’s mission is “to transform lives -- Working with our partners, we design and deliver innovative, high quality health and human services that improve the security and promote independence for New Mexicans in their communities”.
“Overnight, we told people, ‘Go home, and start teleworking’. Well, in order for us to be able to do that, we had to implement a portion of the solution literally overnight so that people could go home,” said Pearson. Like many government agencies, NMHSD operated in alignment within the parameters of normal business hours, 8:00 to 5:00 p.m. “If customers couldn’t reach us during those times, they may have not gotten their questions answered or needs met,” Pearson continued.  And this was only made more difficult when the team looked at customer complexity: data analysis highlighted that the majority of NM HSD customers were enrolled in more than one public assistance program, requiring people to connect with different employees separately due to each program having its own area of expertise. “For example, someone could be enrolled in Medicaid, but also have a child support case. If they had questions about both, they'd have to call the 1-800 number for Medicaid. Then, when they were done with that, they'd have to call the 1-800 number for child support,” Pearson explained.
Just before the pandemic started, NM HSD replatformed its customer service center on Service Cloud which brought multiple disparate systems into a singular call center. The team then expanded on it by enabling customers to engage via email, phone, text, and chat 24/7, 365. “One of our goals is to successfully implement technology that improves services to our customers and employees. It’s a part of a broader initiative that we call HHS 2020 or Health and Human Services 2020, which at its core is realigning public assistance programs, benefits and services around an individual or family,’ said Pearson.
The HHS (Health & Human Service) 2020 Vision is about a transformational, Enterprise approach to the health and human services business. Fundamentally, HHS 2020 is about moving from a program-centric structure to a Stakeholder-centric structure. This involves moving away from program and technology silos into an integrated, flexible framework that supports service provision and Stakeholder interaction across HHS programs and organizations. HHS 2020 is technology-enabled, but represents much more, including rethinking organizational design, redesigning and streamlining business processes and reducing barriers between organizations within the HHS Enterprise.
The contact center solution manages all contacts for all customers enrolled, applying for, or seeking information on the NMHSD programs. Over a million New Mexicans are enrolled in public assistance programs and receiving services today. On a monthly basis 30,000-50,000 applications are submitted. “The HHS 2020 strategy is threefold: customer engagement, customer portal, and the consolidated customer service center. The success of the contact center  was just the precipice of the broader solution to come”.
In partnership with Accenture, the NMHSD kicked-off the implementation to standardize employee processes on the Salesforce platform in the same way the team did for customer engagement. Pearson and team launched a consolidated contact center on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Government Cloud Plus platform. It enables employees to access information, collaborate with subject matter experts, and take action on next steps from their home office as easily as they could from the office before COVID-19. Here’s how it works:
The team started by leveraging Sales Cloud’s customer relationship management tools, which help to aggregate customer contact information from different areas of expertise into one comprehensive profile, creating an information hub that serves as the core of NM HSD’s system.
This hub is then integrated with the various transactional systems running on Service Cloud responsible for eligibility or case management programs, “or the spokes of our organization, if you will. “This way, if a customer-service agent is talking to a contact, whether it's over phone or chat; they have the most up to date information for any question at their fingertips”.
Shield was also added, helping NM HSD bring an additional layer of security to its system and to comply with applicable privacy laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
The system integrates with the NM HSD’s public cloud customer contact center service, which the team is leveraging to triage phone calls and record interactive voice responses. It also integrates with the team’s robotic process automation software, managing data entry through the user interface. “All the pieces work together; “We implemented the technology overnight literally for these people to be able to go home and start taking those calls. The pandemic required us to move rapidly and we've only been able to do that because all the pieces work together, out of the box,” said Pearson.
As for the customer experience there is just one user interface, the “Yes New Mexico” portal where residents can submit their application and identify the assistance needed. Real-time eligibility was implemented for the Medicaid program and will be rolled out to the other programs in the near future. “We want to implement the real-time eligibility process into our other programs as well as consolidate the status tracking, renewals, and updates processes. This will all be managed in the cloud so that we can continue to facilitate customer engagement with 360-degree view of the people that we serve. The goal for expansion is not just our agency and programs, but all health and human service related agencies in New Mexico”.
NM HSD serves as a prime example of how departments and agencies can build a responsive, integrated contact center on the cloud. Here are the best practices from the team's experience.
The solution at the New Mexico Human Service Department is continuing to evolve. “We're knocking down those silos and creating that horizontal integration with the one-stop shop capabilities”. The consolidated contact center has since incurred a C-sat score of 4.7 on a one-to-five scale, but it is the community impact that speaks volumes to the work that has been done. The New Mexico Human Services Department has also leveraged Salesforce to help in its development of the following:
Covid Resource Management: Linking COVID-19 positive individuals with shelter needs to facilitate isolation; controlling the spread of the virus.
Hunger Prevention: The state of New Mexico has 23 nations, tribes and pueblos -- Indian nations, tribes and pueblos in the state. The consolidated contact centers help bridge the communication gap between food distributors and low income communities to provide supplies.
Additional metrics are currently being monitored such as types of communication channels used, contact metrics, and request fulfillment time in order to better serve customers. “We were already headed down the path to standardize on the cloud to meet multiple business needs when COVID-19 came to our communities,” said Pearson,“ and we were able to apply the same strategy and meet business needs that required immediate turnaround and action. Transforming our operations to the cloud enhanced our customer engagement, demonstrating to our staff that our ability to help people from home was still possible”.



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",Government,New Mexico Human Services Department
"Northern Trust first opened its doors in 1889, when it welcomed clients into a one-room office in Chicago. More than a century later, the bank is one of the world’s largest money managers, with assets under management approaching a trillion dollars, locations in 84 cities around the globe, and more than 16,500 employees. Its clientele consists of corporations, institutions, and the world’s wealthiest individuals and families. Even more impressively, Northern Trust repeatedly garners accolades such as “One of the World’s Most Admired Companies” (Fortune) and “One of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens” (Corporate Responsibility). Its venerable success lies in pairing what the company calls its “enduring principles” — service, expertise, and integrity — with an eye toward industry disruption, preferring to lead change rather than react to it. In doing so, Northern Trust is actively shaping the future of a new generation of clients and employees in a world that has become dramatically more complex. In addressing the varied needs that accompany its personal clients’ significant wealth, Northern Trust’s Wealth Management division has focused squarely on the client experience. “We’re helping clients achieve their unique life goals,” said Pete Ruegsegger, Senior Vice President of Client & Partner Experience. “It’s a very personal process that’s grounded in a deep understanding of a client’s needs as they evolve over time.” Managing relationships of this nature requires teams of incredibly talented people, inside the company and out, to exchange knowledge and collaborate efficiently around the globe. Northern Trust takes great pride in its people and wanted better technology to harness their deep expertise to deliver a seamless client experience.
Northern Trust has always delivered excellence, but it was increasingly finding that to do so required its partners — in the spirit of collaboration every Northern Trust employee is known as a partner — to manage the complexity of its business through capabilities and processes that were not sufficiently integrated. What resulted was a sales and service environment that contained an element of friction, despite a high level of client satisfaction. The firm elected to make a more seamless service delivery environment a business priority — and centered its efforts around the development of a Partner Workstation. The team involved in the Partner Workstation initiative wanted to do far more than simply replace the existing customer relationship management (CRM) system. They articulated a vision for a new platform that could function as a “single pane of glass,” through which every partner could better serve clients, and each other. In searching for a provider, they met with more than 10 best-of-breed firms — all of whom pitched contemporary CRM capabilities. They selected Salesforce based on the strength of its broad array of capabilities, both directly and through its ecosystem, as well as its passion for innovation and continuous improvement. “Simply put, Salesforce was best suited to help us achieve our vision,” said Marianne Doan, EVP and Head of Enterprise Partner Services. Leveraging agile development and human-centered design disciplines, the Partner Workstation rollout began in the Wealth Management business unit with a pilot group of approximately 400 partners in markets across the United States — and will soon be delivered to a much broader group. With Salesforce as the centerpiece of the new Partner Workstation, partners use Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Community Cloud, all integrated with legacy databases and accessible from anywhere via the Salesforce mobile app.
“Historically, rolling out significant new capabilities can present a bit of a challenge for traditional firms,” said Doan. And yet several months into the pilot, all the participating partners had become “enthusiastic users” of the new platform. To ensure a smooth transition, Northern Trust relied on Community Cloud, which allowed partners in the field to get answers in minutes when they needed help. They called it “Smart Bar,” in a modest nod to Apple’s Genius Bar. Because the Smart Bar represented something new and unknown, Northern Trust also offered a traditional toll-free support hotline. “In the thousands of interactions we’ve had with the pilot participants, not one phone call has been placed to the hotline,” said Doan. “We were pleasantly surprised at the appetite for change — and it starts to build on itself as partners continue to experience the benefits of Partner Workstation.” The firm foresees engaging in deeper Service Cloud efforts in the near future. At Northern Trust, an extensive network of client service professionals complements the sales teams. Service Cloud will help them further streamline processes and workflows for the benefit of these partners and represents another big step toward achieving their vision. Northern Trust prides itself on having some of the best professionals in the industry, and the firm’s leaders are focused on supporting them with the best possible capabilities. “The work we’re doing with Salesforce contributes to our ongoing focus on service excellence,” Doan said. “It allows us the opportunity to do things that are truly differentiating. Salesforce helps us accomplish this through forward-leaning capabilities like knowledge sharing, advanced workflow, and business analytics, all of which help us leverage our greatest strengths — our exceptional client relationships and our partners.” With the Partner Workstation well underway within the Wealth Management division, Northern Trust is exploring broader use of the Salesforce Platform, both internally and through integration with its client-facing capabilities. “I’m so proud to be associated with a firm where partners are focused on creating an exceptional client experience, and where there is a clear commitment to embracing the future,” said Ruegsegger. “I know for a fact that whatever else changes, we’ll continue to strive to serve every client with distinction.”



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",Other,Northern Trust
"Leverage the latest mobile trends, benchmarks, and insights from 300+ million shoppers.
Win more mobile shoppers and boost conversions with these six site design best practices.
Connect with shoppers anytime, anywhere, and on any device with our mobile-first B2C ecommerce solution.
In a move that highlights the growing importance of mobile, PUMA has overhauled and relaunched its mobile websites in some 24 markets worldwide.
“Shoppers may buy from PUMA.com, or they may be in one of our wholesalers or retailers, or just walking down the street and see one of our products,” said Ken Kralick, PUMA’s Global Head of Ecommerce.
“They may use their phone to learn about the brand. So we need to focus on the mobile customer experience so they can do that very quickly. You have to balance that with the ability to show a big product catalog and represent the brand.”
It’s no surprise that Kralick speaks so confidently about the power of mobile. At PUMA, mobile traffic in some geographies was approaching 70%, which is even higher than Salesforce’s recent Shopping Index report that reveals that mobile accounts for 60% of traffic and 41% of orders.
But, like many brands, the high mobile traffic wasn’t translating to conversions. PUMA decided to re-architect its sites so that shoppers can easily create accounts and save carts for future checkouts on a tablet or desktop.
Engineered through a data-driven design analysis of device traffic patterns and shopping behavior on over 2,000 storefronts, Commerce Cloud’s Storefront Reference Architecture provides merchants with best practices in mobile UX design, merchandising, and technical architecture to improve conversion and enhance the mobile shopping experience. With over 200 wireframes that model intelligent storefront design, direct ownership of storefront code empowers merchants to build unique and differentiated sites.
Kralick explained the benefits of the Storefront Reference Architecture implementation by saying,  “We rolled it out as a true reference architecture with multiple countries, multiple currencies, multiple languages and continuous integration, so we can have a solid, future proof, mobile-first platform to build off globally.”
PUMA no longer worries about the site surviving shopper demand when a hot new product — say, the recent Fenty X Creeper sneaker collaboration with Rihanna — hits the market. “We’d get to 18,000 concurrent users in the first couple seconds and it would just devastate all our sites for a couple minutes. Now, with the new Storefront Reference Architecture, we don’t even notice the spike. It’s a non-event from a server-load standpoint.”
PUMA now has the agility to make experience-enhancing tweaks to its site, constantly iterating based on real consumer behavior. For example, PUMA refined the top navigation and internal search, based on Salesforce’s advice and best practices.
“Without changing any product, without doing any price-point changes, that tweak increased conversion,” Kralick said. “We’re scalable. We’re releasing improvements more often. We’re testing and able to prove and disprove hypotheses quickly in a way that we couldn’t on other platforms.
Since the relaunch of PUMA’s mobile sites in July 2017, they now render and fully load 35% and 69% faster, respectively, resulting in image load times of less than two seconds on the product detail page. Conversion has improved from less than 1% to nearly 1.5%.
“The fact that it’s faster and helps us sell more and we can get to market faster — and that Salesforce has truly as an organization partnered with us —, I can’t tell you how important that is.”
In re-architecting its sites around mobile, PUMA is truly living by its tagline,“Forever Faster.”

For retailers, being mobile-first is a journey that involves technology, organizational alignment, and much more. Check out our interactive step-by-step guide to mastering mobile commerce, and get the latest insights into how to put mobile at the center of your growth strategy.






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",Retail,PUMA
"Change is hard. But change is particularly hard when you’re in charge of an ambitious global digital transformation journey. Christine Robertson — Marketing & Sales Leader at PwC Canada — understands this all too well, having found herself at the helm of PwC’s efforts to become a digitally enabled network of firms. Currently, the PwC network is spread across 158 countries with more than 236,000 employees and 11,000 leaders.
PwC dates back to the 1800s, but it has gradually expanded its business offerings to include technology consulting, as well as advisory, audit, and tax. As PwC increased its global footprint, each new region created processes and systems that were uniquely tailored to its local culture. This ultimately resulted in siloed regional offices, disparate technology systems, and complex multilayered structures. These disconnects hindered the firm’s ability to globally collaborate, which presented real challenges for leaders like Reggie Walker, Chief Commercial Officer at PwC U.S.
“For us to serve our clients better into the future and meet their expectations, we needed to bring our network together,” Walker said.
PwC established a global strategy to help the network become a digitally enabled organization better able to thrive in the digital revolution. This shared vision would enable PwC to harness its internal consulting experience and transform its sales and marketing operations to ultimately better serve its clients.
PwC chose to go with a single, globally shared deployment of Salesforce. “We know Salesforce is the leading platform,” Robertson said. “But digital transformation isn’t only about technology. The people part is the hard part.”
She was referring to the almost-universal challenge that cripples most digital transformation projects: getting people to adopt new technology and new ways of working. According to Forrester, a majority of digital transformations fail to generate positive returns. Of those failed transformations, 70% are due to a lack of user adoption and behavioral change.
As a relationship-driven company, PwC knew it needed to focus on getting its people to adopt this new system. That meant building a gold medal team of specialists with a breadth of expertise to drive the transformation and securing full leadership buy-in, all to help foster a culture that readily embraces using Salesforce to better respond to the needs of its clients. If Salesforce technology were a car, PwC needed to create a workforce that was excited and interested in learning to drive.
At the start of the journey, PwC partnered with the Salesforce Professional Services team to cocreate a vision for adoption, including developing engagement models and determining KPIs to measure success. Through this process, the team discovered some universal threads across the breadth of learning styles within PwC’s workforce.
“People get bored. If you look at adult learning, no one wants to sit in a classroom or join a webinar,” Robertson said. “We needed people to learn new behaviors without using traditional learning models. We had to make it fun.”
Through human-centered design techniques and applied behavioral science, PwC’s team of specialists channelled their consulting expertise to create a variety of highly personalized and fun learning tools. This included everything from interactive escape room sessions, to white glove, one-on-one coaching, and guided in-app learning.
“The escape room sessions had amazing feedback in Canada. So then we thought, how do we scale this to Brazil or Sweden or Africa?” Robertson said. “We couldn’t do one-size-fits-all, so we focused on testing and iterating to get models that worked.”
While PwC continues to roll out its sales and go-to-market transformation globally, member firms have seen astounding success already with 14 deployments in 87 countries. Currently, more than 65,000 users are live on Salesforce.
PwC’s focus on prioritizing user adoption paid off: Over 90% of key internal stakeholders logged in within the first week of the U.K.’s go-live. There was a 151% increase in the value of recorded opportunities during the first month. In the U.S., sales pipeline grew 300% in 2017 due to Salesforce adoption. PwC has noticed that client teams with the strongest adoption are winning 8%–10% more business.
Now more than 80% of the network’s revenue is captured in Salesforce, enabling network-wide visibility into the global sales process. The member firms saw a 25% increase in won opportunities in the first year of transformation.
The people-first approach has successfully helped leaders like Reggie Walker drive adoption and equipped them to better service their clients’ own digital transformation projects. “We are reimagining our client experience, and viewing our customers differently than before,” Walker said.
PwC’s partnership with Salesforce Professional Services was instrumental to its transformation journey. The Salesforce Professional Services team provided invaluable expertise in the Salesforce Platform and astute business knowledge in the sales ecosystem.
“We’ve only begun to unlock the power of the PwC network, and we could not have achieved this without Salesforce,” said Robertson.



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",Professional Services,PwC
"Pacific Clinics is California's largest nonprofit provider of behavioral healthcare. It needed new ways to meet the growing demand for mental health services, while managing the complexity of medical data restrictions. So it partnered with Salesforce.
What you need to know
Nonprofit Cloud helped Pacific Clinics automate the process of entering client information into electronic health records (EHRs). This saved its employees 175 hours per month in administrative time and freed them to focus on the people they serve. Before, the agency’s Enhanced Care Management program served 200 clients per month. Now, it’s 700.
Why it matters
Many pre- and post-treatment care plans don’t use EHRs. This meant that Pacific Clinics’ team had to manually reenter data while maintaining privacy and security. Now that the process is automated, employees can focus on the most rewarding parts of the job: serving clients. The extra capacity makes a real difference for managed care Medi-Cal clients, some of the most vulnerable in Pacific Clinics' communities. The result: better employee morale, and better health for everyone.
CEO and President
Better results, better experience
It used to take 80 hours for staff to process a list of potential clients. Now it takes 15 minutes.
By eliminating 175 hours of data entry each month, staff can now serve 300% more client referrals.
Salesforce Shield protects sensitive data, ensuring HIPAA compliance.
With Experience Cloud for nonprofits, clients can connect on their preferred channels.
Pacific Clinics reduced staff burnout by eliminating tedious manual tasks.
Employees can now access client records in real time.
With MuleSoft, Pacific Clinics automates its data exchange with health plans, third-party billers, and other agencies.
",Healthcare & Life Sciences,Pacific Clinics
"3,500 employees
Salesforce customer since 2017
The insurance and wealth management industry is on the cusp of significant, disruptive change. This is due to a perfect storm of emerging business challenges. Accelerating technological advances have led to increased competition from new product offerings and businesses entering the market. At the same time, financial professionals and consumers expect more from the organizations they do business with. It’s no longer enough for businesses to have a great product. They also need to be able to deliver seamless, personalized experiences.
Faced with this new reality, Pacific Life Insurance Company started a transformational journey to digitize its business, enhance customer experiences and drive operational excellence. A key challenge being addressed is the need for a unified platform to improve visibility over customer interactions across the company’s U.S. retail businesses.
Pacific Life is one of the leading life insurance and retirement solutions companies in the U.S., with more than $158 billion in assets. The Fortune 500 company provides a range of products, including life insurance, annuities, and mutual funds, through a network of independent financial professionals — the company’s customers — who sell these products to their end customers.
In 2018, Pacific Life celebrated 150 years of success and was keen to ensure the future looked just as bright. Recognizing that superior customer experience — for both financial professionals and consumers — would emerge as a key differentiator in the market, company leaders turned to Salesforce for help to develop a whole-of-business solution. “Our path forward will be guided by the needs of customers,” said Rob Goodman, Assistant Vice President and CRM Program Owner. “And we are opportunistically leveraging strategic partners like Salesforce to provide next generation capabilities, and transform our customer engagement model and our technology infrastructure.” “We believe the next 10 years will see more change than the whole 150-year history of our company,” said Adrian Griggs, Chief Operating Officer. “The effective integration of channels across marketing, sales, and service activities is critical to delivering a positive, brand-reinforcing experience at every touchpoint in the customer relationship.”
To enhance visibility across its U.S. retail businesses, Pacific Life deployed Financial Services Cloud across the organization. Employees now have access to a single view of customer data, thanks to this fully-integrated customer relationship management (CRM) solution. As a result, employees who interact with customers on the frontline are able to deliver more seamless engagement and higher value, differentiated experiences.
The platform also allows Pacific Life to intelligently prioritize and tailor digital interactions with individual customers, based on their needs, and more effectively measure business impact. In the future, the company plans to be able to connect with customers in the financial services sector via a greater range of channels, including email, chat, social, text, and phone.
“Financial professionals expect the same personalized touchpoints and convenience when working with institutions as they get from their favorite consumer app experiences,” said Goodman. “For Pacific Life, this means we need to offer a seamless, convenient experience across our entire organization.”
Pacific Life is also using Marketing Cloud to communicate with financial professionals, improve the effectiveness of campaign activity, and track conversions of leads to sales.
Tableau CRM leverages the data within Pacific Life’s CRM system to deliver robust insights to employees to help them make smarter, data-driven decisions. For example, Einstein’s predictive analytics capabilities can analyze data and then recommend the next best action, such as who to call or visit next.
Tableau CRM also offers data visualization tools that allow employees to see real-time activity updates across a variety of customer touch points.
With evolving technology and changing customer expectations driving demand for improved digital capabilities, Pacific Life needed to modernize how it leverages technology to deliver rich and personalized experiences.
“Pacific Life has been progressively adopting more cloud-based infrastructure, platform and software as a service technology in recent years,” says Meetali Agarwal, Pacific Life’s Director, Customer Data. “We realized we needed an integration platform that would provide us with the ability to connect across cloud and on-premises systems — and across a variety of internal, partner and vendor systems — in a fast, flexible, secure, scalable, easy-to-use, and easy-to-maintain manner.”
Using the MuleSoft AnyPoint Platform, Pacific Life has been able to tap into a diverse ecosystem of partners to better serve its customers. The company created a central customer data hub to connect to Salesforce. MuleSoft can facilitate a real-time data exchange between this hub and a variety of third-party applications. MuleSoft also allows the company to easily create and use application programming interfaces (APIs) to digitize its insurance products, and integrate with partners to distribute its products via a range of digital platforms like insurance marketplace Blueprint Income. This allows the company to reach new customers.
In this new climate of changing technology, Pacific Life realizes the importance of learning through innovation. Recognizing that employee buy-in would be vital for the success of Salesforce’s solution, the organization ran an internal campaign to encourage employees to embrace the new technology. This is aligned with its overall strategy of embracing new ways of working and new technologies.
“Providing value to the customer is vital, both at the point of the initial sale and over a customer’s lifetime,” says Griggs. “We believe exceeding customer expectations by understanding, anticipating, and fulfilling their needs through tailored offerings is key to our success.”
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",Financial Services,Pacific Life Insurance Company
"83 employees
Salesforce customer since 2014
When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States in early 2020, hospitals and insurance companies began moving patients with chronic conditions out of their systems, canceling routine appointments and elective surgeries in order to accommodate those with COVID-19. But this vulnerable population of patients with chronic conditions still needed help managing their health at home to ensure that they weren’t putting themselves in high-risk situations that could compromise their wellbeing.
Pack Health, a digital health coaching company for chronic disease management, quickly scaled to accommodate 25,000 to 50,000 new members with chronic conditions in its remote care system.
In normal times, companies contract with Pack Health to provide one-on-one digital health coaching to patients for more than 25 chronic conditions like diabetes, COPD, or mental health. But the novel coronavirus changed everything, both for patients with underlying health conditions (who are at an increased risk of contracting the virus) and for the greater healthcare infrastructure. To help relieve the burden, Pack Health needed to be able to quadruple its team of coaches to accommodate the influx of new patients.
“Chronic disease in the U.S. is already at crisis levels,” said Mazi Rasulnia, President and CEO of Pack Health. “Combine that with a pandemic, and it was clear that we needed a public health and medical response on an unprecedented level.”
Pack Health onboards patients with the help of Salesforce, including digital communications and specialized call center agents who provide program education and warmly transition members into engagement. This way, Health Advisor time and capacity is fully maximized to focus solely on providing care and checking in with members at least five times per week via phone, text, or email.
Pack Health is handling the influx of members with a goal of hiring 30 to 40 new advisors to support its rapid expansion. While employee onboarding is normally a hybrid of both face-to-face and virtual education, the company has been able to compress its training program from two weeks to five days by shipping out Chromebooks that are preloaded with Service Cloud and other resources. Using Service Cloud, Health Advisors can reference knowledge articles to educate members on their condition, set goals and reminders, and form plans to manage their health.
Because these tools, as well as patient records, are already in the cloud with Salesforce, Pack Health can achieve ultimate scalability and configurability to quickly meet changing needs.
“Being in the cloud with Salesforce gave us full confidence that we could scale,” said Rasulnia. “The technologies and processes were already there, so we didn’t really have a hiccup in terms of going virtual and being able to handle the incoming requests.”
Pack Health tailors relationships with each member using important insights like social determinants of health and connecting with patients on their preferred channel, whether email, phone, text, or secure app. In addition, Pack Health’s software developers have configured preapproved text message templates within Salesforce, allowing Health Advisors to customize messages to members through simple drag-and-drop functionality.
“Salesforce has created a lot of efficiencies for our Health Advisors to be able to do follow-ups and add touchpoints for members,” said Rasulnia. “If Salesforce didn’t have the flexibility it does, we wouldn’t be able to optimize engagement like we have.”
The data that Pack Health collects (from wearables that monitor patients to member/advisor conversations) allows the company to visualize a full-scale picture of health for each member. Health Advisors are able to compound the relational foundation they’ve built with members through remote data collection — and they can see it all right in the cloud.
“People are scared, they’re stressed, and they’re experiencing high levels of uncertainty. For individuals with chronic conditions, this can be extremely overwhelming,” said Rasulnia. “So we’re now becoming that digital quarterback or coach that can support them through this time.”
Pack Health attributes its ability to scale and respond quickly in the time of crisis to having a service platform that can easily be customized to meet changing needs. Rasulnia believes that having off-the-shelf functionality that can be built upon with deeper customization saves time, money, and headaches — allowing Pack Health staff to focus on what really matters.
“The hope is that our services help free up every nurse, pharmacist, and doctor to work at the top of their game right now fighting COVID-19. We just want to do whatever we can to be part of the solution.”



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",Other,Pack Health
"“It takes a village to open a store,” said Jenni Doyle, Director of Information and Technical Services at Papa Murphy’s — the largest take-and-bake pizza chain in the United States. With more than 1,500 franchise locations nationwide, Papa Murphy’s differs from other fast food chains in that its stores offer fresh, hand-crafted pizzas ready for customers to bake at home. From technology partners to designers to project managers, launching a franchise requires a multitude of people working together, and there needs to be transparency across the entire process. “It’s really important that everybody stays in sync with where things are,” she said. The year 2014 was a big one for Papa Murphy’s: It surpassed the 1,400-location mark and it went public. To keep up with its unprecedented growth, Papa Murphy’s turned to Salesforce and Community Cloud to launch Pathway — an internal community that brings franchisees and their entire operations team together to coordinate every step of the store launch, from location scouting to opening day. It offers 360-degree visibility into the entire process, including task allocation and progress. But it wasn’t always such a seamless process. In the past, everyone tracked their tasks on individual spreadsheets. “When we looked at the process, we said, ‘This just isn’t scalable, and it just doesn’t pass our logic test,’” said Doyle. “You’re not going to have consistency if you have 17 groups using 17 different spreadsheets.” “Now, when we introduce new steps into the process, we no longer have to hunt down those 17 spreadsheets,” she said. “With just a few clicks or swipes, we can update one template, and everyone is aware of their new tasks.” Since all relevant documents are built into the Pathway community — including quick reference guides, FAQs, and task-related forms — the amount of email going back and forth is reduced even further.
Papa Murphy’s was already using Sales Cloud to track and manage the full lifecycle of franchise leads, so adding Community Cloud was a natural choice. Its simplicity and ease of integration with third-party apps such as TaskRay from Salesforce’s AppExchange sealed the deal. Papa Murphy’s also added a suggestion box in Pathway, so team members can suggest new features to continuously improve the community and processes. “With Community Cloud,” said Doyle, “we’ve been able to turn around enhancements really fast.” Future plans include evolving Pathway to support other store lifecycle events, such as remodels and relocations, and potentially expanding it into other parts of the business. Papa Murphy’s also uses Marketing Cloud for two key functions: “One is to support the franchise sales process — communications with leads and opportunities,” explained Doyle. “And we also use Marketing Cloud to communicate directly with our customers with coupons, offers, and product information.” Indeed, opening a franchise is a lot like herding cats. There are so many tasks, people, and processes to keep in sync. For Papa Murphy’s, Community Cloud significantly streamlines the process, providing a unified dashboard of more than 400 tasks, 15–20 spreadsheets, and a team of people. “With Community Cloud, we took a process that seemed so complicated and so overwhelming, and we made it really simple,” added Doyle.



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",Retail,Papa Murphy's
"Educators, parents, and learners of all ages rely on Pearson Education. The global learning company offers educational content, learning platforms, assessments, and computer-based testing services. So when the busy back-to-school season hits, Pearson needs to be ready to support every customer, quickly.
To provide fast, personalized support, Pearson needs to understand each customer’s needs and history. However, getting a complete view of customers was a major challenge for Pearson, due to its large size and complex data infrastructure. The company also needed to create self-service resources and communities to help customers find answers or solve challenges quickly.
Today, the company is transforming customer service with Salesforce technology and experts.
Originally founded in 1844, Pearson has evolved from a large holding company to a global digital education provider. As the company changed over the years, it inherited several enterprise resource planning systems and CRM platforms from mergers and acquisitions.
Storing information in multiple systems meant the company couldn’t get a 360-degree view of customers. Additionally, Pearson has several websites and customer support hotlines, so customers needed multiple usernames for various websites and had to provide the same information every time they contacted customer support.
“We might have one person as our customer for years,” said Milin Mathur, Director of Customer Support and Service Platforms. “We want to make sure that we provide them a consistent, good customer experience.”
The company implemented Sales Cloud and Service Cloud in 2014, replacing more than 80 legacy CRM systems. Now sales and support agents can quickly see a customer’s complete interaction history with the company, including products they’ve purchased and challenges they’ve faced.
Pearson’s next goal was improving self-service options for customers, many of whom were young adults who wanted to find answers online instead of calling a customer service line.
The company partnered with a Salesforce Professional Services program architect, who helped Pearson improve the quality of its knowledge base articles so customers could find answers on their own. The architect also helped implement a self-help wizard to show customers solutions directly within Pearson products. As a result, 50% of calls and chats were resolved through self-help, instead of more expensive and time-consuming interactions with support agents.
Pearson continues to innovate with Salesforce to better serve customers. The company reviews Salesforce data to identify challenges customers frequently encounter, then improves product designs to eliminate those concerns. Pearson is also experimenting with artificial intelligence, piloting a program using Einstein chatbots to help customers with their top support request — resetting passwords.
The key to Pearson’s success with Salesforce? “Engage the Customer Success Group early and provide them with all the information that they need in time, and then you’ll see results,” Mathur said.
The Customer Success Group provides resources and expertise to help Salesforce customers achieve their goals faster. Pearson worked with a success manager — a designated expert who helps customers succeed with Salesforce — to find the best resources to improve customer service. Pearson learned the best way to deploy Community Cloud to build closer relationships with its customers through a series of one-on-one coaching sessions with a Salesforce expert, called Salesforce Accelerators.
“The Customer Success Group is partnering with us,” Mathur said. “Whenever we go and start any project, we bring them with us. We work as a team.”



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",Education,Pearson Education
"Nicole Rothermel, Director of Sales Solutions at Penske Logistics, left Dreamforce 2016 feeling inspired to lead her team’s move to Salesforce Lightning.
Rothermel is an innovator. Her mission is to help the sales team sell faster and better. Her team had been using Sales Cloud since 2011. At Dreamforce, she saw that Lightning offered the innovative, new features her sales team wanted — a more intuitive user interface, flexible page layouts, and kanban views that provide key information at a glance.  
To help her organization move to Lightning quickly and successfully, Rothermel used change management strategies and teamed up with Salesforce experts from the Customer Success Group.
“Salesforce is always at the core of what we’re doing to innovate,” Rothermel said. “The Customer Success Group helps us do what we want to do faster.”
Penske Logistics is a leading provider of supply chain and logistics solutions to market-leading companies in the automotive, manufacturing, and food and beverage sectors around the globe.
For Penske Logistics, technology is the key to driving growth and innovation. From exploring blockchain to creating smartphone apps for truck drivers, Penske stays ahead of technology so its customers can focus on their core businesses.
The company’s sales technology has also evolved over the years. Sales reps moved from tracking deals in spreadsheets to using a sales solution developed in-house. In 2011, the company turned to Sales Cloud to give its sales team a consistent way to track deals.
Rothermel believed that Lightning would help her sales team continue to innovate with Salesforce technology. She returned from Dreamforce in 2016 ready to help her organization make the move. However, the move presented some challenges. Several divisions in the company used the same Salesforce organization; some groups had complex customizations and weren’t ready to switch.
Rothermel used change management strategies to ensure the transition went smoothly: Her team got support for the change from senior leadership, ran a three-month pilot with a small group to understand and resolve questions users might have, and communicated the benefits of Lightning well in advance of changes.
In addition to change management, Rothermel’s team also relied on the Customer Success Group throughout the shift to Lightning. The Customer Success Group offers resources and expertise to help Salesforce customers achieve their goals faster.
The success manager reviewed Penske’s objectives and helped the company develop a vision and strategy to get the most out of Salesforce.
The success manager also connected Penske Logistics to Salesforce experts who provided valuable tools and insights for the migration to the Lightning transition. Success specialists guided Rothermel’s team to the Lightning Now Community and helped the team establish metrics to ensure Penske Logistics was getting value from Lightning.
Since rolling out Lightning to more than 500 users in 2017, Penske Logistics has seen 12% more sales activities logged in Salesforce. Thanks to the Lightning features available in mobile, the sales team’s mobile adoption has increased 41%.
“We’ve given them a lot more tools with Lightning to be nimble,” Rothermel said. “They don’t have to wait until they’re back in the office to start putting in all of their activities in Salesforce.”
Rothermel’s team plans to continue rolling out Lightning to more users in 2018. And they’ll continue to partner with the Customer Success Group.
“It was a seamless transition for us because we got the right resources, and we wouldn’t have had that without our the Customer Success Group team,” she said.



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",Technology,Penske Logistics
"To be a successful global brand in the 21st century you need to be agile and locally relevant. For 120+ years, Philips’s innovative lighting, healthcare, and consumer lifestyle solutions have improved the lives of people all over the world. With Salesforce, the company gets a deeper level of understanding of its customers in individual markets so it can provide products that meet their needs more closely than ever before.
“We are creating local solutions, while leveraging global scale,” said Wim Van Gils, Vice President of Global Commercial Excellence. “Salesforce is helping us develop tools, processes, and new ways of working so we can cater to the needs of customers and consumers in specific markets. It’s a collaborative tool that connects the dots.”
Sales Cloud gives sales and operations employees working everywhere from Africa to Brazil to the Netherlands real-time customer insights, so every interaction is meaningful. It brings together information from all over the world so data isn’t siloed in different departments or markets, but provides true 360-degree views.
“We want to connect sales, service, marketing, and anyone that’s customer-facing with Salesforce so we can share best practices and pockets of excellence,” said Van Gils. “We also want to give our R&D, supply chain, and product groups insight into evolving customer needs and opportunities.”
The giant electronics company uses Service Cloud to give 7,000+ call center and field service engineers in its global healthcare division the complete customer views they need to provide real-time service. And, with Chatter, it’s easy for everyone to share information and collaborate across time zones and geographical borders. Philips also started to use Marketing Cloud to get to know customers even better and engage with them on social channels.
“To be a customer-centric company, you need to listen to your customers every day, and — since listening alone isn’t enough — you need to have a dialogue with them,” said Van Gils.
It’s not just employees and customers that are communicating in the new, connected world: Philips is building products that can share real-time data about how they are being used. The company’s “Digital Accelerator” lab helps researchers develop connected products and understand how they are used.
“We work with every business unit to connect products to Philips so researchers can understand consumer habits to better meet their needs,” said Jeroen Tas, CEO of Connected Care and Health Informatics. “We’ve already connected lamps, air purifiers, coffee machines, toothbrushes, and more. In the past we built products that were self-contained, but now these products become plug-ins for digital solutions. Whether it’s lighting or healthcare devices, ultimately we want to create a better, healthier world and improve people’s lives by better understanding our customers and consumers. Salesforce is helping us.”



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",Technology,Philips
"As the COVID-19 crisis unfolded, Piedmont Healthcare’s call center was inundated with calls from concerned community members. Georgia’s largest healthcare provider realized it urgently needed a triage process to help its COVID-19 call center handle the drastic increase in inquiries and ensure patients received the level of care they required.
Katie Logan
Vice President, Experience
In four steps, Piedmont Healthcare transformed its call center to stabilize and then grow its capacity to engage with customers.
When COVID-19 hit, Piedmont Healthcare had just launched a pilot of Health Cloud in its contact center, using the technology to help agents handle routine calls like requests for appointments.
With the help of Salesforce partner Slalom, Piedmont developed new COVID-related call scripting and flows for Health Cloud and scaled it throughout the organization in three days. The call scripting enabled nurses and call center agents to ask callers standardized questions about risk, exposure, and active symptoms, and then quickly guide them to the right level of care.
The solution included setting up a COVID-19 hotline and training more than 80 triage nurses and contact center agents to use the platform in the same short period. All were new to Health Cloud.
Within five hours of Piedmont Healthcare deploying the new technology, its team members had logged and triaged more than 150 calls. The solution was quickly scaled up, with 80 nurses and 70 agents onboarded within weeks.
As guidance and standards relating to COVID-19 have continued to evolve, Piedmont Healthcare has used Salesforce’s solution to deploy real-time changes to scripts and process flows. This ensures team members always have the most up-to-date information to pass on to patients. This includes critical information for employers and employees about safely returning to work.
Katie Logan
Vice President, Experience
Call scripting allowed Piedmont to use nurses who aren’t normally part of its call center team to help triage calls. The team was able to quickly establish its command center and adapt easily as information around COVID-19 evolved.
As part of the project, Slalom developed a dashboard that triage nurses and call center agents used to track and manage patients calling about care related to COVID-19.
Using the dashboard, Piedmont Healthcare can track customer data, including the volume of calls, patient source (new or existing), call source, COVID-19 travel destinations, symptoms, and outcomes. These valuable insights are helping it assess demand for healthcare services in real time, making it easier to ensure it has the right staffing levels and other resources to care for patients.
As virus-related restrictions were lifted and people started returning to work, Piedmont Healthcare leveraged Salesforce’s agility and ability to scale to help restore normal services in its facilities and rebuild revenue.
In addition to continuing to handle calls about COVID-19, Piedmont Healthcare is proactively engaging with patients whose routine care was interrupted due to the outbreak, or who had elective surgeries canceled or postponed.
Piedmont has been able to approach this in a systematic and coordinated way, thanks to Salesforce. This has involved deploying new workflows, call scripts, and measures to help contact the thousands of patients who need to be rescheduled.
Katie Logan
Vice President, Experience
The company is using Marketing Cloud to send tailored marketing communications to patients, including emails and text messages.
“One of the first things we did was push out an email to our entire database saying, ‘It’s safe, we’re here to help you reschedule,’ creating an access point to open the conversation,” said Logan.
As normal services resume, Piedmont Healthcare is also using Salesforce to gather insights into why patients may or may not come in for an appointment — whether that’s because they’re concerned about contracting COVID-19, or are experiencing financial difficulties or transport issues. These insights are helping Piedmont better communicate with patients and predict demand as it resumes normal services.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has proved invaluable for helping the company recover volume lost in the early stages of the pandemic, according to Andrew Chang, Piedmont Healthcare’s Executive Director of Marketing.
Andrew Chang
Executive Director of Marketing
Now, with the conversation shifting to how people should go about their everyday lives in the ‘new normal,’ Piedmont Healthcare is using Salesforce technology to help it do what it does best — look after the health of patients and the communities it serves.
",Healthcare & Life Sciences,Piedmont Healthcare
"In an increasingly competitive global marketplace even giant corporations like Procter & Gamble need to make every dollar count. Procter & Gamble Professional (PGP), a division of the consumer products giant that sells professional cleaning products to businesses, is finding new ways to do more for less. According to Dave Ziegler, Global IT Manager, “Salesforce helps us compete more effectively.” PGP is a leading supplier of concentrated cleaning solutions and automated dilution systems. It also installs and services the systems that mix its products. To move the business forward, the company needed comprehensive views of its customers — including hotels, restaurants, schools, assisted living facilities, and corporations — and the flexibility to adapt to a rapidly changing business. It tapped Salesforce to replace complex legacy systems that were difficult to adapt and expensive to support. Since PGP sells through a network of independent distributors, the ability to easily assign leads, collaborate on deals, and share information is critical. Centralizing everything in Salesforce lets partners and PGP employees coordinate activities and quickly share information between call center, field sales, and technical services teams. “We started with basic CRM functionality — electronic call book and customer records — but Sales Cloud has evolved into an integral tool for managing our business,” says Ziegler. With Salesforce on iPads, PGP salespeople can work from the road, capturing activities and placing orders from anywhere for greater productivity. And, new digital sales aids let reps share more engaging presentations with customers. In addition to showing product specs from their tablets, reps can quickly estimate how much solution a potential customer needs to order, and quickly calculate the savings over using competitive products. Reps close deals faster, and the company saves by reducing printed materials. Service Cloud helps PGP’s customer support teams respond to questions about product effectiveness, dilution formulas, and machine operations. And, with field service teams that conduct both reactive and preventative maintenance, sharing information is also important. “Sales and service need to work in sync with a high degree of collaboration” says Ziegler. “With Salesforce they can execute their jobs faster and more effectively.”
PGP plans to add additional mobile functionality to Salesforce in the future to make it even easier for employees to stay connected and be more productive. “Mobile is the key platform now. Our reps, distributors. and service techs have at their fingertips in the field what used to only be available in the office,” says Ziegler. “With Salesforce everyone at PGP and our partners has the insight into our business we need to continue to grow.”



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",Professional Services,Procter & Gamble Professional
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"When the team at Room & Board built their first website back in 1999, they thought carefully about how to mirror a customer’s very personal in-store experience online. Any move to the digital would need to convey the same importance the company placed in every product detail and in every customer relationship. Originally spun off from a family-owned furniture business in Minneapolis, Room & Board focused from day one on modern furniture, with an emphasis on American craftsmanship and the use of sustainable materials. The company quickly earned a following on the virtues of both its heirloom-quality furniture and its dedication to personalized, high-quality customer service. For years, the Room & Board website essentially functioned as a photo catalog of the company’s products: There was no way to buy anything online, only in the company’s stores. Then, in 2006, Room & Board added a wish list feature to the site. Customers could create a list of items from the site they wanted to buy, and email it to company headquarters, which processed the emails as orders. “That first month we did it, we broke just shy of $700,000 in sales, and we [thought], wait a minute, there’s something here we’ve got to figure out,” recalled John Schroeder, retail business intelligence manager. So a year later, the company featured the email ordering option on the website; it hadn’t mentioned wish lists much to that point. Sales jumped another 50%. Schroeder and his team wanted to serve and learn from their customers as much as they wanted to grow an online presence. “We were understanding how customers were utilizing the website, our stores, or our call center, and taking that information and [asking] ‘How do we create the best possible experience for our customer?’” Schroeder said.
Room & Board leadership turned to Marketing Cloud to help create a digital experience reflective of the ways their customers use the Web alongside retail stores and call centers. The company started uploading all of its customer sales history and data to the cloud in 2009 without knowing exactly how the data would be leveraged. “Now we look back and [realize] that was such a smart decision we made,” Schroeder said. “Every day, machine learning is getting smarter.” All that information now powers product recommendations Room & Board makes to customers using Marketing Cloud’s Predictive Intelligence. Company leadership considers their design associates one of Room & Board’s greatest assets. In stores, design associates work with customers to help them understand how a look comes together in a room, and what missing piece might help to complete a showroom-perfect room in their own homes. Marketing Cloud helps Room & Board re-create that personal in-store experience for online customers. Schroeder called Marketing Cloud his “silent partner” that’s making product recommendations to customers while he sleeps. Years of data about what pieces of furniture go together, what styles complement one another, and what products customers tend to view and purchase in groups informs recommendations made on the website and in personalized email campaigns. Marketing Cloud’s Predictive Intelligence powers these recommendations — and they’re working. Customers who engage with Room & Board’s recommendations place Web orders with 40% higher average values than those who don’t. When customers view those recommendations before coming into the store, the average order value shoots up 60%. “We are educating the customer. They’re walking in the store, already anticipating they’re going to buy that sofa and that lamp,” said Schroeder. “Then, as they’re working with our design associate, they think, I’ll get the rug too. So, they’re really completing their space.”
Room & Board realized a 2,900% return on investment in its first year using Predictive Intelligence. “That’s phenomenal. That’s just an amazing return on investment,” Schroeder said. The company is continually refining its use of the technology, using data about how its customers interact with email and the Web to optimize campaigns even further. In one example, a weekly email campaign was moved from a weekday to Saturday to target customers who read mail on their phones. “It’s a nice little reminder for the consumer who’s out and about to actually go visit a store and sit on that sofa, [and] check out those drawer glides,” Schroeder said. Room & Board’s digital marketing team’s goal is to know each customer well enough to recommend the next piece of furniture or room accent to tie a home together. But today’s customers are shifting more and more toward online browsing in lieu of in-store visits. So Salesforce helps Room & Board extend that in-store feeling to the digital realm, nurturing scores of new customer relationships in the process. “Marketing Cloud has allowed us to talk to customers individually and create more of that one-to-one relationship like we have had in the stores for so many years,” Kimberly Haase Ruthenbeck, director of Web experience, said. “It’s not replacing the in-store experience, it’s just complementing the idea that the customer wants to feel like we know them all the way through the process.” With Marketing Cloud, Room & Board helps more customers than ever before create their own ideal homes.



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",Retail,Room & Board
"Salt Lake City gives residents and constituents the ability to interact with their local government in real time, and that has become even more important with the COVID-19 crisis.
“During this time, especially, we are striving to answer questions, involve the public in the decision-making process, and give everyone the opportunity to let us know about issues they're facing,” said Elizabeth Buehler, Civic Engagement Manager for Salt Lake City. 
Salt Lake is the largest city in the region within a six-hour drive, and, thus, is often expected to act first and lead the tone for those who live within and outside city limits. This means teams like Buehler’s have to think about the unique demographics of the community, as the staff “tends to be the test-bed for new processes and new technology, showing others what can be done based on our firsthand learnings and experiences,” said Buehler.
Like many communities around the nation (if not the world), Salt Lake City’s first-hand experience has resulted in making tough decisions that impact people’s lives, and protect the health and well-being of its residents. The team had to transition many in-person events/meetings to digital experiences, prioritize funding or PPE resources for certain functions or groups of people, and move to have the community shelter in place. 
“The nature of this virus has forced us to act fast on late-breaking information, which means we have to find a way to judge the temperature of our constituents, and engage them in the conversation as we take action on advice from health experts,” said Buehler. “We have to maintain the level of trust we have with our residents and constituents while also keeping people safe.” 
Buehler and team needed a way to listen to every question asked over every channel, and reach back out with a real, concrete answers fast.
The team deployed an outreach and engagement platform on Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. It gives Salt Lake the tools to not only disseminate information out to the public, but also to listen, respond, and act on the insights and comments the city receives in return.
Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio gives Salt Lake social listening tools, which they use to monitor a number of topics across a number of handles run by various departments across the city. Visual summary tools, like word clouds and leaderboards, give users a way to pick up on and engage in newly trending conversations, while topic profiles — a caching of key words and hashtags use in social commentary — recap status or sentiment on well-known discussions.
The team uses this to expand their real-time understanding of public opinion and make decisions accordingly. “As city leadership was contemplating whether or not to issue a stay-at-home, shelter-in-place order, we set up our first topic profile so that our communications director could see how this was being received by the public,” said Buehler. “She was able to see that the sentiment was overall positive — that the majority of Salt Lake would welcome a shelter-in-place order given the circumstances — and was able to include that data and insight in her briefings to the mayor.”
Social Studio also gives the city a number of publishing tools, which Buehler and team use to push announcements and updates across their handles and channels — an especially critical capability when instructions, protocols, and guidance are changing quickly as we become more knowledgeable on the virus. Answers to FAQ, hotline information, and more can also be scheduled using Social Studio’s calendar function, giving the team a way to keep “need-to-know” information handy.
Buehler and team worked with their implementation partner, MTX, to launch this platform in just one week.
Outside of COVID-19 specific topics and execution, Social Studio has also started to help the city move on a few project management and development initiatives. The team used topic profiles to learn how residents feel about a new park project being considered by the city, and are making decisions with the public’s sentiment in mind. They are also leveraging Social Studio’s ability to integrate with the city’s Service Cloud instance to incorporate more social context into case profiles, bringing phone, email, and social inquiries together into a single platform with a single view.  
“This streamlines our processes. For example, someone on Facebook tells us they have a pothole on their street and asks us to come out and fix it. Before, that had to go through a whole separate chain to get it officially in our system and issue a work order,” said Buehler. “But now, we integrating that into our CRM so that all we’ll have to do is click a button to bring any and all inquiries into a central queue. This will help us document, prioritize, address, requests in a way that is fair and transparent.”
“Any way you can expand your reach — expand how you're listening to your constituents — and centralize how you push messages out will really help in times like this as well as when business returns to normal,” said Buehler. “Because simplifying operations in an all-digital environment helps you pinpoint quick wins, identify patterns, and establish best practices for the future.”



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",Government,Salt Lake City
"Shazam’s media identification and discovery service launched in 2004 and was one of the first apps in the Apple App Store in 2008. Since then, the app has been downloaded more than a billion times in more than 190 countries. With Tableau CRM, Shazam leadership can now visualize one of its most important assets — data. Sales teams can now see their data in real time to help give advertisers a more focused audience and customers greater satisfaction.
A few short years ago, Shazam sounded like pure science fiction. Now, its simple app allows users to identify media in the world around them — more than 20 million times a day. Users can record, submit, and identify music, movies, images, and other media in seconds from their personal device. For many, the experience feels like magic.
The team at Shazam knows discovery and curiosity are the essence of the user experience. “We use ‘magic’ all the time as sort of a motivating word in the company,” said Greg Glenday, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Shazam. “You’re curious about something … and you want to know what it is. We built an entire business on that.” The Shazam team also knows that such an intimate moment of discovery, like stumbling across a new, summer-defining song, means customers expect a personal experience they can trust.
Shazam first launched in the pre-app age. Revolutionary from the start, the service asked users to text an audio clip that they wanted to identify, and users would receive an answer in under a minute. Now, with the app, they can get the same information in under two seconds. Over the past 14 years, the brand has evolved along with customer expectations and technological innovations.
“At Shazam, advertising became our biggest business,” said Glenday. “We used to just sell little banners on the app. Now we sell branded content. We sell custom takeovers. We sell augmented reality.”
The company must identify customer media trends for over 200 global advertising partners. Sales teams need to optimize their customer data and historical sales trends to identify future sales opportunities. And executives need easy oversight and trending.
Before Tableau CRM, Shazam’s sales teams had to clean inaccurate data and generate all of their reports manually, which consumed 15% to 20% of their time and resources. And while sales team leaders relied heavily on finance to generate reports, individual sales reps used their own disparate reporting systems. “We had a team that did a lot of things manually,” Glenday said. “At the end of the week I would get kind of a hodgepodge report that, frankly, I didn’t trust.”
Generating manual reports also meant that data was stuck in spreadsheets and never up to date, so advisors and team managers spent more time pulling data than analyzing it. Answering a simple question could take over two hours because relevant data sources had to be gathered and ported into Excel by hand. And after all that, there was no clear way to track quotas, forecasts, or performance metrics.
“Without Salesforce, we would be living in a world of spreadsheets,” said Pete Miles, VP of Ad Operations. “That can become a huge hindrance and create so much drag on a business, particularly on an analytics team and an operations team.”
The entire sales organization at Shazam needed to move away from time-consuming, inaccurate reporting. They chose Tableau CRM.
In just two months, Shazam leaders saw an eye-popping 752% return on their investment. Glenday was impressed: “What used to take 48 hours and some manpower is now five minutes, and I do it myself, which for me — to be able to do it myself — is a big deal.” With Tableau CRM, sales teams and executive leadership use sales data to understand historical data and pipeline trends without the wait.
Company leaders can drill into their data and understand key trends, helping them better coach their teams and drive better behaviors. Sales team managers can drill into their top accounts by advertiser names, brands, and holding companies. And reps know the data is current and clean.
“Everyone kind of understands that Salesforce is the source of truth,” said Anna Nguyen, Director of Account Management. “If you really want to understand how a campaign has done, how a certain account has done, everyone knows exactly where to go.”
Once Tableau CRM became integral to sales leadership and management, Shazam extended the tool to its entire organization of individual sales reps. Now, all reps can manage their personal pipelines and show clients up-to-date, relevant data — all from their phones.
“You can refresh a dashboard and get the latest data,” said Nguyen. “And giving people access to that data will empower them and give them the ability to make decisions on their own and work more independently.”
With Tableau CRM, Shazam is uniting its global team to create a single brand strategy for growth. It helps the team improve revenue stream, provide cleaner client data, and heighten the customer experience. Pete Miles concluded, “With Einstein Analytics*, we’re able to put a trusted source of data into the hands of our advertisers when they need it, providing a whole new way for our users to connect to the world around them.”



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",Technology,Shazam
"The ancient Chinese principle of yin and yang probably isn’t the first thing that springs to mind when it comes to petrochemicals. But the concept of how, in nature, apparently opposing forces can in fact be interconnected parts of a single system — or two sides of the same coin — is reflected time and again at Shell Chemicals.
This applies to everything from parent company Royal Dutch Shell’s sustainability roadmap — which is guiding the company toward net-zero emissions in step with its economic, social, and environmental imperatives — to Shell Chemicals’ use of waste from industrial processes to create raw materials and chemicals that bring real value for society.
“For me, our inputs — the people, processes, and platforms we put in place in our organization — and business performance are like yin and yang; you just can't have one without the other,” said Martijn van Noordennen, Global Manager for Customer Experience & Operational Excellence at Shell Chemicals.
“Ultimately, we’re in the business of serving our customers. We need to be proactive and responsive. We need to understand and anticipate their needs. Our customer satisfaction is now at an all-time high because we have built a platform that allows us to collaborate with and around our customers. This is where Salesforce comes in.” 
This journey began back in 2004 when Shell Chemicals became one of the first players in the industry to develop an ecommerce portal. A decade later, when the time came to update the technology powering the portal, the business went to tender. Salesforce provided a full mock-up, allowing the company to actually see what the platform would look like once implemented.
“I was hooked from there on in,” recalled van Noordennen. “We were buying a customer portal built on Experience Cloud, and that's how it started, but I could immediately see that it could become so much more than that once connected to a CRM system. Then we could really start to collaborate with and around the customer.”
The portal went live in 2017 to help the business realize its bold ambition of providing an unrivaled customer experience. “I often described the customer portal to my colleagues as a virtual shop window,” said van Noordennen. “Customers can come in, order products, find their invoices, and so on. Then I said we’re going to put in an office building next door, knock down the interior wall, and create one seamless platform.” 
Sales Cloud became the central repository of customer data to facilitate intelligent sales processes across the business’ global operations. The system gives full visibility of the customer journey and logs all contacts with customers. This allows opportunities to be nurtured more effectively, empowering salespeople to be both proactive and reactive while anticipating future customer needs.
“Previously, you could have two colleagues sitting opposite each other in one of our offices but completely unaware that they’re talking to the same customer,” explained van Noordennen. “Today, if they look up a customer in Salesforce, they’ll immediately see what’s happening with that customer and, crucially, what their colleagues are doing with them, whether they’re in Houston, Rotterdam, London, Singapore, or wherever.” 
All this is displayed on Salesforce in easy-to-read dashboards, saving time previously spent drawing up reports. “We can connect the dots more efficiently and deliver something that's actually greater than the sum of its parts,” said van Noordennen.
“We store all sorts of intricate detail on these dashboards, from orders and invoices through to the size of a coupling that a driver might need when they get onsite. The entire journey is managed more efficiently without having our customer relationship coordinators spending the first two hours of their day compiling reports and deciding what to do first. Everything they need is there, in a single color-coded dashboard.”
Shell Chemicals is harnessing the power of AI with the adoption of Einstein Analytics (now Tableau CRM). By pooling all information gathered in sales meetings — and using intelligent search functions — the business can unlock a much clearer view of its customers and how their needs are developing.
“All that information is locked in and kept for posterity,” van Noordennen continued. “We need to reinvent our industry and, of course, decarbonization and sustainability are huge opportunities. So if a customer has expressed an interest in a green technology or whatever, we can use Einstein Search to spot these opportunities and drive value. Our talent rotates every three to four years; Salesforce ensures that information does not leave when our people take on new roles.”
Service Cloud is bringing even greater clarity to the company’s customer view. Every contact a customer makes with the business, be it a query about an order or a complaint, is logged, so customer relationship coordinators can tap into a huge amount of information to address issues when they arise. Since the rollout of Service Cloud, the number of cases logged has tripled, while the time to resolution has more than halved.
“The number of cases has gone up because it's easier for customers to interact with us and we can address problems far more quickly, which has driven the case closure time down significantly and boosted our customer satisfaction index, which is now close to nine on a scale of 10,” said van Noordennen.
Shell Chemicals is not stopping there. It is in the process of looping in its manufacturing and technical support personnel to Service Cloud to allow site visits to be scheduled through the platform. The company is also using Salesforce Knowledge, which will facilitate the instant sharing of information via the customer portal.
“This will be hugely powerful,” said van Noordennen. “The search functionality has AI behind it so as soon as you start typing your question it will suggest helpful results. The feature I really love is the tick box that allows results to also be shared via the customer portal. Say you’re a customer, it’s 5:00 p.m. on a Friday, you have a delivery coming in the next morning, and you need to download a certificate of analysis for your colleagues in production. As a customer, you now have access to a knowledge article that shows you how to do it via the portal — without having to call anyone — because the whole back end is automated. Problem solved.”
The business is also using Marketing Cloud to great effect, added van Noordennen: “The brilliance of marketing automation is that you can see how people are engaging with your content. We’re able to use Marketing Cloud to nurture our leads up to a point where they’re warm enough — where the customers themselves say they’d like to talk to someone. It’s adding millions to our sales funnel.”
All this is just the beginning. The different elements of the Chemicals Customer Curiosity Cloud are tied together with the business’ ERP system and a variety of other planning and operations systems through MuleSoft, and the platform continues to evolve as users suggest new functions and improvements, which are acted on by a dedicated team of around 30 people at Shell Chemicals’ Bangalore Center of Excellence.
“It’s constantly evolving,” said van Noordennen. “Another feature that we have added in is the Ideas Generator, which means that if a certain functionality is not to a user’s liking or if they have an idea, they can click on a button and share it with our development team. Colleagues can then vote for any new functionalities that are suggested.”
The platform’s users — and making life easier for them — are always front of mind for the team in Bangalore. They’re clearly hitting their mark. The Chemicals Customer Curiosity Cloud boasts a 97% login rate; 88% of users are logging in at least once a week, and 55% use it daily. And a whopping 95% of users agree that the platform supports their daily activities.
Ensuring this sort of user-centricity is as important as being customer-centric, said van Noordennen. “User-centricity is one of the core design principles of this platform,” he concluded. “As much as our business revolves around our customers, if the work is going to get done and get done well, our platform needs to also revolve around our users. Again, they are like two sides of the same coin.
It’s yin and yang.” 



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",Technology,Shell Chemicals
"Fifty years ago, commercial air travel in the U.S. was a luxury reserved for the upper class. In fact, a single ticket for a flight from Boston to Los Angeles would have cost around $4,500 in today’s money – disposable income middle-class Americans simply didn’t have.
Then in 1971, an emerging carrier called Southwest Airlines disrupted the airline industry by giving the middle class wings.
Starting with only four planes serving three cities in Texas, Southwest® embarked on a mission to break the class barrier to air travel. But achieving this goal required more than offering affordable plane tickets. It meant adopting what the company called a “Servant’s Heart” for service, as symbolized in its “Southwest Heart” logo.
That collective attitude is made possible by first creating a compassionate atmosphere for employees.
“It’s incredibly important that we put our people first and show them the same caring attitude that we expect them to have with our Customers,” said James Ashworth, Southwest Airlines VP of Customer Support and Services.
At Southwest, care is more than an attitude. It’s an action that permeates every department, team, and job function within the company. A prime example is the company’s commitment to accessibility.
“We want to be the most loved airline in the world,” said Ashworth. “And the world includes people with disabilities.”
For Ashworth, who is visually impaired, putting employees first means ensuring that people of all abilities have the tools they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Let’s take a closer look at five ways Ashworth and the team at Southwest used Salesforce Customer 360, one integrated CRM platform, to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty – beginning with improving its employee experience with best-in-class applications to unite every team.
Vice President of Customer Support & Services
Step 1. Save $2.8 million with a simplified, employee-centric HR experience.
Step 2. Serve more customers in less time by consolidating 15 systems into one.
Step 3. Foster an inclusive company culture through built-in accessibility.
Step 4. Give central teams nationwide visibility into technical operations and corporate culture.
Step 5. Level the playing field for sales with market insights and tools.
Employee experience has always been top of mind for Southwest. When it came to digital transformation, the company focused on the department most integral to its employee experience: human resources.
Using Service Cloud and the Salesforce Platform, the company redesigned its online HR services to provide employees with faster answers and greater visibility into personal and company information.
Instead of waiting days for answers over email, employees can find the answers themselves on the website or submit a case request through a custom app. The company also rolled out a new employee service center portal that allows employees to submit requests, view pay and benefits information, and access live help.
For example, an employee can log into the portal, request a leave of absence through the live chat feature, and receive approval from HR the same day. At the other end of the portal, service agents see a full picture of that employee’s data and use it to serve them better. With each employee’s personal data and service history in one place, agents can process more approvals and answer more employee questions in less time.
And the timing of the employee service center’s rollout could not have been better. The portal went live in March 2020, when thousands of employees were transitioning to remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With newly optimized self-service and case resolution capabilities, the company’s HR division was prepared for the influx of employees’ pandemic-related questions.
To keep customers happy, Southwest needed to equip its service agents with the data and productivity tools required to deliver efficient, personalized service experiences. With Service Cloud, the company consolidated 15 disparate systems into one, providing agents with a single view of each customer while simplifying service functions.
With the customers’ data accessible in one place, agents can quickly provide the answers regarding payments, rewards points, flight information, and more. And they can serve customers in their channels of choice, including phone, web, and mobile.
For example, Service Cloud’s in-app chat tool allows customers to contact live agents, even while in flight. Agents using this feature can quickly pull up customer data for fast case resolution, and they can even handle multiple cases at once.
Access to contextual data across multiple service channels has also helped agents better manage their workloads. Since Southwest implemented the in-app chat feature, 30% of all customer service calls have been redirected to chat. As a result, service agents can handle a greater volume of customers in a given workday.
And with AI-powered chatbots, customers can find answers to common questions through self-service resources, resulting in fewer cases opened.
“Sharing Customer data across all Customer-facing Employees and channels helps increase the speed of decision-making, and improves our ability to provide a much more Customer-centric experience,” said Ashworth.
To continue delivering on its value of unparalleled hospitality, Southwest uses the features available with Salesforce’s Signature Success Plan, which includes proactive monitoring services. With the Signature Success Plan, the Salesforce Proactive Monitoring Team continuously monitors performance, errors, and platform limits across all Salesforce solutions. And with proactive monitoring services in place, Southwest is quickly notified of potential platform degradation issues that could disrupt the customer experience.
“Salesforce is vital to Southwest’s operations, and the Signature Success Plan ensures we can deliver a seamless experience to our customers, partners, and employees,” said Julanne Groezinger, Manager, Salesforce Center of Excellence.
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With the input of employees like Ashworth, Southwest has standardized accessible tools and systems across all departments using Service Cloud.
“Employees are the ones delivering those Customer experiences every single day,” said Ashworth. “It’s imperative to ensure we are equipping them with autonomy so when they recognize an opportunity to surprise and delight a Customer, they have the tools and means to do so.”
Service Cloud’s in-app chat includes accessibility aids that allow differently abled individuals to perform everyday tasks with ease. For instance, visually impaired service agents can use built-in accessibility options, such as text magnification or voiceover, to communicate with customers. At the same time, customers who are visually impaired, deaf, or hard of hearing can reach out to agents using the same accommodations.
“Our Leaders continue to show their love for us by making our environment easy to work in,” said Eric Aiken, Customer Service and Support Representative. “Because of that, we’re able to offer great Customer Service to our Passengers and make them feel loved as well.”
Additionally, Southwest only partners with vendors whose technologies accommodate users of all abilities.
As Southwest’s national presence grew, so did the challenge of keeping teams connected across the country. The airline needed a solution that would not only give central teams a full picture of local operations, but keep every employee engaged in the company culture.
With the Salesforce Platform, the Tech Ops team can use low-code applications to track workflows and route cases to any IT team across the country. Technicians can now track parts requests from maintenance hangars and route them to the proper departments – all from a custom app. This way, local IT teams can fulfill engineering and ground operations requests in a timely manner while still following corporate protocols.
Additionally, IT and Development teams can take advantage of easier, more efficient internal collaboration with Slack. For example, team members involved in launching technology, like a new parts tracking application, can create specific Slack channels for deployment planning, so each team gains access at the right time.
Southwest’s Culture Services team also uses the Salesforce Platform to keep track of local efforts to promote workforce culture. For example, central team members can scroll through a single app to view data around cultural engagement activities in the company’s Fort Lauderdale, FL, hub and report that data to the rest of the team.
To stay profitable while delivering exceptional service at a low cost, Southwest implemented Sales Cloud in its corporate and cargo sales divisions. With Sales Cloud, sales teams can track leads, opportunities, activities, and accounts for business customers on a single dashboard. It also enables the company to compete with other major airlines and gain market share.
With process streamlining and data visualization capabilities, corporate and cargo sales teams can get more done in less time. Additionally, Sales Cloud helps Southwest serve corporate customers better by simplifying business travel. For instance, employees of companies with a Southwest partnership can make last-minute bookings or itinerary changes with a few clicks – at no extra cost.
Southwest also built a self-service travel portal, Southwest Business Assist™, to better meet the needs of its growing business customer base. Through this Experience Cloud-powered portal, corporate travel managers and travel management companies have instant access to information about contractual commitments, discount levels, consumption, perks redemption, and more. Conversely, the portal sends automated reports to Southwest that visualize KPIs and sustainability data for each business customer.
“It's so much more than a booking channel,” said Dave Harvey, VP of Southwest Business. “It's a transformational service for eco-conscious travel management companies and corporate travel buyers. It makes back office operations more efficient and helps them reach their sustainability goals – a huge win.”
For Southwest, being the most-loved carrier means more than investing in continuous innovation. It means staying grounded in the company’s original mission of making air travel simple, friendly, and affordable for all.
",Travel Transportation & Hospitality,Southwest Airlines
"58,000 employees and 19,000 contracted agents
Salesforce customer since 2016
Like other insurers, State Farm is facing disruption. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the other emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution look set to bring change. They offer huge potential for both established players and disruptors to transform insurance products and services. The market entry of tech giants and insurtechs could drive consumer expectations even higher than they already are.
“No one can predict what will happen in the insurance industry five to 10 years from now,” said Fawad Ahmad, Chief Digital Officer at State Farm. “But what we do know is that we have to continuously and rapidly adapt to remain relevant to our customers.”
Founded in 1922, State Farm now has approximately 58,000 employees and nearly 19,000 contractor agents servicing 83 million policies and accounts across the United States. It offers more than 100 products, including auto, home, and life insurance, as well as banking, mutual funds, and commercial products.
Despite being the largest property and casualty insurer in the U.S., State Farm needed to transform to remain the market leader. “Changes were needed to rapidly improve our capabilities. Simplifying our systems, processes, and end-to-end customer experiences continues to be critical,” said Ahmad. 
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Salesforce’s enterprise CRM platform for financial services, Financial Services Cloud, will be a core component of the transformation. This platform is built on highly customized versions of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud that provide financial services companies with the insights and tools they need to transform before- and after-sales service. For example, it can help State Farm employees and agents quickly find the important details about customers and craft personalized communications across all channels.
“Salesforce provides State Farm agents and employees a holistic view of our customers,” said Ahmad. “From a single screen, we can more efficiently manage a customer’s information and interactions, making it simpler to do business with us. In addition to the personal agent-customer relationships we’re built on, this improved customer experience ultimately drives loyalty.”
For example, when a customer first contacts State Farm to file a claim — whether by phone, online, or via the State Farm mobile app — the agent gets a complete view of the customer’s data and an automatically generated action plan with prioritized tasks. The customer then receives updates and information via their preferred channel — whether that’s an email confirming receipt of the claim or a text message notifying the customer that a claim payment has been deposited into their account.
Being able to access data is crucial to increase efficiencies and improve the customer experience.
To this end, State Farm uses MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to unlock data from its third-party systems. “We’ve used MuleSoft to connect our systems of record, including billing and claims management, to Salesforce to deliver a connected customer experience,” explained Jason Potts, Enterprise Technology Executive at State Farm.
With MuleSoft, Salesforce features, such as customer search and management, can now access data from third-party systems. “This allowed us to integrate and automate processes across different business areas, simplifying the experience for customers and associates,” he added. And once built, these connections can be reused across the Salesforce Platform to rapidly deliver a unified experience across agents, phone, web, and mobile.
Meanwhile, the digital transformation continues as State Farm innovates for its customers, according to Potts. “Salesforce brings its experience from various industries and continues to challenge us to think differently about how we do business for the ultimate benefit to our customers,” he said.



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",Financial Services,State Farm
"See how you can streamline the grants lifecycle. WATCH SESSION>
“We get up every single day to focus on how we can be best prepared to support the people of California when they most need help,” said Grady Joseph, Assistant Director, Recovery Operations for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “We are always striving to improve the way that we are serving our customers, looking for ways that we can make that interaction with government — which can be challenging in the best of times, let alone in the middle of an emergency — a simple, intuitive, reassuring experience.”
The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services’ (Cal OES) mission is to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate the impacts of all hazards and threats. It is responsible for efforts like coordinating statewide disaster response and recovery activities, managing public safety communications, and keeping a stockpile of necessary supplies on hand to support when California’s 38 million residents need them most.
“In other words, we serve as the state’s defensive line in the face of all types of emergencies; homeland security, earthquakes, wildfires, droughts, and (most recently) COVID-19,” said Joseph.
Like much of the country, Joseph and team found themselves watching the news stories about the virus spreading from around the world, especially Italy, while working with the federal government on quarantined cruise ships and repatriation flights. “What we didn’t have early on was data. We didn’t have any confirmed information on the rate of transmission, no real opportunity to conduct robust testing, or the ability to do any meaningful data modeling. We were flying blind,” said Joseph. “And we only have about 450 hospitals across the state, which meant this crisis was going to be a huge lift for frontline healthcare workers, requiring an unknown and likely unprecedented amount of PPE.”
Unprecedented indeed, as some of California’s most noteworthy disasters still pale in comparison:
In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake damaged an estimated 11,500 homes across the San Francisco Bay Area and collapsed the Bay Bridge, amounting over $10 billion in total costs. It caused roughly 3,700 reported injuries and over 60 deaths.1
In 1994, the Northridge earthquake damaged an estimated 450,000 homes across Southern California and collapsed seven bridges, amounting over $65 billion in total costs. It caused roughly 12,000 reported injuries and 57 deaths.2
In 2008, over 6,200 wildfires burned nearly 1.6 million acres of land impacting 28 different counties,3 and “in 2018 the Camp Fire in Butte County and the Woolsey Fire in Ventura County — probably the most complex event we managed in a long time — had us filling about 35 resource requests over a two week period.”
“But COVID-19 has impacted all 58 counties, simultaneously, leaving us to fill 150 resource requests every single day. So we had to put together a kind of worst case scenario,” Joseph continued. “And that was before California’s record wildfire season happened. 2020 brought over 8,000 wildfires, burning over 3.6 million acres of land across 57 counties. We needed a system that could scale to meet a size and scope we couldn’t necessarily estimate.”
Together with their implementation partner, Four Leaf, Joseph and team deployed a comprehensive PPE management system on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Customer 360 Platform for Government. It gives the state a single, automated, consistent place to go for ordering, filling, distributing, and measuring California’s PPE needs. It is broken into three parts:
(1) Donation and Supply Intake Portal
The operations center was inundated with offers to help supply PPE from thousands of potential donors and vendors. Joseph and team stood up a website using web-to-lead which allows the Cal OES to organize and validate supply offers, as well as streamline the procurement process. “We were able to stand up the Intake Portal within 72 hours, expanding the state’s reach to critical suppliers through an organized system and workflow for triaging and validating thousands of donors and suppliers” said Eric Scully, Founder and CEO of Four Leaf.
(2) Procurement Management
Once a lead has been validated using the intake portal, the information, product specifications, and other pertinent details are automatically populated in the next app: the Procurement Management app, built on Service Cloud. It serves as an extension of the intake portal that not only helps the state take action on suppliers faster, but also allows logistics and commodities staff to track and manage the procurement lifecycle; where supplies are in the process, the amount and source of funding used to purchase the supplies, how long it takes to acquire and then distribute them, and so on. “This application allows the procurement team to have a clear line of sight throughout the procurement process and meet the unprecedented demands for PPE throughout the state,” said Scully.
See these in action.
(3) Public Health Ordering System (PHOS) / Medical Resource Request Triage and Adjudication System
Once a supplier has been validated and the procurement process has been completed, the PHOS app built streamlines the ordering process for both State staff and its customers working in hospitals, clinics, and more. Staff and customers are given role-based log in’s to a Community Cloud portal where they can place an order, check for status updates, and pull their own reports. “Hospitals used to fill out a paper order form and mail it as a PDF to the county. Whoever received the orders at the county office might aggregate them into a spreadsheet and/or forward them directly to their regional support center. You can’t scale that kind of process to manage 150 daily requests. The orders would regularly stack up,” said Joseph.
MuleSoft connects the system to Cal OES’ shipping vendor, automating distribution, tracking numbers, and delivery confirmations. “Once we digitized the core workflows, we were able to integrate distribution partners and create a true end-to-end ordering and fulfillment system with visibility into each step of the process,” said Scully. “We were able to modernize decades-old, paper-driven processes with a matter of days using Salesforce for the PHOS.”
See it in action.
Cal OES shares five best practices from its experience designing and deploying the PPE management system.
“This 3-part system also includes built-in Tableau dashboards that give us granular information on how much time the entire process takes,” said Joseph. “This has unlocked the insights about our supply chain and our logistics pipeline, which we are using to brief the public, hold ourselves accountable, and inform our planning for future scenarios.”
The entire system went live in just two weeks. The team has used this to source $2 billion in PPE over a 45-day timeframe. Automation capabilities and data-driven processes sped up order filling time by two days, and distribution tools enabled the movement of PPE supply to healthcare workers, farm workers, tribal governments, and more. “We were even able to send PPE packages to every single school district in all 58 counties across the state,” said Joseph. To date, the team has delivered over 1 billion units of PPE.
Joseph and team are also starting to apply this strategy to other areas of the mission, turning today’s investment into reusable solutions for tomorrow. They are looking at how to streamline the delivery of resources for fire evacuees, automate shelter management logistics so that staff can keep more time and energy focused on disaster recovery efforts than on filling out forms, faxing orders, or navigating clerical work. “This system provided the kind of accurate and reliable data needed to inform decisions on any relevant topic, paving the way for proactive response measures that would otherwise be impossible to achieve when relying upon paper-driven processes,” said Scully.
“We're constantly improving the ways that we do business and the ways that we're supporting our residents,” said Joseph. “We're using this crisis as an opportunity to completely transform the way that we respond to disasters and manage the logistics, statewide.”



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",Government,California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services
"“IN DCS Child Support Bureau had dedicated the past seven years to a project called INvest, and it’s one of our team’s proudest achievements because it helped introduce an architecture that jumps from the mainframe paradigm to the new cloud-based millennia in a single step,” said Kevin Jones, CIO, State of Indiana Department of Child Services. “No more green screens; our organization can now trade the ownership of the depreciation of a custom IP and static architecture, for modernization of a continuously improved platform that will be just as modern 10 years from now, as the day we turned it on. Leveraging Salesforce is allowing our organization to not only standardize our technology stack for the child support and child welfare systems, but also implement the Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS) on the same tech stack as INvest.”
The Indiana Department of Child Services’ (IN DCS) mission is to engage with families and collaborate with federal, state, local, and community partners to protect children from abuse and neglect, and to provide child support services. IN DCS researches cases, evaluates applications, organizes foster care, and more in order to give children opportunities to grow up in safe, healthy, and supportive environments. Like many child and family service organizations, IN DCS is divided into two categories: child support, which focuses on the funding and financial aspects of the process, and child welfare, which focuses on the delivering services that protect the safety and wellbeing of the child. 
“However, this set of programs and services is defined by nuance since no two kids, their background, or their needs are ever the same. Which means we need to be able to adapt and personalize our services for each case — i.e., each child we support,” said Jones. And for an agency that manages an average of 258,110 cases per year since 2015, this is no small feat.1
In addition to managing essentially 258,000+ unique workflows each year, IN DCS also has to coordinate the efforts of a number of people, representing a number of organizations, as they work together to deliver care. Think: adoption agencies, teachers, counselors, judges, doctors, foster parents, and more. IN DCS cases require the work of almost 4,000 field staff, which have to act fast; IN DCS aims to close a case in just 45 days, as many of the needs it collectively supports could have lasting impact on a child’s quality of life.2
“Last but not least, we have to connect the dots between child support and child welfare since both workflows are often called upon when helping our clients,” said Jones. “We found ourselves considering a custom-built solution to manage these processes and datasets, which could have easily cost upwards of $200 million. That’s not a good use of taxpayer dollars, and would have likely required additional funding in terms of time and energy required to build out such a complex system.”

Jones and team launched CCWIS, a complex case management system built on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce 360 Platform for Government. It connects multiple systems across multiple organizations, giving IN DCS the kind of data-driven, 360-degree view it needs in order to deliver personalized, actionable, real-time care to the children it supports.
Salesforce gives CCWIS a CRM-based foundation that integrates child welfare and child services systems. This can bring information about a child, including the child’s history, caretakers, and more, into a single profile-like setting. Jones and team then use this information as their system of record to:
Create a case for a given child
Tag its subject matter experts on specific questions, needs, or services
Update the case record and/or the child’s profile with new information
Maintain both visibility and accessibility as needed across child welfare and child services
IN DCS layered on Tableau, giving teams data analytics tools that they can use to share data with the entire DCS enterprise; from executives to middle management to the frontline. This helps everyone understand the impact the team’s collective work has on children in DCS care and make data-driven decisions, accordingly.
Knowledge was also added, which surfaces helpful articles, answers to frequently asked questions, and self-services information the team might need as it works through the case. The organization further extended the CRM base with Experience Cloud, which added a portal to the system. Child Welfare at IN DCS uses this portal to issue and collect child support payments, integrating transaction status into the child’s case in real-time.
Marketing Cloud gives the IN DCS team tools to push out information on different programs and available services through newsletters or emails. Shield provides an extra layer of security to the solution since CCWIS manages a large amount of personal and identifiable information, while Sandbox gives admins an offline environment to test updates, new features, and new functionality. Last but not least, MuleSoft serves as CCWIS’s omnichannel API and integration solution, pulling data, such as dental, immunization, health records, from across IN DCS’s systems through to the child services side when children are relocated to a new state.
 
Many IN DCS employees have essential responsibilities that required them to still come into the office during the COVID-19 crisis. Many other employees, like case managers, still have to make house calls, visit kids, and perform other work in the field as they work to keep kids in safe and healthy environments amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Jones and team leveraged the same design principles from their work with CCWIS and INvest, and deployed an app that tracks the amount of masks, hand sanitizer, and general PPE available to employees in real time. “We’re using the same model to get employees the tools they need to do their job,” said Jones.
The team has also started to manage shift scheduling on the platform, adjusting schedules to fit capacity limitations as risk levels rise and fall, and facilitate employee-based contact tracing. Salesforce Maps was layered on to visualize the number of cases per office or team. “That way if we have an outbreak in one team or office, we can run a report to quickly see who was scheduled alongside them, if there were any visitors, the clients they might have visited, and so on, helping mitigate service disruption while keeping employees safe. Crucial capabilities in emergency scenarios,” said Jones. The team built a prototype in just eight hours, and the app was live and being used by 4,000 people just 10 days after that.
“We had the platform in place that not only supported the mission-critical requirements, but also enabled us to quickly pivot and address the reality brought on by COVID-19,” said Jones. “Turns out, we were ready for the unpredictable.”



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",Government,Indiana Department of Child Services
"Surf Air has been called “a disruptor of tomorrow” by Fast Company, and “the future of flying” by Forbes, but when it comes to winning customers over, this startup has reached the stratosphere. Launched in 2013 as the first ever all-you-can-fly airline, Surf Air’s members fly up and down the California coast with ease for one monthly subscription fee. “Time is the new commodity,” explained Justin Hart, vice president of member acquisition. Surf Air saves members time by cutting back on the pain associated with air travel. Members book flights from their smartphones in less than a minute, arrive at the airport as little as fifteen minutes before departure time, skip traditional security lines, and enjoy friendly concierges who greet them in the terminal to handle baggage check and other details. “Ultimately at the end of the day, we’re giving our members their time back,” said Jeff Potter, president and CEO. Surf Air’s flight plan has grown to 2,300 members with no signs of slowing down. The startup is expanding its fleet of planes from 11 to 65 by 2021, and has begun to add weekend leisure trips to its schedule of business-oriented weekday flights. Which is why Surf Air turned to Salesforce. “Our airline is built around our customers’ needs,” said Hart. “Salesforce helps us keep track of all of our relationships and manage our guest list.” Using the world’s #1 CRM system, reps are able to set up test flights for prospects so they can experience the ease of flying Surf Air firsthand. Then they follow up with customized emails sent directly from Salesforce. Often referred to as the “Uber of the skies,” Surf Air also uses Salesforce to find the right audience in the specific geographic markets it serves, tracking flight preferences once members join. This level of personalized service leads to both winning, and keeping, loyal customers.
Customer happiness is paramount to Surf Air’s mission. The company wins customer love with an innovative offering backed by outstanding service. “We are a membership club that happens to fly airplanes,” Potter explained. Passengers on Surf Air flights enjoy BMW-designed leather seats, plenty of legroom, and free Wi-Fi. But they also enjoy something possibly even more rare and valuable than personal space on a plane: a sense of community among its members. “What we’re providing is the interaction you get on the airplane,” Potter said. “At the end of last year, 11% of our members had begun a business deal with other members on the plane. Flying Surf Air is unlike flying traditional economy or even business class.” Potter and Hart said they won’t grow the business without protecting that community feel. To wit, more than half of Surf Air’s new members come from member referrals, and the company has started hosting member nights that are more like networking mixers than hard-sell opportunities. “There are no sales happening at these events — the members get to engage with each other and with us,” Potter said. Salesforce helps Surf Air’s membership teams manage relationships with current and prospective members with the right mix of automation and personal touch. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement lets the company deliver different campaigns and interactions to prospects based on their histories. A new visitor to Surf Air’s website would, for example, have a different experience than a referral who’d just completed a buddy flight. Surf Air’s custom Salesforce workflow also leverages Marketing Cloud Account Engagement automation to keep customer information and important tasks top of mind, while still allowing plenty of room for personalized, premium member service. That workflow also includes using Data.com to find new prospects in targeted areas along the West Coast, and then creating and nurturing new leads in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to qualify and hand off to sales teams via Sales Cloud. And third-party AppExchange solutions like DocuSign make it easy to build new functionality into the platform as the company’s needs evolve. “What’s great is that I built that workflow,” Hart said. “I didn’t have to go out to a tech developer to have them build that. That flow is all there — anyone on my team could have built that.” Potter and Hart like to tell stories of how Surf Air has changed its members’ lives. There’s the executive who finally made it to his son’s science fair thanks to the San Diego to San Francisco route. There’s the client who added his daughter to his membership so she could fly home from college to see him. And there’s the member who chartered a flight so he could marry his bride on a Surf Air plane. These tales abound, and they all carry the same message: Surf Air is changing lives by changing the way people fly. “Our customers love us,” said Hart. “And Salesforce is an important part of that.”



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",Other,Surf Air
"Building customer relationships requires time, effort, and sincerity. Sysco, the world’s largest food distributor, keeps its customer-company philosophy front and center on its website — and in everything it does. The company, which sells to 400,000+ customers in the U.S., Canada, and Ireland uses Salesforce to keep employees connected and working together to help customers. “With Salesforce, we have a level of visibility to customers that we never had before,” said Wayne Shurts, CTO. “And we’re able to collaborate to help them much more effectively, which is key for our continued growth.”
Sysco sells to restaurants, hospitals, universities, nursing homes, schools, and companies that manage commercial dining. Its sales team of 8,500+ uses Salesforce to track opportunities and better manage relationships. Reps spend over 90% of their time on the road, so the ability to access customer information from their personal mobile devices is critical. A custom app — called Sysco360 — helps them discover cross-sell and upsell opportunities. “Salesforce is helping our entire business grow,” said Shurts. “In Houston alone, we’re up 14% year over year.”
Sysco is made up of 70+ operating companies, so making it easy to share data between individual entities is essential. The Salesforce Platform adds a layer of agility to the company’s SAP back end so reps can easily access data and reports while visiting customer sites or from the company’s 70+ warehouses.
Chatter is used companywide, so 45,000+ employees spread across the individual operating companies can access Salesforce records, share information, and trade best practices from their mobile devices. The ability to collaborate from anywhere helps bridge the geographical gap among operations in the U.S., Canada, and Ireland. “For the first time we can do team selling, and work together across geographies,” said Shurts. “And, Chatter creates a more social leadership dynamic. It creates an open dialogue across the entire organization that has really glued us together.”
Sysco also engages with customers on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Marketing Cloud helps the company listen to conversations about its brand and communicate one-on-one with customers. “We can hear what customers say about us, and about our competitors,” said Shurts. “And if we hear about an issue, we can address it right away.”
In the future, Sysco plans to build more apps on the Customer 360 Platform to help reps do more value-added selling while visiting clients. The company is planning a menu analysis app that will let reps use iPads to help clients discover new ingredients to create better products and margins, or learn how to optimize menu placement for high margin items. “Salesforce is helping us figure out more ways for our sales reps to help our customers,” said Shurts.



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",Retail,Sysco
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"The Texas Department of Information Resources—or Texas DIR—serves as a bridge between private and public sector processes across the state.
Texas DIR is responsible for providing “technology leadership, solutions, and value to Texas state government, education, and local government entities to enable and facilitate the fulfillment of their core missions.”* In other words, Texas DIR's 198 employees work with the private sector on behalf of colleagues to bring the latest technological advancements into the state, streamlining the procurement process and making better use of taxpayer funds all around. Its work allows departments and agencies to focus more of their efforts on the missions at hand, not on navigating the different buying practices between public and private sectors.
Texas DIR makes innovation more accessible across the Lone Star State.
Bridging the gap between public and private sectors is no small task, with no small impact.
Where the private sector has the luxury of selecting a target customer, and designing a product or service accordingly, the public sector must serve everyone. Where the private sector can pick and choose between partners based on a number of competitive advantages, the public sector is often encouraged to work with the partner that can provide the highest quality service at the lowest cost—determined by the review cycles of the public procurement process. What may seem like cycles of unnecessary government overhead is in fact a system carefully designed to drive the kind of competition that fuels innovation, for the benefit of an industry that does not always have the ability (or the budget) to experiment. Every dollar saved is a dollar that can be used to support mission-critical programs and services; education, healthcare, public safety, transportation, and more.
As essential as the procurement process is, the operations behind it are still one of the most costly and time consuming government models, largely because many agencies still use a paper-based process for issuing RFPs and evaluating vendor proposals. “Currently, when you look at most of the processes of the government today whether its HR systems, procurement, how they do delivery, or policy design - most of the systems are incompatible with the digital age and they need to be modernized,” said Executive Director for Deloitte’s Center for Government, Bill Eggers, on a recent episode of Our Digital Nation. “There are a lot of government transactions and services that can be 100% digitized. You would never have to fill out any forms on paper again.” And Eggers is not the only one noticing this gap; in a recent survey of government IT, finance, and procurement decision-makers, the Center for Digital Government found that 31% of respondents do not have a portal or eProcurement system where they can post bids and RFPs online.** In fact, many leading agencies have manual systems with at least 100 steps in the procurement process, each of which lack consistency, flexibility, and thus the ability to be repurposed. The resulting lag time can have a major ripple effect on public services, holding agencies back from maximizing their impact. 
But not in Texas. 
A self-proclaimed provider of technology leadership—not just technology solutions—Texas DIR turned this pattern into a call-to-action. The team developed BidStamp — an eProcurement application on the Salesforce Platform that took its paper-based procurement process digital, automating workflows and streamlining solicitations and contracts throughout the procurement lifecycle:
Community Cloud powers BidStamp's vendor information portal. Contract hopefuls (think: prospective bidders, current vendors, past vendors, and so on) can log in and create a profile that outlines their ability to meed key functions required during the solicitation response process.
Once they have moved from hopeful to prospective bidders, contractors can view DIR solicitations, download relevant documentation, and upload proposal responses directly to the online portal, giving the right people access to the right information on both sides of the procurement process. Contractors can continue to access information throughout the bidding process, giving them visibility to the various aspects that will help them be the strongest partner to Texas' mission. 
Digital scorecards—set up using pre-configured workflow rules that quantify a prospective bidder's applicability based on a set of objective criteria—help the DIR staff make informed purchasing decisions faster. Instead of manually consolidating and evaluating 100+ page vendor proposals, the team can review a scorecard, reducing the total lifecycle from solicitation release to contract awarded.
BidStamp integrates with third-party systems, including web portals like FedBizOps, on-prem solutions, and legacy systems, using out-of-the-box APIs. DIR integrated BidStamp with SharePoint, extending its new automation capabilities to document management. This integration helped reduced data duplication and increased organizational consistency across the agency.
While BidStamp's benefits became quite clear to DIR internally, the applicability was not lost on the staff's counterparts. The eProcurement project inspired over 25 new app projects across the state, helping Texas manage everything from asset tracking, to budgeting, to help desks, portfolios, and more. “If you want state agencies to move to 21st century technology, you need to keep it simple to implement and use,” says Todd Kimbriel, Deputy Executive Director and State CIO, “so we adopted a Salesforce first policy for our development team.”
“With Salesforce we can build some apps in weeks that would take months with other solutions,” said Kimbriel. “This helps us ensure that every dollar is spent as effectively as possible. We can continue to add more and more apps for the same fixed fee, locking down costs but expanding the technology value.”
And, since many of the apps are built by its own administrators, with or without a formal IT background, the agency is spared the staffing costs and time allocations so typical of traditional deployment processes. “A more junior admin [within DIR] started using Salesforce, became very entrepreneurial, and started developing applications on her own. She was not really an IT person to begin with, but learnings from others using the Platform helped her leapfrog the innovation process,” said Kimbriel.
Developing new apps on on the cloud is not only fast, but also cost-effective, key to the financial stewardship inherent to Texas DIR's mission.



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",Government,Texas DIR
"The Arizona Legislature established the Registrar of Contractors in 1931 to: issue and maintain contractor licenses, investigate and cite violators, adopt construction standards, educate the public and contractors on rules, policies and procedures, and to assist in dispute-resolution.
“Esse quam videri means to be rather than to seem, or to be good without concern of how you look,” said Jeff Fleetham, Director the Arizona Registrar of Contractors (AzROC). “It’s a phrase my team and I have taken to heart as we work to be the premier contractor licensing agency, wisely managing our resources, and effectively navigating external relationships to further our mission.” AzROC’s mission is to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public through regulatory systems designed to promote quality construction. 
AzROC currently issues over 43,000 licenses to construction companies and investigates roughly 7,000 claims per year. Approximately 75% of these businesses have five or fewer employees. And this is all done by a team of just 105 employees, who typically work from an office, Monday through Friday, 8:00 to 5:00.
“However, the expectations of many of our customers changed to wanting digital access to services anytime and anywhere,” recalled Fleetham. “The ROC to modernize technology and expand self-service options while continuing to reduce ‘red tape.’”
For example, if there was a hardworking construction professional that wanted to start a business or get a license, the process was cumbersome and form-heavy. Approximately 20% of an applicant’s waging time was used to complete the process. Contractor complaints took 4-5 months to address, and new licensing applications took up to four months. “This means we had to move faster than the traditional paper-based processes,” said Director Fleetham. “Like Governor Ducey says, our charge is government at the speed of business.”
Fleetham and his team began to assess AzROC’s operations, looking for ways to modernize the manual and paper-based processes facilitating their license and investigation workflows. “We became solution developers. We had to make it easier for all seven million of our customers to partner with us. No matter how big or small; no matter how hard it was. Our customers wanted digital access to services anytime, anywhere. This began our digital transform journey,” said Director Fleetham.
In partnership with MST Solutions, a global Salesforce Partner, AZROC launched its licensing, renewals, and investigations solution on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Platform. “It is an automated, digital case management system that guides customers through the various steps and forms required to obtain a license, initiate an investigation, or update their credentials.” said Jeff Zimmerman, Chief Information Officer, AzROC.
The information submitted through the system is captured in a profile-like setting, giving AzROC a 360-degree view of the customer request. The configuration capabilities available via the Platform enables AzROC to capture information unique to the mission (think: picklists fields with options like “activation date” or “permit close date”) without having to write custom code. “This not only saves time and budget, but also allows for automatic updates that are pushed through the AzROC system,” said Zimmerman.
The Platform’s configuration capabilities also helped support AzROC’s three-fold process covering its major operations – accounting, compliance, legal, and licensing -- allowing the team to offer a consistent user experience on the front end without having to sacrifice the necessary program-specific workflows on the backend. “On the licensing side, for example, we can enforce role and responsibility parameters. The team uses Pareto charts to assess what criteria is most important to a given customer, and then determine process flows from there. We built this right into the workflow rules, developing a system that can address the needs with the biggest impact, first. Then we began the integrations of the accounting and legal departments” said Brian Kirby, Director of Strategic Licensing Solutions, MST Solutions.
APIs share information between departments, and push notifications alert staff of new action items. Insights and best practices from the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace accelerated design and deployment time even more. “From an IT standpoint you're managing one platform versus several throughout your agency, or even your state” Zimmerman added.
AzROC department heads, managers, and customer service representatives provided the requirements necessary to meet their customers' needs. The system design leveraged those requirements, ensuring that data and processes were truly aligned “We embarked on a mission to provide everything needed to submit an application or file a complaint online. We asked and listened to our customers and developed the requirements to meet those needs.”
Jeff Fleetham, Director
AzROC department heads, managers, and customer service representatives provided the requirements necessary to meet their customers' needs. The system design leveraged those requirements, ensuring that data and processes were truly aligned. “We embarked on a mission to provide everything needed to submit and application or file a complaint online. We asked and listened to our customers and developed the requirements to meet those needs,” said Director Fleetham.
“The licensing management system started to ease the pressure inside the walls of the ROC. There were fewer callbacks and fewer complaints up the ladder which meant more time was spent servicing our customers,” said Director Fleetham.
Within just nine months, AzROC revamped the following business cases:
New Licenses Applications: New application submissions automatically alerted the Licensing, Accounting, and Legal teams seamlessly triggering the investigation process into the applicant’s background.
Customer Complaints: New customer complaints triggered the Compliance, Licensing and Legal Departments. Additionally, customers receive automatic updates on complaint statuses.
License Renewals: The solution automatically notifies customers of upcoming license expiration and exam/validation requirements to extend an existing license. The Legal and Licensing team are also updated in order to validate any newly entered information.
The results were exceptional:
Estimated savings of 8,000 hours of data entry.
Eliminated the need of a 3rd party application, saving an estimated $100,000 annually
Built-in address verification and standardization function that reduced returned/rejected mail by $25K (or 5,250 pieces of mail).
Estimated 59% reduction in application deficiencies.
Reduced customer phone and email inquiries into the department by 18%.
“We also integrated Smarty Street, an address verification tool, which we estimate has saved an additional $11,000 annually due to an increase in data accuracy,” said Zimmerman. “Different departments were able to collaborate on the same platform without having to ‘swivel chair’ between systems.”
In addition to the numbers, AzROC’s digital transformation completely changed how customers conducted business with the organization. “Let’s say you were deployed overseas, and you want to be a licensed contractor when you came home. You had to wait until you returned to begin the licensing process,” said Director Fleetham. “Now, once license exams are integrated, the entire process can be completed online; and the minute you jump off the plane you're a licensed construction professional in the State of Arizona.”
AzROC established a clear goal and followed through with action.
Provided a customer-centric experience that was based on direct feedback.
Identified a cloud-based platform that aligned with its goals and operational requirements.
Leveraged the subject matter expertise provided by MST.
Continues to invest in training and enablement, ensuring its investment in technology remains an investment in the mission
Transitioning to the cloud also prepared AzROC for the unexpected onset of COVID-19. Like many departments and agencies, AZROC was a “brick-and-mortar” team that had to rethink the workday as physical distancing guidelines were issued. The Platform helped the AZROC team to seamlessly transition to a remote work environment, without disrupting their ability to maintain service delivery. “It’s proof that if you are listening to your customers, you will always have a strategy that is right, no matter what might impact the mission,” said MST’s Kirby.
“This solution was simply to serve our customers. It has worked before, during, and will continue to work long after the current crisis,” said Director Fleetham. “We must hold ourselves accountable for results, to the citizens of Arizona, and to our colleagues because it is the right thing to do.”



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",Government,Arizona Registrar of Contractors
"The City of Chicago’s 311 City Services Call Center is truly community centric. It’s mission is to serve as the point of entry for residents, business owners, and visitors that need easy access to information regarding City programs, services and events—the kind of non-emergency services one might expect from his / her / their municipality as it works to keep the city clean, accessible, and orderly.
However, its mission also includes services one might not expect from their municipality; assisting non-governmental agencies (volunteer groups, non-profits, local businesses, etc.) to deliver improved customer service and manage resources more efficiently. Or documenting all non-emergency service requests in a CRM,[1] bringing a forward-thinking, technological mindset to the team’s purpose and definition. 
This kind of breadth and depth demonstrates a real focus on the people that make up the core of Chicago. “We are concerned with the services the community needs today in order to stay healthy and vibrant, as well as what the foundation the community will need tomorrow in order to succeed long-term,” said Derrick Brownlee, Managing Deputy CIO for the City of Chicago, which is no small feat given the current trends impacting government missions.
The Chicago Bureau of Information Technology, a sister team to the Chicago 311 City Services Call Center, joined us to share their experience with outreach and engagement tools on the cloud. They broke down their strategy step by step, showing us how they turned a platform that was designed for more typical communications management activities into a crisis response engine with the onset of COVID-19.
The Brookings Institution, a non-profit research organization that looks at new ways to solve public policy issues, found that city budgets nationwide are facing an era of increased uncertainty given the current administration’s preference for devolution -- the transferring of power to a lower, local, or regional administration. “If cities are to successfully design, fund, and implement policies that provide high-quality educational opportunities, safe streets and neighborhoods, modern transportation networks, affordable housing options, and economic opportunities for all residents, they will need significant fiscal resources and flexibility.” 2
This unpredictable budgetary trend is in sharp contrast to current social trends brought in by today’s digital era. As timely, personalized, app-ready service models have become the new norm, they redefined what we as a society consider to be a quality customer experience from any enterprise-class organization (government included). This is especially true for local and municipal organizations, like the City of Chicago, that are citizen-facing.
The end result: a squeeze effect that is pushing local government to do more with less. “Our workforce is shrinking and our budget is shrinking,” said Brownlee, “but we have the same responsibilities with more demanding expectations. And with a city as diverse as Chicago, there is always something happening that needs our attention – music festivals, sporting events, one of the country’s largest marathons, and more, on top of public health and public safety.”
“It’s all about managing expectations, setting realistic goals, and sticking to a timeline,” Brownlee continued. “We needed a solution that could support two-way communications, improve interactions with constituents, and unlock new levels of efficiency.”
Brownlee and team re-platformed Chicago’s 311 system on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Government Cloud. It is a solution that transforms the typical call center into a modern contact center, unlocking everything from back-office information to self-service capabilities across a single, connected experience:
Front-end customer experience: “Roughly 70% of our 311 calls are information related. How do I apply for a driveway permit, for example. You don’t need to call the city for that,” said Brownlee. So, the team set up online portals on Community Cloud, giving residents 24-7 access to self-help information via a watering hole strategy “Instead of having to make multiple phone calls or visit multiple websites, Chicago residents can keep coming back to our community portal, and get the answers they need quickly.”
Case management: For the other 30% of calls that are indeed infrastructure related and thus require deeper engagements – fixing potholes, tree trimming, and so on – the team initiates a case in Service Cloud. Automated case routing and guided steps walk employees through the workflow, streamlining the process as employees move from intake to resolution.
Knowledge articles serve up answers to frequently asked questions. Status updates are pushed to customers via email or text message automatically. “And we can do this all via mobile, enabling folks in the field or office with the same accessibility,” said Brownlee. “For example, we layered on Field Service Lightning. We use this to schedule and dispatch work orders while people are on-the-go using , eliminating the time it takes to come back to the office, get the next assignment, head back out...”
Platform-level services: “This solution integrates with 3rd party systems, so that departments like inspections and permitting can receive a work order from us, complete the task, and close out the case without having to log into another system. We get notified automatically,” Brownlee explained. “It sits in the middle of several other systems, making it the core application for the city, really.""
Tableau CRM was layered on, allowing users to run their own reports and get real-time visibility to a given status, set of metrics, or catalyst that sparked a service inquiry. This also helps with capacity planning, as managers use the same reports to “anticipate what resources we’ll need when, say, people go on vacation, or when we get into the winter season,” said Brownlee.
“Most importantly, this approach gave us the flexibility to operate out-of-the-box, turning an investment in IT into an investment in the mission,” said Brownlee. “Or, in other words, turning taxpayer dollars into productivity benefits for the community.”
Derrick Brownlee dives into the details of this solution on a webinar. See it come to life.
Learn more about the cloud technology behind innovative projects like Chicago’s 311 transformation.
Turn Chicago’s 311 best practices into your to-do list on how to transform the typical call center into a comprehensive contact center.
“Internally, we’re delivering services more efficiently,” said Brownlee. “Work order management, such as the inspections and permitting example, has reduced the amount of paper we send back-n-forth as an agency. We’re also able to push tasks out to departments with specific expertise versus trying to do all services centrally.”
And this shows in the City’s numbers: graffiti clean-up used to take 45 minutes to an hour to schedule the work order. With this new system, that time has been reduced to 5 to 10 minutes. And overall case closure rate has increased from 82% to 94%.
“Externally, two-way communications has made a huge difference. We publish service requests to the mobile app, so that residents can see what might have already been submitted in their area. That, plus increased communications about where we’re at on the delivery timeline has reduced the snowball effect, where residents would put in repeat requests if they didn’t get a response to their previous inquiry,” said Brownlee. “This improves our response time exponentially.”
“This strategy is helping us do more with less,” said Brownlee. “It’s the platform for city services, starting with 311 as the gateway for addressing public health, public safety, and the general well-being of the city.”



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",Government,Chicago 311 City Services Call Center
"See how Salesforce, the world’s first intelligent CRM, can help you blaze a trail to business growth.
",Technology,Salesforce
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"In just five years, CIOs have gone from thinking their most important skill was “technology know-how” to seeing it now as “contributing to corporate strategy,” according to research by Forbes Insights.  “The skill sets expected of CIOs are shifting,” said Tom Davis, Chief Marketing Officer at Forbes Media. “They need to contribute to corporate strategy and manage a lot of change.”
The public sector is no exception, as proven by the Arizona Strategic Enterprise Technology Office (ASET) and its Business Engineering Division.
ASET, the technology office for the State of Arizona, is responsible for developing and executing a comprehensive information technology strategy for the state. It also provides enterprise-level services for state agencies and maintains service-level agreements that produce significant innovation and cost benefits statewide. ASET is both the strategic IT think tank and enterprise-level executor for the state. “By statute, every state agency is required to submit an IT strategic plan to us each year,” said Doug Lange, State of Arizona Chief Strategy Officer. “We then analyze those plans, identify commonalities, and recommend the solutions that allow us to invest once.""
“But Arizona is a federated state,” Lange continued, “meaning that [state agencies] still have the ability to make decisions based on what they feel is best. They aren’t necessarily forced to work with ASET or follow our guidance. In our federated model, if they don’t trust us as a strategic partner and instead see us as an ordinary utility, they can opt to go another route.”
With over 130 agencies, commissions, and boards that employ over 32,000 people — or prospective customers, as Lange and team see them — ASET needed a model that was different from the “stand up new servers or build custom applications.
“We needed to do things better, faster, and cheaper if we were going to build the kind of trust we need in order to fulfill our mission,” he said. “We needed to align ourselves with our governor’s objective to operate at the speed of business.”
Lange was tasked with launching the Business Engineering Division, a team under ASET that focuses on customer needs by introducing best-of-breed, user-experience-focused technology. For Lange, this meant cloud first. He and his team built a project management platform using Service Cloud and Experience Cloud.  It was configured to put the attention on people and projects rather than process and paperwork.
The FedRAMP-authorized platform uses Service Cloud as a customer relationship management (CRM) foundation. “We identify the agency on the account record, asking for additional information (such as project requests, status updates, and implementation progress) to be stored in a 360-degree, profile-like record,” said Jennifer Quintero, IT Business Analysis Manager in the Business Engineering Division. “We also push conversations to Chatter [a live comment board similar to a newsfeed on Facebook] which gives everyone real-time visibility to recent events with a given agency.”
Then digital community portals extend the CRM’s profile capabilities into its various working functions — Project Investment Justification, (or PIJ), and strategic planning. Project owners from various agencies can log into the community, submit their plans for review, check for status updates, and answer any questions. The Business Engineering Division can plug information from the community directly into the CRM, streamlining the intake and workflow associated with PIJ and strategic planning responsibilities.  “Our goal was to create an easy and effective way for agencies to work with us,” said Quintero.
Doug Lange and Jennifer Quintero joined us at Dreamforce to share more details about their experience deploying a cloud-based project management platform. Hear more about the strategy and see a demo.
“You can’t build a business on notepads, in Word documents, or spreadsheets,” said Lange. “To give you an idea of size and scope, we currently have 61 projects with $460 million active budget associated with those projects — that’s a lot of money, a lot of taxpayer money. By managing that in a digital CRM environment, we are tracking agencies like a business would track its customers. We are tracking taxpayer dollars like a business would track expenses.”
While thoughtful planning and best-of-breed investments were key objectives, Lange, Quintero, and team measured real success based on outcomes. And, like any successful startup, outcomes they had. 
PIJ approval time dropped from 21 days to just 10 days. Strategic planning went from supporting 24 agencies to supporting over 80 agencies — a more than 250% gain in customers in just two years. The team also saved an estimated $10 million in project costs.
“We can talk about our state, we can talk about vision, we can talk about our solution, but it really all comes down to outcomes that matter to the state,” said Lange. “We couldn’t be prouder of this work. We, as an enterprise-focused organization, are creating trust in a federated model.”



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",Other,Arizona Strategic Enterprise Technology Office
"“When the pandemic started, our top priority was and remains ensuring Rhode Islanders are safe and healthy,” said Bijay Kumar, CIO for the State of Rhode Island, “which meant that even though we didn’t know the size or the scope of the problem, we would still need a comprehensive response strategy to support the Department of Health and frontline workers. We needed a ‘catch all’ without the luxury of knowing what a ‘catch all’ would entail.”
Rhode Island’s state government is responsible for protecting the health and well-being of its residents in the face of a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic -- a mission that has forced leadership to make some exceptionally tough decisions. Like many states across the country, Rhode Island took a straightforward approach to responding to novel coronavirus in its community; it shut down whole sectors of the economy, asked large groups of people to shelter in their homes, and had to respond to new or changing information as it was discovered or validated by the healthcare industry in real time.
“As our knowledge of the disease continues to evolve, we’re trying to be more pinpointed with our approach,” added Chirag Patel, Chief of IT Enterprise Applications “This calls for more testing, quicker case investigation, and robust contact tracing.”
Contact tracing is a very detailed — and oftentimes a very manual — process often conducted by departments of health. When someone tests positive for certain diseases, the trained state, city, or county health staff will get in touch with him / her / them and record any interactions with people or places that took place during the infectious period. The department then follows up with the primary and secondary contacts of a person who tests positive.
And while it is not a new concept within the public health community (it has been used to track H1N1, Ebola, and so on), it is a now a household term with the onset of COVID-19. Departments of Health, Governors, Mayors, and more have asked their residents to keep a diary of the people and places they have come in contact with so that the state might have an easier time retracing the public’s steps.
“The virus doesn’t take a break,” said Kumar, “which means this process has to be faster and more flexible in order for us to gain ground on the spread and make reopening the state possible.”
Kumar, Patel, and team transitioned its contact tracing system from an on-premise solution to Salesforce’s Customer 360 for Government. It gives the Rhode Island Department of Health a comprehensive record of each and every COVID-19 case across the state, and allows for a more integrated and adaptable solution to the pandemic. It also is compliant with applicable privacy laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  Here’s how it works:
A Rhode Island resident starts experiencing COVID-19 symptoms and they call their healthcare provider. If the patient’s symptoms warrant a test, the physician can log into an online portal built on Community Cloud and Lightning Scheduler, look through available days and times at nearby testing sites, and schedule accordingly. Relevant details, such as symptoms and basic demographics, are captured in a profile-like record in Health Cloud at the time of test-scheduling, allowing the team to potentially have a fuller picture of how positive and negative results are broken down within the community. The system also allows Rhode Islanders to ‘self-schedule’ tests.
Rhode Island is beginning to leverage built-in API capabilities of Salesforce to feed laboratory test results into the system. If the results are positive, they are added to the workflow of Rhode Island Department of Health case investigators, who then follow up with the individual to explain that they need to enter isolation and see if they would be open to participating in the state’s contact tracing effort.  For those who are willing, case investigators can sign up the individuals up for automated symptom monitoring which will let the individual know when they are ready to end isolation. This triggers a daily SMS text message containing a survey (sent via a third-party system), which individuals can use to report any changes in symptoms and request services such as housing and food support to help ensure they can succeed with isolation. The results are integrated within Salesforce, and built in logic helps drive the functionality. Every day the list of individuals needing quarantine or isolation support services is provided to RI’s local United Way 211 to help connect the individual with the support they need; efforts are underway to integrate this process electronically.
“The work we do is important only in how much it helps,” said Patel. “It’s easy for technologists to look at this kind of project as 1’s and 0’s, but the resulting impact has meant so much more.”
The initial version of the platform was live within just one month and specific features (such as test scheduling) were able to be brought live within just one week, replacing semi-electronic processes with the kind of automated, digital experience departments and agencies need in order to scale their resources to address this crisis. Laboratory ordering through a state-based portal also allowed for Rhode Island to more carefully monitor and provide directed testing in a time that test kits and PPE were in short supply.
Additionally, the team consolidated multiple workflows into a single platform, which (A) eliminates tasks like duplicate data entries which are typically time consuming and prone to errors and (B) reduces the amount of time it takes to contact someone after they have either tested positive or been exposed to someone who tested positive – the ultimate goal of any contact tracing effort.  
In a desire to continuously improve the response, the state is starting to also measure the number of cases, how long it takes to process a case, testing of the workforce, and so on. The number of users can be ramped up or ramped down, giving Kumar, Patel, and team a solution that can flex with waves in the virus. And, since the platform is built in the cloud, this can all be done via a remote work environment.
“This strategy gives us the tools to keep pace, the data to evolve, and the ability to do more in fighting this crisis,” said Kumar, “It gives us a foundation that has an immediate impact as well as lasting impact on how we respond – not react – to the future.”



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",Government,Rhode Island Department of Health
"It probably included buzzwords like “connected devices” or catchphrases like “the internet of things” to describe tomorrow’s technology applications – applications that tend to sound so futuristic it is hard to really picture them coming to life. But these are live, real-life use cases the Cary team is enabling across its community right now.
Cary, located in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, is home to 162,000 people. It has a history of being an industry leader when it comes to recognizing customer preferences, digitizing public services, and redefining the overall government experience. “We really think about from the moment you wake until the moment you go to sleep, where are all the possible touch points you have with the Town, and how can we make that experience better? How do we meet our citizens where they already are?” said Nicole Raimundo, CIO for the Cary.
Raimundo’s perspective reflects the Town’s mission: enrich the lives of its citizens by (1) creating an exceptional environment and (2) providing exemplary services that enable the community to thrive and prosper. “This means there is no status quo. There is always an opportunity to improve,” said Raimundo. “And, because Cary is in a high-tech region, we know that our residents – our customers – see an exceptional government experience as one that uses technology to connect them without feeling the burden of that connection, i.e. without them having to wait in line or file a form.”
Raimundo and team began looking at what early technology adopters were using in their interactions with other industries. A handful of data points stood out:
Text messaging was quickly becoming the most used data service in the world.* 89% of consumers wanted to use text messaging to communicate with businesses, making texting the most preferred customer support channel.** Plus, adults between the ages of 35 and 44 were receiving an average of 52 texts per day, and adults 45 to 54 were receiving an average of 33 texts per day.*** 18% of Cary’s population is over the age of 55, with the median at 40 years old; text messaging was a looking to be a very familiar and welcome communication channel across the community.
Personal assistant devices were becoming increasingly popular. Amazon’s Echo accounted for 72% of the smart speaker market with over 25,000 skills enabled on the device. Studies found that the most commonly used skill was information gathering – “Alexa, what is the temperature going to be today in downtown Cary?” – followed closely by music. These usage patterns, combined with researchers estimating 75% of U.S. Households would have a smart speaker by the end of 2020, were signaling that this could be a highly effective way to distribute information to the community.***
More traditional applications still had a strong foothold. Google’s Waze, a crowd-sourced traffic monitoring app, has over 100 million users. “Applications like Waze offer a meaningful way to connect citizens to government data – in this case, about street closures and construction – so they can be proactive and make informed decisions that save them time and help us improve traffic flow,” said Raimundo.  
“I always think about how do we as a team get ahead of trends like this,” said Raimundo. “What that really means is, yes, smart cities stuff but even more it’s about connecting our people to each other and to our resources.”
Raimundo and team launched several cloud-based application pilots across the organization, giving its residents entirely new ways to connect to government services:
Cary turned Alexa into its newest contact center agent. “We have an app built on Field Service Lightning that allows you to submit a ticket right from your home. Say you wake up in the morning and notice your trash bins are still sitting on the curb, full. You can ask Alexa to confirm your trash collection day, and then send a service request to us to send a truck for your overlooked bins,” said Raimundo.
Nicole Raimundo walks through more of the strategy and details behind Cary’s cloud vision, as well as additional use cases that are in the works.
Cary turned stoplights into the newest connected device using Salesforce IoT (Internet of Things). “Later that day, you’re on your way to the dog park when you notice Waze is directing you to take an alternate, unusual route. You think nothing of it until you get to the park, where you overhear someone discussing the traffic jam caused by an outed stoplight on your usual route,” Raimundo continued. “Where you just saw a redirect, the Town saw the stoplight itself trigger an alert that was sent to the traffic department, the police department, and your phone simultaneously, engaging everyone at the right time with the right information to mitigate, triage, and avoid the intersection, respectively.”
Cary launched these pilots with relative ease because it leveraged the same cloud platform as its foundational infrastructure. Alerts from stop lights or tickets from Alexa are logged in its Case Management System on the Salesforce Service Cloud, bringing more color to the profile developed by data collected from more traditional use cases. “If you realize you forgot your pass once you get to the dog park, you can text our LiveMessage app; we’ll verify your identity and unlock the gate for you remotely. If you’re submitting an inquiry over mobile – a pothole, for example – you have the option to attach a photo.”
“We’re building out this connected community. That means connecting people to each other, and using technology as the means for that connection.”
Cary serves as a prime example for departments and agencies looking to transform the ways citizens can connect to their government.
While these applications are designed first-and-foremost for customer success, the resulting capabilities spill over to the employee side as well. By capturing more information about more citizen touchpoints, Cary is giving teams the context they need to send the right people at the right time with the right sense of urgency, resolving the issue faster and cheaper without sacrificing quality of service. “In the pothole example, we can determine if it’s a storm water issue, or a pipe leak, and get the right field team out there instead of sending everyone out of caution,” said Raimundo. “They can now get that information out in the field, unlike the system that we replaced, where the work orders themselves were sheets of paper. “
Office-based employees are also better equipped. The platform has opened up visibility to various work streams across the organization, as opposed to keeping progress and learnings isolated in off-the-shelf, departmental-specific software. Now any employee is becoming more informed as to whether or not a problem was solved, where the bottleneck might have been, which subject matter expert made a difference, how to best get back in touch with the customer, and so on. The platform has streamlined operations from the front to back office, helping everyone make better decisions.
“We are building out the 360-degree view of our citizens, and then we’re translating that over to internal operations. That will allow us to refine existing services, create new services based on quantifiable needs, or maybe eliminating services that aren’t driving any value,” said Raimundo. “So, we’re still delivering against our business objectives, but we’re doing it in a manner that’s nearly seamless to our citizens.”



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",Other,Cary
"“We want to create a new kind of car, almost like an iPhone on wheels.” The innovative vision of Shigeki Tomoyama, Managing Officer at Toyota, is captivating the hearts and minds of people all over the world. Imagine cars entering the very human realm of social networking, tweeting their own status updates. Or anticipating your actions so they can provide the service information that you need. This is the future for people and their cars, and it is on the verge of becoming a reality. Since 1996, Toyota has firmly believed that cars are more than just products; they should connect with Toyota customers. This was visionary—but it was more than just a dream. Toyota is already building connections with customers into the 8 million cars it manufactures each year. The vision came to life in the form of a single platform, Toyota Friend, which is based on Salesforce Chatter. A private social networking service for Toyota owners, it enables people to interact with their cars, dealerships, and Toyota itself. In addition to prompting you to recharge whenever your EV or PHEV battery is running low, it enables your car to “tweet” service information to you. Very much like a good friend, in fact. You can also use this tool to communicate with friends and family by connecting to public social networks, like Facebook or Twitter.
Toyota also uses Chatter to enable hundreds of thousands of staff across the world to interact with each other at any hour of the day—revolutionizing the way they work. Employees can post questions and get advice and answers from coworkers based in 170 countries around the world. Rather than each individual office working on their own to solve problems and develop documentation, Chatter allows everything to be shared. “People have only 24 hours a day,” says Toyoda. “But through social we can connect with many people at once.”



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",Automotive,Toyota
"73,000 employee
Salesforce customer since 2009
 
U.S. Bank is actively positioning itself for the future. A key part of that strategic effort is adopting a “one bank” mindset to eliminate silos and create a unified customer experience across all business lines. That effort received an important boost from Salesforce.
In the past, customer relationships were built within individual business units, despite the fact that a customer might do business with multiple divisions such as banking, mortgage, investment or payments. By approaching customer relationships as a single company, with a single view of “the truth,” employees now have an aligned and complete view of their customers’ interactions with the company. This has been a game-changing shift for the nation’s fifth-largest commercial bank.
With the help of the Salesforce Platform, the bank now can create a single, unified database of customer information, giving a more complete picture of each customer. In turn, customers now have an easier time accessing financial services across all channels, including mobile devices, personal computers, ATMs, and more than 3,000 branches in 25 states.
“There are tools and resources in place today that simply weren’t available a decade ago, and putting them to work for the good of our customers and the good of our organization overall, has been a tremendous strategic move for us,” said Srini Nallasivan, Chief Analytics Officer.
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The move to Salesforce started after the company’s Small Business Banking group began looking for a new vendor to support mobile applications. The old system relied on separate databases that each required individual updates and hardware that required constant upgrades. This meant data was siloed and could not intermingle, which prevented U.S. Bank from getting a complete picture of its customers. With Salesforce, all customer data collected from every branch lives in one system.
“Customers are at the center of everything we do,” said John Bilden, head of enterprise customer relationship management. “Having a unified view of our customers enables us to deliver a more unified customer experience.”
With a single, unified database of all its customer information, U.S. Bank has the data it needs to understand its customers, and, with Sales Cloud Einstein, it has the tools it needs to turn that information into results. For example, the bank was able to use Einstein to build a model to predict lead conversion by searching through customized historical lead data. By sharing the insights gleaned from Einstein, U.S. Bank employees can work more effectively across the company’s entire network. Wealth managers, for example, can use retail banking insights to offer relevant products to customers in the wealth division.
“We work to build high-quality, personalized relationships between our customers and their financial advisors or commercial bankers. There is nothing that replaces that person-to-person interaction,” Nallasivan said. “What AI allows us to do is augment that relationship. We can provide our teams with better data and smarter insights, which helps them establish stronger relationships.”
The next step in U.S. Bank’s deployment of customer relationship management (CRM) is personalization. The bank is partnering with Salesforce to personalize its financial offerings and strengthen the complicated, high-touch relationships that involve a mix of banking services.
“Salesforce allows us to more effectively serve our customers in the moments that matter most,” Bilden said. “The Salesforce Platform gives our employees who are handling our relationships access to what they need to know, regardless of our internal division, so we’re one bank, one company to our customers.”
One example of this new approach is Salesforce’s “team room” concept, where up to 50 employees who work on a single customer account can see the information they need, when they need it.
The company’s implementation of Salesforce created immediate benefits that were hard to ignore. The Small Business Banking group gained more agility and more flexibility to add or subtract built-in features, as well as a decreased need for technology assistance and new equipment.
The group’s increased productivity garnered attention from other areas of the bank, and in 2013, the home mortgage division adopted Salesforce, followed by wealth management and a payment services unit. Two years later, the commercial banking group signed on, as well. Today, about 12,000 of U.S. Bank’s employees are Salesforce users.
Getting people to adopt Salesforce has been a major consideration for U.S. Bank, and the company points to Trailhead, Salesforce’s guided learning paths, as an important part of that initiative.
When introducing Salesforce within a U.S. Bank unit, the Enterprise CRM team found individual users were much quicker to adapt to the Customer 360 Platform once they completed the Trailhead paths.
This guided-learning approach has provided valuable education for the development team members, too, as it helped them easily find solutions to any concern they may have. Trailhead is now the most popular starting point for training on the Enterprise CRM team, and they’re expanding its use to reporting, seasonal updates, and new product education.
Learn more about Kimber’s journey with Trailhead.
After eight years with Salesforce, and success with Sales Cloud Einstein, U.S. Bank was ready to see what else Salesforce Einstein had to offer. Despite requiring an AI solution customized to its unique needs, U.S. Bank nonetheless found there were many use cases for artificial intelligence. With myEinstein, U.S. Bank has the ability to predict anything in CRM — an ability that is powering many of its current projects. For one initiative, Einstein helps U.S. Bank solve a problem shared by all banking institutions: customer churn. The team uses Einstein Discovery to understand and explain the causes of churn and predict the likelihood of customer retention.
“The volume of information and quality of data that comes with AI and machine learning allows us to see patterns and make connections that the human eye cannot,” Nallasivan said. “That enhancement to our analytics capabilities is huge, and bringing it down to the frontline level is game changing. There is tremendous potential that we are just now beginning to fully realize.”
In December 2016, U.S. Bank signed a five-year agreement, cementing its relationship with Salesforce as a mission-critical partner.
“Salesforce enables relationships. People are at the center of the culture, and the tools they have created bring that culture to life for its customers,” Bilden said, “That mindset or approach is directly in line with our philosophy. It puts people first, and everything we do enables us to be in the best possible position to deliver our enterprise strategy and serve customers now and into a very exciting future.”



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",Other,U.S. Bank
"From home and personal care to food and drink, your cupboards probably contain at least one Unilever brand. Each day, 2.5 billion people use Unilever products to feel good, look good, and get more from life.
With more than 400 brands and 161,000 employees, Unilever is one of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies — a role it takes very seriously. Whether it’s a sumptuous soup or an energy-saving laundry detergent, every Unilever brand has a purpose, from advocating nutritious cooking to tackling climate change.
“As a big corporation, we have an obligation to add value to people’s lives,” says Unilever’s Global CIO Jane Moran.
Through its commitment to sustainability and diversity, Unilever is changing the world for the better. Unilever exists on a grand scale: seven out of every ten households around the world contain at least one Unilever product.
To keep developing great products and driving change, Unilever needed to empower its people with the right technologies and information. That meant enabling them to become digital natives.
Jane Moran, Unilever CIO
Step 1: Fuel growth and competitive advantage through digital transformation.
Step 2: Empower employees to develop their own business apps.
Step 3: Accelerate digital transformation with a platform-based approach.
Step 4: Build stronger customer connections with personalized journeys and faster response times.
Step 5: Unlock new insights with analytics.
Step 6: Create more lightbulb moments with continuous learning.
By embracing everything that the digital age has to offer, Moran is helping Unilever travel further and faster than its CPG competitors. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a huge opportunity for us,” said Moran. “By delivering digital insights and digital solutions to our colleagues, retail customers, and end consumers, we can drive greater growth.”
And Moran has a unique approach for connecting the digital dots across the Unilever value chain. “I want to give the power of technology away – it’s too cool to keep to myself. When you put the power of technology in the hands of the people that use it, they become much more productive,” said Moran. “With Salesforce, everyone can be a technologist and a Trailblazer.”
Jane Moran, Unilever CIO
By embracing everything that the digital age has to offer, Moran is helping Unilever travel further and faster than its CPG competitors. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents a huge opportunity for us,” said Moran. “By delivering digital insights and digital solutions to our colleagues, retail customers, and end consumers, we can drive greater growth.”
And Moran has a unique approach for connecting the digital dots across the Unilever value chain. “I want to give the power of technology away – it’s too cool to keep to myself. When you put the power of technology in the hands of the people that use it, they become much more productive,” said Moran. “With Salesforce, everyone can be a technologist and a Trailblazer.”
By encouraging thousands of Unilever employees to play a part in Unilever's digital transformation, Moran has been able to fast-track innovation – especially when it comes to the development and deployment of apps. Unilever’s IT and business teams have created more than 50 apps on the Salesforce platform, spanning processes as diverse as developing new products and answering employee HR queries to scheduling volunteer sessions and coordinating internal marketing across a community of 12,000 users.
Unilever’s volunteer app, which helps employees create volunteering activities and invite their colleagues to join in, was developed in less than a week using the Salesforce Platform. Since implementing Salesforce, the company has seen solution deployment costs decrease by approximately 40%.
Salesforce customer since 2012
Unilever also uses Service Cloud and Experience Cloud to help its people work in smarter, faster, and more agile ways. “We have a small city of around 100,000 Salesforce users – from finance and HR to marketing and R&D,” said Moran. “It provides our people with a standardized and interconnected platform.”

Evolving from a project to a platform approach was one of Moran’s first objectives when she joined Unilever as CIO in 2014. “With Salesforce, we can focus on business needs instead of technology enablers,” said Moran. “It helps us deliver digital solutions very quickly.”
Thanks to these digital solutions, Unilever can connect with its retail customers and employees like never before. For example, a new solution for retail execution helps Unilever's field reps manage accounts, place orders, and deliver other key services while visiting customer sites. Executing and planning promotional activities with retailers is also a lot easier thanks to a new trade promotions management solution.

Unilever wants to make meaningful connections with its millions of consumers around the world. “We are passionate about our consumers,” said Moran. “We have around 20 million contacts on a continuous basis – and we want to make these contacts more personalized.”

To personalize how it engages with consumers, Unilever wants to become more predictive. With CRM Analytics, it can better understand consumer challenges and desires, as well as the success of trade promotions.

Unilever is also getting closer to its consumers by reinventing its channel model, with some brands now being sold direct through websites powered by Commerce Cloud.
By exploiting analytics and building more direct consumer relationships, Moran and her IT team can predict future business needs and market trends – and plan for them in advance. “The rate of change is so fast, we need to be able to test new ideas,” said Moran. “With Salesforce, we can push the limits of what technology can do for our business and inspire the next generation of people that want to innovate.”
To maximize future innovation and digitalization opportunities, Unilever needs to ensure its data is integrated and trusted. “We’ve created a library of adaptive and reusable integrations using Salesforce's integration capabilities, which enables us to smartly connect our business applications around the globe,” explained Moran.
With operations in more than 190 countries, ensuring data visibility and integrity is essential – especially when there are 22 petabytes in circulation across the business. “With Salesforce, we can see where information flows to and from,” said Moran. “Greater visibility of the data highway enables us to unlock sharper insights and drive smarter actions.”
As a lifelong learner, Moran is keen to make the most of not only new data insights but also new technologies and software languages. “I taught myself Python last summer,” she said. “I also use Trailhead as I want to keep learning – and it’s fun. With Trailhead, we can create a great community of developers and inspire business stakeholders to exploit technology for their own benefit.”
Encouraging non-stop learning and innovation is key for Unilever as it continues to unlock the full potential of digitalization and to create stronger customer and consumer connections. “If you are always learning, then there will be more light bulb moments,” said Moran.
Every step of Unilever’s digital journey links to its overall goals of changing the world for the better and making sustainable living commonplace. With advanced analytics, Unilever employees can track their personal sustainability metrics and see how they are helping to safeguard the future of the planet.
“With Salesforce, we can keep driving innovation, agility, and digitalization – and have a little fun along the way,” said Moran. “We’re evolving together and evolving how we put customers and consumers at the heart of our business.”
",Consumer Goods,Unilever
"Since its founding in 2005, United Capital has led a fundamental shift in how financial advisers interact with clients. “When we started this company, what we noticed is that the entire industry really viewed human beings like walking wallets,” said CEO Joe Duran. “And we just asked this very simple question: What if we can help people improve their lives by simply making better choices, and by helping them to not be as concerned with their wealth as with their life?” With that philosophy guiding every decision, United Capital has successfully distinguished itself as a financial life management company. The market has responded enthusiastically, making United Capital one of the fastest-growing financial life management firms in the United States, with nearly 600 employees serving more than 25,000 clients. Today, the advisory firm has reached $15 billion assets under management (AUM) despite a difficult financial climate. With robo-investing putting increasing pressure on traditional advisory firms to defend their value, United Capital has thrived thanks to an empathetic, human approach that can’t be replicated by algorithms. And yet, technology plays a key role: Because of Salesforce, advisers get to spend more time with clients while connecting, empowering, and engaging them more deeply.
United Capital began to rethink its technology when rapid growth and a series of acquisitions of like-minded local advisory practices quickly exposed the limitations of its homegrown CRM solution. After an in-depth search, Duran and his team selected Salesforce as the central technology platform because it had the flexibility to scale while being easily customizable to meet the unique needs of various offices. “It gave us the ability to grow not just in size but also in capabilities,” said Mike Capelle, Head of Platform. The onboarding process, data migration, communication between offices, and systems integration are now streamlined, with all 82 offices supported on just one primary, on-premises server. Advisers collaborate through Chatter, where they share ideas and strategies for helping clients. “All of our employees are on Chatter,” Capelle explains. “It helps us shrink the company, and keep all of our offices connected throughout the day.” Ultimately, efficiency allows United Capital advisers to spend more time doing what they care about most: connecting with clients. “Technology removes so much of the daily burden that it allows us to be freer, more empathetic human beings, and to have more time to connect and talk about what really matters to people,” said Duran. With Salesforce, the team at United Capital developed a unique system for getting to know clients and how they think about money, so that advisers can provide more personalized counseling and financial plans. Potential clients start by taking an online quiz, integrated with an app built with the Customer 360 Platform, to identify their financial mindset. Over a period of two years, more than 43,000 potential clients completed the Money Mind® analyzer, giving both them and United Capital a closer read on their emotional relationship with money. Using Marketing Cloud, advisers can tailor communications that are more relevant and timely to their clients and prospects. “Salesforce let us reach out to more people, and it let us grow and be nimble and fast,” said Chief Marketing Officer Gail Graham.
United Capital has found more than a vendor; it now has a committed partner in the Salesforce community. Said Duran, “It seems like everybody’s committed to a couple of things: Doing the right thing, making things easier and faster, making things more simple. And when we start telling people what we’re trying to do, everybody that we’ve met from Salesforce has been in sync with us, like, ‘Hey, we want to help you get there.’ I feel like they actually care about the mission we’re on to improve lives.” In turn, United Capital has been a key ally and guide in Salesforce’s development of Financial Services Cloud. “We partnered with Salesforce to provide a pathway for advisers who want to stay competitive in a changing landscape to robustly and dynamically engage with clients with Financial Services Cloud,” said Duran. The result, according to Capelle, is a solution that is custom-tuned for advisory practices, “using Salesforce Lightning to create a much more intuitive and engaging experience.” Graham finds Salesforce so flexible and dynamic that she doesn’t even see it as technology anymore. “When I first came to United Capital, I’d ask questions,” she said. “And the answer was always Salesforce. And I would ask, ‘What’s Salesforce? I thought that was a CRM.’ And they said, ‘No, it’s not just a CRM.’ So to me, Salesforce is like the Wizard of Oz. It’s behind the curtain, helping us make things happen. It’s where the magic comes.”
United Capital has now upgraded to digital versions of all the tools it uses to get to know new clients. Honest Conversations®, the firm’s unique card exercise used to lead conversations about life and financial priorities, is now an iPad experience linked directly to a client’s Salesforce profile. The exercise sometimes goes so deep that even longstanding married couples learn new things about their respective spouses. Those insights allow advisers to develop financial plans that are much better reflections of clients’ foundational values and priorities. All these conversations add up to the client creating what United Capital calls the Guidebook, which clarifies “what’s important to them, where they are today, and what steps [United Capital recommends] to get them on the right path,” according to Graham. Advisers measure progress against the client’s stated goals at regular intervals, driven by Salesforce. Today United Capital is working on its most ambitious, customer-centric product to date: The Guidebook is evolving into the GuideCenter, a holistic financial life management app that will be completely mobile and provide one more way to put clients in control of their everyday and long-term financial planning. “I think it’s going to change the industry,” said Duran. “It's a completely different way of thinking about your financial life. And Salesforce is embedded in that at its core.”



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",Financial Services,United Capital
"270,000 employees
Salesforce customer since 2010
Healthcare is becoming more expensive, and individuals are demanding more for their money. Yet as expectations grow, members face highly disconnected digital experiences during their most vulnerable moments. UnitedHealthcare is transforming the way members think about their relationship with health insurers by anticipating member needs and by giving individuals the power to navigate their personal health journeys.
“A lot of the shifts that you've seen in retail or financial services, those technology shifts are now coming to healthcare,” said Phil McKoy, CIO at UnitedHealthcare. “There is a lot more focus on consumer digital, a lot more focus on personalization, and a lot more focus on giving control back to the people that we serve.”
Many in healthcare recognize the need to shift to a member-centered model, but few know where to begin. A luminary example of what is possible, UnitedHealthcare is part of the largest healthcare IT company in the world, UnitedHealth Group (UHG), combining payer, provider, and IT services into a single entity with 270,000 employees. The scope of UHG’s capabilities, alongside the scale of its operations and data, place UnitedHealthcare in a unique position to blaze a trail for member-centered care on behalf of the entire healthcare ecosystem.
“We have to be about simplicity and personalization,” said Chris Carlson, SVP, Strategic Capabilities at UnitedHealthcare. “We have to be an organization that consumers look to and say, ‘Listen, I don't care where I go, but I hope you have UnitedHealthcare as your insurance company.’”
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Every interaction with UnitedHealthcare is designed to delight its members and to intelligently guide them to the highest-quality, most affordable care option. When members call with a routine claims question, for example, UnitedHealthcare customer care representatives automatically know who the member is. Using Service Cloud, representatives can see all relevant member information on a single screen, and they can recommend care programs that benefit the member's health.
Kate-Lin Dennis is Senior Customer Care Representative at UnitedHealthcare and uses Service Cloud every day to help members live healthier lives.
“With the Salesforce Platform, if somebody calls in and needs diabetic education, we’re able to look up local pharmacies for them that service diabetic supplies, and set them up with home health agencies,” said Dennis. “We can set them up with programs that help guide them through those processes.”
 
With complete and connected information, UnitedHealthcare uses Marketing Cloud to create personalized, 1-to-1 member experiences across every touchpoint, from acquisition through care coordination and ongoing engagement.
UnitedHealthcare also uses Marketing Cloud to keep healthy people healthy with tailored wellness journeys across multiple channels of communication, including email and text. These journeys guide members to live a healthier lifestyle, reducing health risks and preventing chronic diseases.
“Salesforce allows us to give significantly greater individualized care with the right information for our members when they need it,” said McKoy. “One of the things I get excited about when I think about what we've just built, is I feel like we've just laid the foundation. We're just scratching the surface of what we can accomplish together with UnitedHealthcare and Salesforce.”



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",Other,UnitedHealthcare
"Clean drinking water: It’s the one product that everyone needs every day. And United Utilities helps ensure it reaches around 7 million people in the northwest of England through a network of more than 40,000 kilometers of pipes, 200 reservoirs, and 80 treatment works.
But that’s just the start of the challenge for United Utilities. Its customers increasingly expect more than just a constant supply of clean drinking water and reliable wastewater services. From fewer leaks and faster repairs to easier payment options and lower bills, consumers — and regulators — want water providers to demonstrate constant improvement and innovation. And United Utilities is using apps, analytics, and digital maps to rise to the challenge.
“To deliver more value to our customers, we need to become more efficient through the implementation of new technologies and processes,“ said Simon Chadwick, Digital Services and Central Operations Director for United Utilities. “With Salesforce, we can help our teams work faster and smarter, so we can provide better customer service at a lower cost.”
Thanks to an ambitious digital roadmap, United Utilities has already improved its end-to-end resolve time for issues such as leaks on its network by 20% and has pledged to reduce customer bills by 10.5% by 2025. These and other improvements are taking the residents of the northwest by storm: United Utilities came in third in Ofwat’s customer service league table for water and wastewater companies for the year ending March 2020. 
The company’s new Integrated Network Solution has been key to transforming how it manages its teams, partners, and infrastructure assets. Built on Service Cloud and Field Service, the solution has replaced a patchwork of systems used by contact center agents, field workers, and sub-contractors. “Everybody had different parts of the story, which made it difficult to track progress and performance,” said Chadwick. “With Salesforce, we now have central visibility of the customer journey in real time. It’s given us a single view of our water and wastewater operations across the northwest.”
United Utilities partnered with Accenture to design and deliver the new solution to coincide with the start of the new regulatory period in April 2020. “We had just 12 months to make it happen,” said Chadwick. “We had never done anything on this scale before, and we were the first water company in the U.K. to attempt it.” As a true Trailblazer, United Utilities completed the solution on time and on budget. It is now used by 2,000 people across five organizations, with around 800 new contacts and 900 new work orders added every day.
With Field Service and Service Cloud, work orders can be seamlessly shared with sub-contractors on their mobiles and automated updates sent to customers. And it can all happen a lot faster, for example, United Utilities has reduced the time it takes to create a work order by 60%. “Our field teams now have visibility of previous issues and repairs, which means they can have more informed conversations with customers when responding to incidents,” said Chadwick.
By pioneering an integration between Salesforce and a geographic information system, United Utilities has taken visibility to a whole new level. “We need to help our teams visualize problems and assets in different areas across the region,” explained Tim Stanley, Head of Data and Analytics at United Utilities. “We can now provide field workers and contact center agents with access to quick view maps, which helps us react faster to localized issues and trends.”
Supervisors can also view photos captured on the Field Service Lighting mobile app to ensure roadworks are set up safely and sites cleared correctly. Collaboration between 500 field workers and 400 contact center agents has improved too thanks to Chatter, an enterprise social networking tool that has been integrated with the Field Service mobile app.
Better collaboration is just the tip of the transformation iceberg for the contact center team at United Utilities. The previous system only captured the first contact with a customer, which meant it was difficult to track a case through to resolution. With Service Cloud, the team can not only see the progress of individual cases but also whether they are linked to other issues reported in the area. This has helped to reduce the number of onsite call-outs for related problems.
The data captured in Service Cloud also enables contact center agents to identify vulnerable customers and check satisfaction levels, which means they can provide a more personalized and proactive response across multiple channels. “With Service Cloud, we can manage inbound and outbound customer interactions more effectively and empower our agents with better access to richer information,” said Chadwick.
By integrating Service Cloud with its website, United Utilities is able to improve the visibility of the status of work requests and repairs for customers. 
The data captured in Service Cloud and Field Service feeds into a trailblazing data science program, which enables United Utilities to run around 250,000 analytics queries every day. Tableau sits at the heart of this program and is used by 2,000 people across the business to analyze everything from rainfall and reservoir levels to customer service and satisfaction metrics.
“We want to extract more value from our data to help our teams make smarter decisions,” explained Stanley. “By using Tableau as part of our data science platform, we can consolidate billions of rows of data from more than 30 source systems to generate analytics that helps improve operational performance and the customer experience.”
These analytics have already enabled United Utilities to reduce its energy consumption by up to 15% at target sites and reduce overall costs by more than $1.2 millions per year as part of a strategic energy management program.
Richer insights have also helped improve the efficiency of the field teams responsible for assets such as water and wastewater treatment works and pumping stations. For example, by analyzing daily schedules, United Utilities was able to identify more efficient ways to manage the teams’ time and capture details on work undertaken. This resulted in a 50% reduction in unallocated time in field workforce schedules. “By optimizing how we use our resources, we can provide a faster response to major incidents, such as a sewer flooding after a storm,” added Chadwick.
United Utilities doesn’t just want to improve outcomes for its current customers; it wants to safeguard the water supply for future generations. And that means understanding consumption, especially during peaks in demand. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, water consumption changed dramatically as more people were working from home,” explained Stanley. “With Tableau, we were able to visualize whether we had sufficient resources to meet demand during the peak summer period.”
Ensuring people had access to clean drinking water and wastewater services was a top priority for United Utilities during the pandemic. It helped more than 120,000 customers with a $4.8 million support scheme and made it easier for people to apply for reduced social tariffs.
The pandemic also forced United Utilities to rethink its approach to training. With a new release of the Integrated Network Solution due to hit when most of its 5,000 employees were still working from home, United Utilities needed to find a way to deliver remote learning on a massive scale — and fast. Within six weeks, it launched 40 modules on myTrailhead for 2,000 employees, including contact center agents, field workers, and sales reps.
The new online learning platform has been a massive success, with more than 1 million points earned in just three weeks and 96% of training completed prior to the launch of the new release. “With myTrailhead, we can create smaller learning modules, which are easier for people to complete,” said Jo Nixon, Deployment Lead at United Utilities. “It enables us to track activity levels for different trails and to use gamification techniques to encourage participation through the allocation of points and badges.”
myTrailhead had been such a success that United Utilities is developing new trail mixes to simplify the onboarding of new recruits and to help people return to the office safely as COVID-19 lockdown restrictions evolve.
United Utilities’ ongoing digitalisation efforts will be key to unlocking more efficiency gains and meeting its cost savings goal of $153 million by 2025. It already has a number of initiatives in the pipeline, including tracking hotspots for customer contacts and unifying service channels to create a more omni-channel experience.
“We can now innovate and implement faster, which helps us meet customers’ changing expectations,” said Chadwick. “With Salesforce, we can safeguard water supply for the people of the northwest by increasing efficiency, visibility, and agility.”



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",Technology,United Utilities
"Univar Inc. is a distributor of commodity and specialty chemicals around the world. Univar enables brands that produce clean drinking water, manufacture carpet, make house paint, or even make soda. That’s just a hint of its reach. Its chemicals, ingredients, and services power companies that consumers interact with on a daily basis.

When the team at Univar sought to provide a better experience to its many global buyers, an impressive journey began.
Univar’s customers were frustrated with the buying process, asking for self-service and easy reordering capabilities. They wanted the ability to make purchases anytime, anywhere — similar to B2C shopping online. Univar needed to introduce online ordering or risk losing a significant portion of their market share.

At the same time, Univar wanted to increase gross profit per order and grow online revenue. It needed to improve order accuracy and minimize human errors. To lower operational costs, it had to streamline renewal and subscription management processes.

An online portal could provide a more holistic view of Univar’s customers. That way, it could connect more authentically with buyers as a stronger business partner.

Interestingly, around this time, Amazon Business began approaching manufacturers about selling their products through its portal. This was a clear sign that the growth of B2B online buying was on a high trajectory. Univar wanted to benefit from the trend without sharing revenue.
Salesforce B2B Commerce and Community Cloud afforded Univar rapid speed to market. In fact, Univar launched the new storefront in just eight weeks. The storefront, MyUnivar, allows customers to check order status and history and to access invoices and quotes. MyUnivar also enables easy two-click reordering and empowers customers to more easily self-serve with 24/7 access across devices.

As a native B2B commerce solution on Salesforce, B2B Commerce also offers Univar a 360-degree view of its customers across sales, service, marketing, and commerce. This complete customer view provides Univar with deeper customer insights and increased market knowledge and reach, leading to improved customer loyalty through personalized interactions. It’s also driving greater revenue growth.

Univar wanted to expand its online business overtime. B2B Commerce provides the scalability and flexibility needed to continually iterate as the business and customer demands develop.
The results of partnering with Salesforce speak for themselves. Since launching the MyUnivar page and related solutions, Univar has reported:
Unify the buyer experience with Commerce Cloud.
Create beautiful, CRM-powered experiences with Community Cloud.
Give your sales teams the power to close deals like never before with Sales Cloud.
Deliver personalized experiences with Service Cloud.
Drive action with intelligent marketing using Marketing Cloud.



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",Technology,Univar
"“We are the heartbeat of the state’s local business community,” said Ben Hart, Deputy Director for the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity (GO Utah). “We serve as the liaison between business owners and state operations, helping small businesses grow during good times and survive any storm brought on by the bad times.”
GO Utah’s mission is to enhance the quality of life by increasing and diversifying Utah’s revenue base and improving employment opportunities. In other words, it manages programs, funding, and services designed to make it easier for Utah’s entrepreneurs to open a business as well as attract new business opportunities to the state – helping to increase employment opportunities and strengthen the local economy, “even during unprecedented times like we’re in now with COVID-19,” Hart continued. 
“We have been answering phone call after phone call with a business owner in tears on the other end trying to not only save their dream but also keep their staff employed. They invested everything and all of a sudden it's gone,” said Kori Ann Edwards, GO Utah Managing Director of Operations. “We are talking to people who are scared and who are vulnerable, making for conversations that are very human and very personal. Thus, our team has become even more passionate about our work, because we see the big picture impact. We see how much it helps both the individual and the community when we can provide COVID-19 relief, fast.”
As the Federal government began introducing COVID-19 relief initiatives, the GO Utah’s first priority was somewhat obvious: to issue resulting funds as quickly as possible and as accurately as possible because it was all supported by taxpayer dollars. The team needed a way to securely track a recipient’s location, county of origin, employee size, financial information, if it was considered a rural business (“we established a rule that 25% had to be awarded to rural businesses that are less likely to get foot traffic compared to, say, those located in downtown Salt Lake City,” said Edwards) and more, all in real-time so that it can report back on where are being spent without delaying disbursement.
GO Utah’s second priority was not so obvious: to issue funds with the right context because the pandemic introduced more than just a healthcare crisis, and more than just an economic crisis; it also introduced a confidence crisis. As of February 1, 2020 (pre COVID-19), the Morning Consult – a startup based in Washington D.C. that measures the public’s real-time perception of the market and financial status – measured Utah’s Index of Consumer Sentiment at 122. By May 1, 2020 it had dropped to 88.5, a decline of roughly 27%. And this is not just a problem Utah is facing; Morning Consult saw an average decline of 24% after scores dropped in 41 of 50 states.1
“Consumer confidence rate is critical to helping businesses reopen,” said Hart. “Contracts, bridge loan programs, commercial rent assistance…those only go so far if the consumer doesn’t trust that they can go shopping or out to eat safely. People need to know they will be in an environment designed to limit the spread of COVID-19 (to the best of our knowledge), and that their jobs are secure enough to allow them to spend money.”
Hart, Edwards, and team began looking for a way to give business owners the financial help they needed today, with a reporting plan and a communications strategy capable of answering questions that public taxpayers and the larger community will likely ask tomorrow.
GO Utah launched a loans and grants management platform on the Salesforce 360 Platform for Government. It is a cloud-based, CRM-style  platform that gives the team the tools they need to manage the disbursement of relief funds, from origination to reporting. “It also aligns our business priorities and IT best practices,” said Kristen Jensen, GO Utah Director of Business Intelligence, “making our technology investments relevant and our business requirements actionable across each and every step:”
Step 1 – Front-end customer log in.
Business owners looking to apply for a loan, grant, or other financial support are given a log-in credential to access the platform and create a profile in Experience Cloud, Salesforce’s online, self-service portal product. The business owner is guided through a series of fields that capture critical information about their business, followed by a second series that then completes the application for funding specifically. The business owner can log back in at any time to check for status updates or answer questions as their application moves through the review process.
Step 2 – Back-end review and approval.
The profile and application are automatically transferred into GO Utah’s instance of Service Cloud, Salesforce’s CRM product optimized for customer service and case management needs. Service Cloud presents the details of the business in a 360-degree, profile-like setting, giving GO Utah a complete view of the applicant. Automated prompts guide GO Utah through the review process, Knowledge articles surface related FAQs and information, integrated Chatter bulletin boards allow staff to tag subject matter experts, and push-notifications alert everyone when it’s their turn to take action. Chat bots facilitate live conversations between staff and customers alike, bringing a real-time element to the Q&A that otherwise might chip away at timely deliveries.
Step 3 – Reporting.
Einstein Analytics, Salesforce’s Artificial Intelligence tool, was layered on top of the platform, giving GO Utah the ability to surface loan or grant information via integrated dashboards. The team is using this to report on where funds were spent, spot trends, pinpoint catalysts, and develop data-driven insights on how best to help the Utah business community survive COVID-19.
The GO Utah team shared four best practices from its work with the cloud.
“Plus, it’s flexible. Ie: we can rename certain fields or configure specific workflows using Platform to manage any type of funding opportunity all from the same system, whether it’s a traditional grant or a tax credit or a newer loan process like we’re doing more and more of with COVID-19,” said Jensen. “We had never been responsible for issuing loans until now. But we built this workflow into the platform over a weekend and expended $12 million as the first round of bridge loan money to our businesses that were starving. We got the okay on a Friday and we had the platform live by Tuesday – five days.”
GO Utah also used the platform’s flexibility to support In Utah, a public service campaign that is focused on reactivating the local economy by making current health guidelines readily available and keeping best practices top-of-mind.2  “We were able to bring that branding into Salesforce and give business owners ideas on how to create a safe and healthy environment inside the store, restaurant, etc. as a part of our regular communications with them,” said Jensen. “The easier we make it for people to stay vigilant, the more confidence Utahns will have in resuming more familiar lifestyles, which is good for the health and the well-being of our state – economically, physically, emotionally.”
And of course, GO Utah’s approach also met the objectives around speed and visibility. Utah’s first public health restriction went into effect my March 20th, and GO Utah’s first grant program went live on the platform just 11 days later on March 31st. The team was able to disburse the original $11 million in funding from the Federal government so quickly in fact that it subsequently received another $140 million, which was then allocated just as quickly. To date, GO Utah has supported businesses across Utah’s 29 counties, with 27-30% of grants/funding going towards rural businesses hit especially hard by COVID-19 health ordinances. As follow up initiatives came with more targeted guidance and therefore became more complicated by comparison – minimum rent qualifications, PPE modifications, and so on – GO Utah was able to see granular details like who started the process, how far they got before abandoning the application, where answers deviated, and more. “We know which programs work, and we know which programs don't because we can measure what moved money out most quickly,” said Edwards. “We shared those insights with the state Legislature so that they can apply those learnings to future efforts.”
“This approach has given us direct insight into program impact. We have seen how much our team can accomplish, how far a ‘can-do’ attitude can take us, and how many people we can help,” said Hart. “Our government will never go back to the way it was. It will take the lessons learned from COVID-19 and apply them to any future effort so that we can have the same level of impact.”



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",Other,GO Utah
"Nick King had recently started as the Vice President of Cloud Marketing at VMware in 2017 when his manager approached him with a challenge.
VMware, a leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, was preparing to launch VMware Cloud, a portfolio of 17 products and services. The company needed to build a new marketing platform to reach new audiences as well as existing customers. And it needed the platform to be ready in 90 days for its annual VMworld conference.
King described launching the new platform in time for the conference as “one of those moments when you had no choice but to land it.”
Since the late ’90s, VMware has been a leader in virtual machine technology. The company’s software allows businesses to virtualize their infrastructure, helping to reduce IT costs and boost efficiency.
When King joined VMware, the company had multiple instances of Salesforce and a hodgepodge of marketing campaign tools. To unify the company’s many different systems and give its team consistency, VMware decided to build its new marketing platform using only Salesforce solutions, centered on Sales Cloud and a variety of Marketing Cloud products, including Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Choosing Salesforce reduced VMware’s integration costs. “And it allowed us to really focus on building and innovating on top of the platform versus debating which platform was better than the other,” King said.
VMware also partnered with Success Cloud, which provides resources and expertise to help Salesforce customers achieve their goals faster. A success manager, a Salesforce architect, and a technical account manager from Success Cloud helped King’s team launch the marketing platform successfully.
Integrating so much technology together quickly “was like playing a chess game,” King said. The Success Cloud team helped VMware integrate each piece in the right order, sharing best practices and referring VMware to others who had completed similar initiatives.
“What usually would have been a four-week consolidation of all these different pieces of information was a half-hour phone call, maybe two days where we’d meet with someone else. And then by the end of the week, we’re implementing,” King said.
Within 90 days, the team successfully built a complete marketing automation platform in time for the VMware Cloud launch at VMworld.
“It definitely felt like we were bending the rules of physics,” King said. “It was a lot of fun.”
Nick King’s advice for working with Success Cloud experts to find new solutions.
With a connected marketing platform, VMware seamlessly executed its marketing plans for the new product launch.
Offering free trials of VMware Cloud was key to the marketing strategy. VMware used Engagement Studio to manage leads that filled out free trial request forms. Product teams used Sales Cloud dashboards to review the status of requests so they could respond quickly.
Next, VMware emailed activation links to approved customers with an application programming interface (API) connection to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Then, customers received an onboarding email from Engagement Studio.
Marketing Cloud helped VMware reach prospects who attended VMworld but didn’t request a free trial. The company then used Social Studio to publish content and engage with customers on social media.
Throughout the process, the Success Cloud team was “in the hallway with us, giving us feedback, helping us figure out which technology to use, coaching us on which way to build a journey and how to optimize it,” King said.
See how VMware transformed their business by combining marketing, sales, and service on one unified platform.
Their new integrated platform helped VMware communicate its new narrative and demonstrate its strategy for the future. That gave the public confidence, King said. VMware team members also felt confident knowing the company could deploy solutions quickly.
The new platform also enabled marketing, sales, and support to work together more cohesively and complete tasks across functions. Sales teams can run campaigns and engage customers one-on-one. Marketing can close sales opportunities. Support can be involved throughout each of those processes.
“One of the beauties of having Success Cloud partner with us is that they helped us understand the different pieces,” King said. “They understood our entire landscape at VMware. And they helped us quickly bring together these teams.”



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",Technology,VMware
"Learn from the Trailblazers who are transforming their business, changing the world, and shaping the future with Salesforce.
Reinventing your business doesn’t have to be slow. See how Ford went from 0 to 60 with Salesforce.
Discover how L’Oréal combines beauty and tech to deliver its most personalized experiences yet.
See how GE Appliances closes the gap to customers with connected, proactive service.
",Other,Salesforce
"The Department of Health Care Finance (DHCF) is the District of Columbia’s Medicaid agency, charged with improving health outcomes by providing residents access to comprehensive, cost-effective, quality healthcare services. In 2013, DHCF launched the District of Columbia Access System (DCAS), an integrated eligibility system for Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and other programs.
“At least one in two DC residents touch our agency at some point, and our user base continues to grow,” says Paul Hunt, DHCF’s organizational change management lead, “which means we need to think about things like how to serve more residents more efficiently, ways to provide a more intuitive customer experience and how to do that all without sacrificing support for employees.”
DHCF’s goals reflect a larger trend sweeping health and human services (HHS) agencies. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act changed longstanding approaches to determining eligibility for benefits, placing new emphasis on the use of technology to qualify consumers for assistance.1 To encourage greater integration of state eligibility systems, the federal government also allocated funding to states investing in eligibility and enrollment systems.2 In response, states began to strengthen the connections between their health and human services program sand increase data interoperability and systems integration, also referred to as integrated eligibility.
Integrated eligibility systems serve as a watering hole for people to learn about and apply for a broad range of HHS programs. The unified, consistent user interface across services makes it easier for clients to enroll in programs for which they are eligible. Such systems can also potentially speed up the benefits approval processes, improve the customer experience and streamline enrollment steps — all while lowering administrative costs.
Migrating to an integrated eligibility system however represents a significant change. It requires HHS agencies to look at how they conduct business from one program to the next, and train caseworkers to use new technology systems that determine eligibility across a range of programs rather than just one. The key to success during this transition is employee training and support.
Hunt was tasked with leading this shift at DHCF, driving change management activities as well as developing an end-user transformation strategy.
“As we were migrating to a new integrated eligibility and enrollment system, we needed to think about how we would enable our staff to adapt and thrive in this new environment, as well as lay the foundation for District residents to apply for all types of HHS benefit programs via any channel on this platform.”
Hunt and his team launched myDCAS, a centralized caseworker portal and knowledge access sytem built on the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Service Cloud. MyDCAS serves as a contact center and case management solution in one, providing employees the information they need to help answer constituent eligibility questions and process applications within a single system.
MyDCAS includes a Salesforce-based knowledgebase with step-by-step guides, training videos and FAQs (including a Yelp-like rating system) previously spread across multiple locations.
“Employees can check the FAQs to find answers about the DCAS implementation overall, the impacts of it, things they should be aware of,” says Hunt. “They can get answers to their questions very quickly and easily.”
The knowledgebase also includes a self-service ticketing system that allows employees to submit a ticket directly to the help desk and enables caseworkers to check the status of tickets they’ve submitted. Finally, MyDCAS integrates third-party systems, including Drupal pages that house static information like intake forms, eligibility applications and more, as well as a custom learning management system that allows employees to take online courses or register for training.
“The system was built to be seamless,” says Hunt. “It’s intuitive and provides employees a very natural way to get the information they need. It also provides a simple way for them to escalate up to different levels of support, whether it’s the help desk or additional training.”
Today, rather than searching PDF-based job aids, DHCF employees can find the information they need using MyDCAS. This ensures they aren’t accessing outdated or inaccurate data. It also means they spend less time searching for the information they need or on the phone with the help desk. A month into the MyDCAS launch, DHCF was already experiencing a drop in help desk calls.
Meanwhile, analytics embedded in the myDCAS portal enable DHCF to fine tune caseworker training based on the questions asked or issues raised.
“We’re not throwing everything at the wall just to see what sticks anymore,” says Hunt. “We can see where there may be training gaps across the agency, or if certain individuals need more support in specific areas. Having that data will make us more efficient and effective in our approach to training.”
Once fully implemented, DCAS will touch multiple agencies across the District. Between caseworkers, district employees and partners, the agency will go from supporting about 900 users to supporting about 4,000 users. DHCF leaders are confident myDCAS will provide caseworkers a more advanced support system, more accurate information and access to continuous training so they can provide fast, consistent support to the growing number of constituents in need of services.
“Even as the number of residents seeking our services grows, we’ll be able to serve them efficiently,” says Hunt. “We’ll enable a more intuitive customer experience without sacrificing support for our valued employees.”









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",Technology,DHCF
"Mention “Washington, D.C.,” and chances are the federal government is the first thing that comes to mind. But the District is also home to a local government entity responsible for providing atypical city services to a rather atypical community. The District's Office of Unified Communications (OUC) manages both 911 and 311 services, hosts one of the country’s few 24/7 311 call centers, covers Department of Motor Vehicles services since there is no state-level entity, and so on for a dynamic population.
“We only have about 700,000 residents in the District,” said Wanda Gattison, Public Information Officer for the OUC. “However, we handle over 1.8 million calls per year. That's because our population swells to over 2 million people during the day with all the commuters coming in for work. And that swell is intensified during peak tourism events, like the 4th of July, the Cherry Blossom Festival, or presidential inaugurations. It all results in a high demand of city services.”
Servicing this constant ebb and flow of the District’s population is made more complicated when the type of customer is taken into account. Managing events tied to the federal government community, which falls within the jurisdiction of local government, means that first responders must apply the appropriate attention and urgency required to both entities.
In 2006, the District of Columbia government began consolidating many stand-alone agency call centers under the OUC. Agencies like the Department of Transportation, the Department of Public Works, and the Department of Motor Vehicles each had individual call centers, with individual cost structures and individual user experiences. As the OUC transitioned to become the single point of entry for a wider variety of basic city services, the team began to look for “self-service tools, automation, and comprehensive reporting capabilities to drive performance since we were becoming the public face of local government,” said Erick Hines, 311 Operations Manager for the OUC. 
 
Nielsen, a global measurement and data analytics company, published a study around this time frame that found millennials were living in urban areas at a higher rate than any generation before them, driving the growth of cities to surpass the growth of other communities for the first time since 1920. Washington, D.C., was the sixth most attractive area for a group Nielsen defined as a “social generation, both online and in-person... They’re never more than a few clicks away from friends and family. And offline, they prefer to live in dense, diverse urban villages where social interaction is just outside their front doors.”* 
These trends had a lasting impact on the community. Today, Washington, D.C., is home to the fifth-largest group of college graduate millennials, meaning communication strategies need to address the preferences of a younger generation in order to keep city services relevant.**
The OUC’s city services Twitter account, @311DCgov, has attracted over 10,000 followers, with certain groups growing so vocal that managing the Twitter handle became a full-time job. “We’re seeing a lot more millennials moving into the District.” said Hines. “With this population of 311 users, we’re seeing that they prefer using Twitter or the mobile app.”
“If you want to be on social media and tweet us a service request, we're happy to do that. If you want to text to us, we're going to accommodate you there. If you want to chat online, we're ready and waiting. However, we also understand that no matter the channel, under certain circumstances, people still want to talk to people,” said Gattison. “We saw technology as an opportunity to really enable these new channels, and make it easier to put a person at the other end of each and every inquiry — by phone or otherwise.”
The District’s 311 services were re-platformed into services on the cloud, turning a server-based call center into a complete contact center. A robust set of modern communication channels increases visibility, reduces costs, and mitigates risk. 
OUC deployed Salesforce Service Cloud as the cornerstone of its new contact center. It leverages classic CRM capabilities to collect and manage information in a profile-like setting that creates a 360-degree view of a given inquiry or case. This degree of visibility makes it easier for the 311 team to check on the status of a specific set of details, or report on performance as a whole, anytime, across any of the agencies it supports. It also helps the team address service needs and justify resource requests based on data-driven insights. For example, “When we identified that broken parking meters were our highest call driver, we made an informed business decision to move to interactive voice response to automate those calls.” said Gattison. 
Live Agent Chat gives agents tools to answer questions over the web, giving them more ways to progress cases. Automated email notifications can be customized and scheduled. “This is a major thing,” said Hines. “We can schedule them based on stepped SLAs [service level agreements]. An email notification is sent out to the resident every time an activity is completed. It's very useful because we have some service requests where the SLA may be 365 days — things that are budgetary like trees, streets, sidewalks — and now the customer will always know the status of their service request.”
The agile, open nature of the cloud integrates mobile app inquiries, inquiries submitted over social channels, website submissions, and more. It also makes it easier to bring new agencies and their respective interfaces into the environment. “Change is inevitable,” said Gattison, “and we needed a system that embodied this.”
The update process was transformed completely. “The old server-based CRM had to be updated weekly or monthly. Anytime those updates occurred, we were without a CRM for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. So, typically we would do these updates at night when the call volume was low, which meant once it came back up, any issues would linger into the next business day. Now, everything is seamless. Plus, we're no longer paying for that server space,” said Hines.
“We still field about 1.8 million 311 calls per year,” said Hines. “Even with Twitter and Live Agent, the call volume has remained the same the last few years.” Complaints have gone down significantly, and reporting has become more efficient. “It used to take an hour to run a report. Now, we can run three to four reports in that amount of time, helping us report back to constituents, the Office of the City Administrator, and the business community in a timely fashion,” said Hines. The user-friendly platform makes it easy for DC311 to answer more inquiries. Despite the growing demand of channel shift, “there is still a population who prefers to talk to a customer service agent. In knowing that, we are here to answer the call.""
The user-friendly platform opened up bigger, more impactful opportunities. L.E.A.P. (Learn, Earn, Advance, Prosper) is a workforce development program that places District residents in on-the-job training experiences around the city. Following professional development and job skills training, OUC has welcomed over 60 L.E.A.P. participants, and 42 are now full-time OUC employees. “OUC has been synonymous with the L.E.A.P. success story,” said Gattison.
“The Salesforce CRM is very easy to navigate, so new employees feel comfortable utilizing the system to perform their duties — it’s very intuitive. For them to be able to walk in after a week of class, and utilize the system to navigate questions, research service requests, and follow up with residents, it means a lot. It's made a huge impact on our community, supporting Mayor Bowser’s platform for ‘Creating Pathways to the Middle Class’ for District residents.”
L.E.A.P. has had a huge impact on OUC as well. “Prior to the L.E.A.P. program, our call wait time was roughly seven minutes. We are now at .31 seconds,” said Hines. “Some participants now work with the 311 social media team, and others continue to be on phone duty in the call center. It’s extremely gratifying to see everyone’s professional growth, and to know that we are accomplishing so much every day.”
OUC is redefining what it means to be a meaningful employer, a successful employee, and an even stronger partner in the community.
* http://www.businessinsider.com/cities-most-educated-millennials-2018-3
**http://www.businessinsider.com/cities-most-educated-millennials-2018-3#5-washington-dc-54-6



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",Government,OUC
"WeWork provides more than 253,000 members around the world with space, community, and services to help members work and make a life, not just a living. By giving teams a 360-degree customer view with Salesforce, every interaction is personalized, helping to fuel new membership growth by 330% over the past two years.




























",Professional Services,WeWork
"A decade ago, planning a wedding meant calling vendors, physically visiting a venue, and announcing your engagement in the newspaper. Now 30% of engaged couples plan their wedding from a tablet or mobile device, and one in four couples use at least two apps for wedding planning, inspiration, organization, or connecting with other couples.
As the leading technology company serving the $200 billion wedding, corporate, and social events industry, WeddingWire has built its success on innovation and meeting the changing needs of its customers.
The key to this strategy is a forward-thinking business model focused squarely on customer preference, education, and communication. WeddingWire employs Email Studio to create customer email journeys. They are also a heavy user of Mobile Studio, producing SMS campaigns, and dynamically generated content based on user behavior, giving the company the ability to maximize user experience while providing personalization tailored to the needs of its customers.
“We’re constantly trying to get better because every engaged couple is different,” said Email Marketing Specialist Bethany Mulcahy.
When users joins WeddingWire, they provide their email address and wedding date. With the wedding date as the starting point, the company can predict, for example, when an engaged couple might be ready to pick a venue.
The same experience is repeated for other key planning milestones, such as selecting a wedding dress or photographer. This predictable customer journey gives WeddingWire the opportunity to provide relevant and engaging content for its customers. WeddingWire also uses email to onboard vendors and offer education and information tailored to their specific industry. An advertising program gives the vendors additional opportunities to showcase their services to WeddingWire clients.
“We send a lot of emails to vendors about educational opportunities, as well as a biweekly newsletter that relies on a lot on AMPscript to personalize for region, advertising package, and industry,” said Bart Thornburg, Senior Manager of Email Marketing.
WeddingWire has parlayed the focus on user experience to successfully integrate mobile technology. At its vendor conference, WeddingWire World, the company uses MobileConnect, found in Mobile Studio, to text attendees information on Wi-Fi passwords, meeting locations, and swag giveaways.
WeddingWire also uses MobileConnect to drive adoption of its WedSocial app. The app allows wedding attendees to upload personal photos taken during the wedding to share with all attendees and also provides wedding information, such as rehearsal dinner and reception location.
Adoption of the WedSocial app is driven through a series of promotional emails directed toward the engaged couple. Critical in the series, which begins 30 days prior to the nuptials, is a table card email, sent to the couple 17 days prior to the event. The email encourages them to print custom table cards to be displayed at the wedding.
The table cards include an SMS shortcode and keyword generated by MobileConnect, making it easy for guests to simply text in for a link to download WedSocial. The link they receive is customized for the device, directing them to either Google Play or the Apple App Store.
The table card emails solved for a common pain point. “It’s always a challenge to connect people from something in the physical world to something in the digital world,” Thornburg said. “It’s a jump from one medium to another and SMS proved a really good way to bridge that gap.”
The results speak for themselves. Since launching the WedSocial email series and MobileConnect campaign, adoption of the WedSocial app among WeddingWire users is up 74%.
“Marketing Cloud allows us to be really focused on the experience of our community,” said Thornburg.



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",Technology,WeddingWire
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
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",Other,Salesforce
"WY OSLI’s mission is one of trust—literally and figuratively.
The Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments (WY OSLI) is a revenue-generating agency that manages the State’s collective 7.3 million acres of trust land – land that was issued in a grant by the Federal Government upon statehood back in 1890 with the stipulation that each and every acre would be held in a trust dedicated to support Wyoming’s public schools and institutions. “We are effectively managing natural resources and funds for current and future generations,” said Jason Crowder, Assistant Director for WY OSLI, recounting the agency’s mission.
As named in the 1890 federal grant, revenue garnered from these transactions fuels the public institutions, primarily the State’s public school system. With the number of resources being managed, as well as the number of public institutions being supported, leadership launched ”a statewide initiative to automate and digitize records to more or less bring [Wyoming] state agencies into the 21st century,” said Ben Bump, fellow Assistant Director for WY OSLI and teammate of Crowder’s. “The majority of the money appropriated for this initiative was pushed towards building the application that would ultimately be for the big bread-and-butter programs of the agency. And what was left over was what got thrown over to us with lease and land functionality. That really brought forth the need to have an all-encompassing solution that could be flexible – that could cover a bunch of programs—a bunch of different programs—all under one roof.”
Jason and Ben share their perspective and experience on Our Digital Nation, Salesforce's podcast series exploring the intersection of government and technology.
WY OSLI shared the step-by-step process behind the design and deployment of their integrated application library. See how the team developed a digital, core platform strategy that was capable of transforming the services that transformed the mission.
Learn more from the best practices WY OSLI demonstrated as the team extended a digital, application-based strategy across the organization.
Bump and Crowder replaced a paper-based system with the Surface Land Asset Management System (SLAMS), an integrated application library on the cloud. This new system modernized point solutions, while also combining them into a comprehensive, application-based model that serves as a core platform strategy for the entire organization. This library includes:
Purpose-built applications: WY OSLI was able to build custom apps, fast, thanks to a user-friendly, web-style interface that starts developers out with standard application templates and layouts. These templates and layouts can be easily customized in clicks, instead of writing lines of code.
Out-of-the-box mobility: Templates and layouts are designed for use across desktop and mobile devices, meaning each resulting application is inherently field-friendly.
Built-in collaboration capabilities: WY OSLI included a digital comment board within each application. This allows users to note progress, ask questions, and tag people in the same way they might comment on a Facebook wall or contribute to a LinkedIn feed.
Native integrations: WY OSLI integrated 3rd-party ESRI (environmental systems research institute) information into one of their applications. This type of integration allows the team to understand more context about the impact of current and future project plans.
As staff started working in SLAMS, they began enjoying their work more and doing their job better. “For us, it’s not just a business function but also a change in culture that has been infectious, and it’s still going on. Our system and the success of it is a major piece of that,” said Bump.
“We understand the assets that we're managing, we’re understanding the uses that are on that land asset we're managing, we’re understanding the relationships, symbiotic or not, and I think there’s a revenue generation benefit from that. So, the way I feel this fits into our mission  is that we're doing what we're required to do—effectively,” added Crowder.
Information was easier to find, answers came with greater consistency, and services moved faster across the agency.
Crowder and Bump started offering the SLAMS system to other states that were looking for ways to transform their mission in the same way WY OSLI did. This proved to a mutually beneficial relationship; using WY OSLI’s experience as a starting point, sister agencies are able to develop applications faster and share that back to Crowder, Bump, and the larger team.
WY OSLI is not only defining the modern mission within their home state, but also is serving as a trailblazer for the industry.



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",Government,WY OSLI
"In many ways, Jo Mousselli’s entire life led up to the success of Xtreme Lashes, the global business the former teacher and pediatric ICU nurse co-founded with her family. The fast-growing company’s supportive culture can be easily traced back to the vision of its magnetic CEO. “I’ve always loved beauty and fashion,” said Jo Mousselli. “I believe that when a woman feels beautiful, she feels more confident. And I aspired to start a company that helped empower women personally and professionally.” After graduating magna cum laude from Texas Woman’s University, Mousselli embarked on a career as a pediatric ICU nurse that lasted more than 10 years. Working side by side with health professionals, most of whom were women, inspired her to develop high-performance, long-lasting beauty products. “I embarked on a journey to satisfy the modern woman’s desire to look and feel beautiful as she juggles a busy career, family, and social life,” explained Mousselli. Combining her medical background with her passion for beauty products, Jo Mousselli perfected a system of semipermanent eyelash extensions. The result: An innovative, hygienic approach that gives women a natural, virtually undetectable alternative to mascara and traditional false lashes. Xtreme Lashes by Jo Mousselli® does more than just provide a way for women to feel more confident physically. Mousselli’s vision also includes helping beauty professionals gain more confidence about their futures, training them to be both Xtreme Lashes Certified Stylists and financially strong entrepreneurs. “It’s their own business,” said Mousselli. “We give lash stylists our customized recipe for success — the products, training, and management expertise. It’s professional and financial self-reliance, so certification is very empowering.”
Founded in 2005, Xtreme Lashes by Jo Mousselli started in the Mousselli home with just her family working alongside her. In a mere nine months, the business moved from their home’s game room to a commercial space. That upward trajectory hasn’t wavered in the company’s 10-year history. As of 2015, Xtreme Lashes has trained over 32,000 lash stylists around the world. As beautiful as growth can be, it also presents challenges. Xtreme Lashes quickly outgrew its self-built IT fulfillment system, and each area of the business ran on different apps connected to different databases. The hodgepodge system was hardly in alignment with Mousselli’s methodical philosophy on business and expansion. “You need a systematic approach. If you’re going to grow, you need a great, flexible platform that’s ready to scale. We didn’t have that and that was starting to prove to be more and more challenging for us.” So they began to look for a new technology partner that could scale and support all parts of the business. “We needed a single cloud-based platform that could store all our data, run apps for every department, and deliver value to our clients,” said Ali Moshfeghian, COO. “After a long, very detailed search, we found Salesforce provided all that, and more.”
As the hub of all the company’s IT initiatives, Salesforce touches 90% of the business. “It’s so flexible,” said Mousselli. “We love the ability to have one integrated system that we can use to manage so many parts of the business.” Xtreme Lashes uses Sales Cloud to capture records from its stylists, including their purchase orders, training courses, and profiles. “Every department has access to the same data,” said Mousselli. “It’s really wonderful to be able to do that. We can take great care of our clients no matter how big we get. Salesforce is like a living, breathing, evolving organism, just like we are.” The company also uses Sales Cloud’s analytics and reporting features to increase customer satisfaction and sales in the future. “We put a lot of emphasis on data, and take a scientific approach to customer service and quality control,” said Mousselli. “With Sales Cloud, we can see what promotions worked best, and why. What I love even more is the ability to see which courses and products lead to the best results for our stylists. On that roadmap to success, being able to analyze everything from one database is so valuable. We were able to do analysis before, but not nearly as well.”
Wanting to continue to keep all aspects of its business on Salesforce, Xtreme Lashes also uses several Salesforce native apps from the AppExchange. “Some say you can’t do inventory or financials on a CRM,” Moshfeghian said. “But you can get so much additional functionality from the AppExchange. We use Ascent as our ERP, FinancialForce Accounting, and FinancialForce Billing. And what’s incredible is that we implemented our entire back end on Salesforce in only three months. Typically that takes six months to a year.” Beyond the AppExchange, Xtreme Lashes has also used the Salesforce Platform to build custom apps, like the Lash Calculator app that helps stylists configure the best lash extension length, thickness, and curvature. “Our Java developers built the Lash Calculator app on the Salesforce platform in only a couple of weeks,” said Moshfeghian. Once the app was complete, they were able to make it instantly available to lash stylists on the Xtreme Lashes Community Page, which the company built with Community Cloud. “Start to finish, it’s a great example of how Salesforce enabled us to easily create ways to help our stylists and their customers.”
Xtreme Lashes relies on Service Cloud Lightning to keep its clients at the center of the business and ensure its stylists have the tools they need to succeed. “Our stylists depend on us for their livelihood,” said Moshfeghian. “Now with Service Cloud Lightning, when they call with a product issue, we can see who sold it, who shipped it, and who did quality control.” With the entire lifecycle of every product sold at its fingertips, Xtreme Lashes has been able to give its clients a level of support that wasn’t possible with its previous systems. Mousselli is proud of her company’s innovative, premium-quality beauty products. But more importantly, she feels she’s accomplishing her goal of helping beauty professionals and women have better lives. “We were founded to empower and enrich lives through beauty — the lives of the beauty professionals who provide the service, and the lives of the women who receive the service. And we can do that so much better, and faster, with Salesforce.”



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",Consumer Goods,Xtreme Lashes
"Nonprofits everywhere are facing new challenges. Staffing shortages are prevalent, and salary competition is stiff in today’s strong job market. Year Up is no different, and turned to technology to find a new way to do more with less.

Year Up is committed to ensuring equitable access to economic opportunity, education, and justice for all young adults—no matter their background, income, or zip code. Its mission is to close the Opportunity Divide by ensuring that young adults gain the skills, experiences, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through careers and higher education.

Since its founding in 2000, Year Up has served students across 30+ campuses, but it wants to have even more impact. Setting a goal of serving 10x the current number of people reached by 2030, Year Up needed efficiency at scale.

To scale up its impact, Year Up:
Reworked how it collected and protected data
Improved the admissions process, making it 31% faster
Facilitated a 42% reduction in administrative time by enrollment teams
Saved 4,500 staff hours yearly via a custom internship matching application
Here’s how Year Up is making an impact nationwide with Tableau, Salesforce Platform, and Slack.
Gary Flowers, CIO, Transformation & Technology Services
1. Collect data securely and spot the next big trend.
2. Revise the admissions process to boost enrollment speed by 31%.
3. Develop a better internship matching process to boost efficiency by 45%.
To help address its data needs, Year Up collaborated with Salesforce. Together they developed RADIO, a program that gives real-time insight into the organization’s progress and attendees. Year Up can track retention, admissions, development, internships, and outcomes in one place.
By monitoring the admissions dashboard in Tableau, enrollment teams can spot key trends. For example, if an increased number of potential students started falling out near the end of enrollment.
Year Up uses Salesforce Shield to protect the information it collects from enrollees. Secured data allows it to protect the privacy of enrollees and business partners.
To serve more people, Year Up needed a faster application progress. Students used to take 20-30 days on average to complete an application. Year Up invested in Lean Human Centered Design and developed a simplified enrollment system integrating Salesforce and TargetX online application tools.
Now, it takes just two hours from the first inquiry to a finished application. This new experience has reduced the time enrollment teams spend on administrative tasks by 42%.
Enrollment teams nationwide can communicate with each other via Slack. Sharing trends they observe or troubleshooting issues in real-time.
Year Up matches students who complete training with internships with corporate partners, including Salesforce who hosts more than 125 Year Up interns a year.
Previously, Year Up staff spent hours manually matching student skill sets to potential internships. That changed when Year Up and Salesforce Platform developed a custom app to match applicants.
The app uses 54 specific data points per student and 35 separate data points per internship. Providing fast, accurate matches for each internship has increased staff efficiency by 45%.
This efficiency has saved an estimated 4,500 hours a year. It’s time staff can now spend with students instead of on administrative tasks.
",Nonprofit,Year Up
"In just four and a half weeks, YETI built a fully customized, guided online experience for its drinkware campaign with Salesforce’s composable storefront tools.
YETI, the global designer, retailer, and distributor of innovative outdoor products, is known for its premium and durable drinkware, coolers, and outdoor gear — and memorable customer experiences to match. Instead of using the Commerce Cloud storefront templates it employs across YETI.com, YETI wanted a fully customized experience to guide visitors through its drinkware portfolio. Commerce Cloud’s Composable Storefront gave YETI the freedom to combine existing templates with all-new composable storefront technology through a hybrid storefront approach.
Customers expect compelling shopping experiences from unique brands. Salesforce makes it easy for YETI to innovate an entirely new, customized experience while keeping its existing storefront intact.
Vice President, eCommerce
Here’s how YETI is improving the online shopping experience with Salesforce:
Because the composable storefront is “headless,” YETI can move quickly and make frequent changes to the experience without impacting the backend.
When YETI wants to create a new website experience, phased deployment allows the team to start where they'll have the biggest impact and launch quickly. This way, YETI benefits from faster time to value instead of waiting for long implementation cycles. For example, the company launched its recent All Day Drinkware campaign in just four and a half weeks.
Design features like background video create an immersive browsing experience without extending page load times. Unique scrolling features guide users through a shopping journey instead of a standard product catalog.
   Customer-first design has helped YETI increase mobile conversion rates 63% year over year.
Plus, YETI personalizes the online experience further with content, campaigns, offers, and recommendations tailored to each customer. With Commerce Cloud Einstein, AI suggests products based on shoppers’ past purchases, geographic region, and even their favorite outdoor adventures.
YETI prioritizes the customer experience after purchase, too:
Previously, the YETI team consulted spreadsheets, multiple systems, and even sticky notes just to answer one customer question.
YETI has reduced call center costs and support times by consolidating customer data into a single source of truth in Service Cloud. And because Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud are connected, agents have the context of customer data to personalize support and close cases faster. Customer service reps can even place and modify orders on behalf of a customer.
Consumer insights from Tableau help YETI better meet customer needs while also scaling for rapid growth. YETI’s sales operations group can track sales performance of specific products by geographic region, helping ensure products are properly stocked based on customer demand. Tableau also provides a single source of truth for YETI to monitor cross-channel sales data from its e-commerce, retail stores, and third-party retailer data sources.
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",Retail,YETI
"Electric motorcycles are taking off and Zero Motorcycles is leading the pack with a combination of innovative products and state-of-the-art service. Hailed by Forbes as the “Tesla of motorcycles,” Zero has quickly become the industry leader in high-performance electric motorcycles that surpass traditional gas-powered bikes in almost every metric. “Few other motorcycle companies have made bigger strides in a shorter time than Zero,” Cycle World wrote in a recent review. But the road to the top hasn’t come without a few speed bumps. Despite their reputation for technological innovation — and a made-in-America pedigree — in one key area Zero was not firing on all cylinders: customer service, for both owners and dealers. “We knew we had a great product,” says Mike Cunningham, Director of U.S. Sales and Dealer Development. “But we also knew we weren’t delivering the optimum experience for our customers, our dealers, and even prospective buyers taking a first look at Zero. Salesforce helped us change all that.”
For example, before Salesforce, Zero was using three disparate systems that dealers needed to negotiate – one for sales, one for service, and one for marketing. Dealers had to send in paper warranty cards to register new owners. The result? Zero employees would stand around the fax machine waiting for new paperwork to come through. “How can we be a high-tech company and not deliver a high-tech experience?” asks Aaron Cheatham, Director of Customer Experience at Zero. Zero was ready to take a new look at its entire business so they partnered with Salesforce Ignite, a customer-driven innovation program. “Every year we’re looking to grow revenue by 100%,” says Cheatham. “That’s why we need a platform that can grow with us, and we discovered that Salesforce could transform our entire business.” Through the Ignite program, Zero and Salesforce used a human-centered design approach to reimagine the rider and dealer experience. This resulted in a solution powered by Salesforce Customer 360 that delivered a high-touch customer experience surpassing anything available in the industry.
“We hope that everybody who buys our bike has a great experience with the product,” says Richard Walker, CEO. “But to be a world-class brand, everything else has to work, every other touchpoint the customer has with you has to be first class, and that is what Salesforce has enabled us to do.” Today, a prospective customer enjoys a seamless experience from start to finish. It begins with Marketing Cloud, which Zero uses to generate targeted, relevant communications like the latest product news and releases, industry trends, and reviews of bikes. Zero sales managers can track the journey of a lead from the moment a rider clicks on an email to when they visit the website to the moment of truth – when they sign up for a demo. “Once somebody drives one of our bikes, they’re sold,” says Cunningham. “So our #1 priority is to get them into the dealer to demo a bike.”
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Zero’s new approach is the way they integrated their products into this seamless customer experience by creating connected motorcycles. If an owner ever has a mechanical problem, he can tap the help button in the app and get service advice on the spot because Zero can access key data remotely, diagnose the issue, and schedule an appointment if necessary. The result has been 50% faster response for emergency service and 25% reduction in support tickets. And firmware updates – which are currently rolled out manually and require owners to bring their bikes into a dealer — will soon be pushed out to owners, allowing Zero to update every bike’s software remotely. Using Community Cloud, Zero built a dealer community that enhances communication among dealers, access to a common inventory, and a forum to solve issues that arise. This seamless communication system between owners, dealers, bikes, and manufacturer has virtually eliminated the lag time and miscommunication that hampered Zero in its early days. Salesforce Customer 360 has changed the entire ownership experience for any rider and created a new sense of engagement with the brand and the community. “Salesforce opened opportunities for us that we didn’t even know existed,” says Chris Heimbuck, Director of Marketing.



Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.
",Automotive,Zero Motorcycles
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce
"With Salesforce, the world’s favorite companies connect with their customers in a whole new way. With Data + AI + CRM + Trust they boost productivity, get a single view of each customer, and deliver amazing, personalized experiences in real time. See how.




See how Williams-Sonoma, Inc. uses AI + data + CRM to engage consumers at every stage of life.
See how the streaming giant boosted advertising sales and improved productivity.
Learn how AAA reduced response times by 10% with automation.










",Other,Salesforce