"Salesforce CRM has enabled us to define how we do what we do. Previously our processes were nebulous. But we have discovered that our entire business has been defined by the features within salesforce.com."


Xavier Augustin, Founder & CEO

Y-Axis Overseas Careers

Salesforce CRM provides process efficiency and business direction to overseas careers and immigration consultancy Y-Axis

Challenge

  • Improve communication and information sharing between 12 offices dispersed around India, to bring them under one “virtual roof”
  • Accommodate rapid rate of expansion - with a new office opening every three months the business required a flexible CRM service that allowed for unpredictable increases in users quickly and easily
  • Retain control of corporate data and prevent it from getting lost or leaving with employees when they move on
  • Limit implementation costs
  • Create closer collaboration between the sales and process teams
  • Monitor and manage employees ‘on the clock’ activities

Solution

Salesforce.com partner Lister Technologies delivered a customised Salesforce CRM application for 150 users across the Y-Axis head office and 12 regional offices within just 90 days. Lister Technologies carried out training for core system users over the course of a month.

Results

  • Productivity remains high throughout the month with daily targets, as opposed to the previous system which encouraged employees to gain momentum in the run up to month end
  • Increase in presales activity of approximately 50 percent
  • Ability to measure and compare volume of new customer enquiries month-on-month
  • Deeper insights into transactions allowing Y-Axis to emulate successes and intervene early when problems arise
  • 360° view of customer data allowing sales consultants to effectively and efficiently manage leads and service clients
  • Multiple level escalation rules within Salesforce CRM enabling customer queries to be addressed within  48 hrs
  • Employee logons monitored through Salesforce CRM ensuring punctuality
  • Employees on the sales side have access to a single user interface, simplifying business processes
  • Reporting time slashed from 1-2 days at month end to reporting ‘on the fly’
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Full Case Study

Y-Axis Overseas Careers is India’s number one overseas careers and immigration consultant, providing vital guidance and assistance to Indian people with aspirations of pursuing a career in another country. Essentially, Y-Axis is a unique mix of career counselor and immigration firm - the applicants that pass through its hands receive career counseling, job search, immigration and consulate services.

Unifying the business
A desire to bring 12 regionally dispersed sales offices under one ‘virtual roof’ drove Y-axis to seek a CRM solution. A rapidly expanding business, Y-Axis currently opens a new office at a rate of one every three months, therefore it had a critical need for a scalable solution that would enable it to keep control of company data.

Its traditional method of recording company data within Excel spreadsheets was cumbersome and time consuming, so it began researching a system that would give employees access to one application through a single interface. Y-Axis specifically sought a provider that lived and breathed CRM, rather than one for whom CRM was not the core business. Cloud was also a key criteria for Y-Axis, whose rapid expansion made scalability and easy cost-effective expansion paramount. Salesforce.com supplied the answer within its Salesforce CRM service.

Fast, hassle-free installation
Salesforce.com implementation partner Lister Technologies was engaged to develop a customized installation of Salesforce CRM for Y-Axis. The phase one implementation of was completed across 150 users on the sales side in just 90 days , providing users with a means for recording and storing all interactions relating to each customer account centrally in the cloud where it could be shared across the company and accessed 24 x 7 by anyone who needed to view the information.

This immediately resolved the issue of inaccessible data pockets being created by sales representatives with their own individual spreadsheets, instead creating an open and seamless business environment. It also solved the issue of employees leaving the company with their data.

With Salesforce CRM in place, Y-Axis not only gained better control over its data but also over its employees.

“Our system is configured so Salesforce CRM users have access to everything they need via the salesforce.com interface, so they are not tempted to waste excessive time on Facebook during work hours, for example. We can also monitor system log-on times to oversee punctuality,” says Xavier.

Deep insights into business operations
With a high degree of workflow, the Salesforce CRM system guides new business leads, whether web enquiries, phone enquiries or ‘walk-ins’, through a whole series of processes that culminate in a transaction or don’t. Salesforce CRM provides Y-Axis with a clear view of which transactions have completed and which haven’t – in the case of the ones that haven’t it allows the company to dig deeper into data records to examine the reasons why. All o f this goes towards improving business processes for greater success.

Reporting on the fly
With sales representatives operating on commissions, Salesforce CRM easy reporting makes light work of calculating commissions accurately based on actual transactions completed. And in fact Y-Axis has discovered easy reporting to be one of the major benefits of the new system. Whereas previously this task was left to the month end and entailed the collation of spreadsheets from regional offices into one overall report, it is now possible to pull down performance figures on the fly, dramatically slashing reporting time. Under the previous system senior personnel would often spend up to two days working from home on reporting at the end of each month – this is no longer necessary.

“The current reporting system provides a holistic and real-time view of the entire company, where the previous method was only able to show us a view of company operations in bits and pieces,” says Xavier.

Phase two of the Y-Axis Salesforce CRM implementation will address its expansion to encompass the process side of the business. Presently, the sales cycle is completed in salesforce.com where it transitions to the process team for handling migration requirements. With plans to create a salesforce.com back end to the immigration business, operational efficiencies are set to increase even further.

Measurability improved productivity
“We currently have around 5,000 applicants pass through our doors every month – a figure we weren’t even aware of before Salesforce CRM,” explains Xavier. “We currently have a 10 percent conversion rate and our aim is to generate around a 15 to 20 percent conversion rate – every one percent increase has a significant positive impact on our bottom line! This is something we can easily track and monitor in salesforce.com to help us work towards our goal.”

Still in the early stages, Y-Axis estimates that it is already experiencing around a 50 percent increase in presales activity.

The careers and immigration consultant plans to save further valuable development time and resources in visiting the salesforce.com AppExchange online application marketplace for a template on which to base a new in-house  Recruiting and Survey application.

“We still have so many avenues to explore within Salesforce CRM for improving the business. Nevertheless, having all information stored in one place is our greatest value. In the words of Mark Twain, it pays to ‘put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket!’”

Y-Axis Overseas Careers

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