Shopping.com Improves Customer Service, Cuts Support Cases by 30 Percent with Salesforce

“Salesforce has been very successful for us—with the help of the customer service solution, we have been able to cut our support team in half and still have a faster turnaround time with our customers.”


Challenge
  • Online comparison shopping pioneer Shopping.com, an eBay company, needed a CRM solution to provide a secure, centralized place for client data.
  • Data resided in Excel spreadsheets on local hard drives, making it difficult to share. 
  • In the midst of a move and a merger, the company wanted to deploy a CRM system within 60 days to avoid data loss.
  • As a rapidly-growing shopping destination working with thousands of stores across the Web, Shopping.com needed a scalable solution it could customize as it grew.
  • The company also required a solution it could expand to address customer service. Key requirements included ease of use and affordability, as well as support for its international business units.

Solution
  • Shopping.com chose Salesforce CRM for its cost-effectiveness, robust customer support features, and the availability of the Force.com Web Services API—which makes it easy for companies to integrate Salesforce with virtually any Web service.
  • With the help of salesforce.com premium support, Shopping.com implemented Salesforce CRM in just 2 weeks to users in the US, Europe, and Israel. Users in sales, customer support, and finance employees rely on the software-as-a-service solution today.
  • With assistance from salesforce.com partner Theikos™, Shopping.com deployed email-to-case functionality to integrate support aliases with Salesforce and to route questions to the correct support queue.
  • Customers can submit cases on the Shopping.com self-service portal via Salesforce’s Web-to-case functionality.
  • More than 20 custom dashboards and 10 custom objects provide more accurate forecasts and real-time views of critical business metrics.
  • The company upgraded to Unlimited Edition for increased storage, enabling the tracking and archiving of important client documents.
  • Force.com for Microsoft Outlook keeps client communications in sync.
  • The company installed ExactTarget™ from the AppExchange to track outbound email campaigns. 
  • Integration with proprietary applications provides more in-depth business intelligence. Integration with SAP for invoicing and a proprietary customer billing system is planned for the future.

Results
  • Shopping.com has reduced the total number of customer support cases by 30% since deploying Salesforce.
  • The smaller case load and improved infrastructure allowed Shopping.com to increase employee productivity while also improving customer turnaround time.
  • A central repository for client information provides 360-degree customer views, maintains data integrity, and preserves important records. It also streamlines marketing efforts.
  • Improved reporting and access to business information facilitates better decision making.
 
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