Perceptive Software deploys salesforce.com to every user for company-wide success

Challenge

• Leading enterprise content management (ECM) software development company wanted a single, scalable, company-wide CRM solution
• Company growth had outpaced the performance of Lotus Notes and other custom-built legacy solutions
• Required the ability to customize the application platform to rapidly address business needs while reducing development, support, and maintenance costs
• The staff of 11 that had been maintaining the Lotus Domino/Lotus Notes platform was reallocated and reduced to four
• Needed to complement disaster avoidance/recovery strategies

Solution

SALES CLOUD

• Phase 1: Chose salesforce.com for its cloud computing model, easy customization, and proven performance, and deployed the Sales Cloud for sales automation to the worldwide sales team
• Upgraded to an enterprise license agreement (ELA), providing access for all 600 employees, and extended Salesforce to include Service and Custom Clouds
• Replaced Lotus Notes as the new company-wide CRM solution
• Integrated Google Apps Premier components for employees to communicate and collaborate in the cloud
• Future plans include integrating Perceptive Software’s enterprise content management (ECM) solution – ImageNow – with salesforce.com’s integrated content library and using salesforce.com’s community, marketing, and mobile features
• Also planning to use Salesforce Chatter to provide employees with complete snapshots of customer accounts that are updated in real time

SERVICE CLOUD

• Phase 2: salesforce.com partner Appirio optimized the Service Cloud to create a worldwide product support platform for internal and external support agents at two primary call centers plus remote locations
• Imported and replaced multiple customer databases with this single, company-wide system
• Replaced a help desk application and a heavily customized application for tracking custom coding services with the Service Cloud cases module
• The agent console supports case management, solutions, automatic workflows, and collaboration
• Deployed the customer portal for more than 6,000 users; the portal includes self-service features like the Service Cloud knowledge base and access to the content library
• Added the ideas feature to capture customer feedback
• Integrated with Softrax and Great Plains software for license and service revenue management with help from Cast Iron Systems

FORCE.COM

• Phase 3: deployed custom-built apps on the Force.com cloud platform, including:
  • A professional services automation tool built by Appirio on Force.com, which replaces a legacy professional services tool
  • An event management application built in two weeks by one full-time employee to replace two Lotus Notes applications
  • A collateral inventory management application built in less than 1 week by one full-time employee that replaced a time-consuming manual process of tracking collateral on spreadsheets
  • A product configurator built by Appirio on Force.com, which tracks the metadata around each product release
  • A training application, built by Appirio that lets users enroll in classes at the customer portal, pay fees, and track their registrations
• Integrated with a SQL Server data warehouse
• Planning to integrate all applications used by the company with the Force.com cloud platform

Results

SALES CLOUD

• Completed an extensive pilot demonstrating the capabilities of the Sales Cloud in just 3 weeks
• Standardizing on Salesforce reduces costs and makes it easy to add new functionality and features company-wide while maintaining change control methodology standards
• The Sales Cloud centralizes critical customer information, providing a 360-degree view, and easily integrates with other systems
• Dashboards effectively summarize important information that was previously getting lost in email
• Combined with reports, dashboards help employees better organize their time, increasing productivity

SERVICE CLOUD

• The self-service portal combined with the knowledge base helps deflect calls, reducing staffing needs and improving customer satisfaction
• The cases module has replaced multiple Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino applications, eliminating the need for ongoing maintenance
• Increased call volumes and quicker handling of cases as a result of employees having tools like solutions or the knowledge base at their fingertips
• Employees report greater job satisfaction

FORCE.COM

• The ELA means new company-wide apps can be easily built and deployed at no additional technology cost
• Four employees replaced more than 20 Lotus Notes applications and several dozen databases with applications built on the Force.com platform in less than 4 months
• Completion of the deployment by a small internal team saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to an outside vendor
• During the rollout, no bugs were reported and less than 15 cases were created to address problems employees encountered with the new platform
• Replaced heavily customized applications that were hard to maintain with a highly scalable, easy-to-use cloud platform for building multiple custom applications
• Complete views of customers, employees, partners, and alliances are easily accessible via dashboards and reports, providing real-time analytics to monitor performance and improve planning