Recollective reinvents the customer experience with Salesforce
Find out how Recollective is supporting 65% year-on-year growth with Salesforce.
As the world around us evolves, organizations need to understand existing and potential customers to ensure products and services continue to meet their needs.
Recollective offers an industry-leading research platform that helps both inhouse and agency-based market researchers gain greater insights. Available as a stand-alone solution or bundled with services to help researchers get started, the comprehensive toolset supports a wide range of research, from asynchronous and live studies to journaling, focus groups, and ongoing large-scale customer communities.
The Recollective platform is used by more than 1,400 corporate, educational, and government customers in 45 countries, ranging from start-ups and niche research companies to major household brands.
The company is growing rapidly, having experienced a 65% year-on-year increase in sales in each of the last two years and with a goal to continue this double-digital expansion for the next 10 years. Recollective has a strong focus on the customer experience, which underpins its ambitions for growth. The company boasts high levels of both employee and customer retention, achieving a customer satisfaction score of 86% in 2022.
To continuously improve the customer experience and support the business along its growth path, Recollective has used Salesforce since 2007. The company now uses Sales Cloud, CRM Analytics, Salesforce CPQ, Salesforce Billing, and Service Cloud. With the Salesforce platform, the company is optimizing almost every part of its business, from finance and sales to services, customer support, and admin.
1. Increase understanding of customers and sales.
As a growing company, Recollective’s sales reps are exceptionally busy, so it’s important that they can focus their energy and efforts where it’s most likely to yield results.
With a centralized CRM system, Recollective’s sales reps and managers have a clear view of opportunities so they can prioritize activities and convert leads to sales faster. The company has recently extended its reporting capabilities with a fully integrated analytics solution. “Using AI and machine learning, we’ll be able to use past data to predict future customer behaviour in order to make better business decisions,” explains Stephen Thompson, COO.
2. Simplify quote creation.
With a plethora of variables in its solution and service bundles, creating quotes used to be time-consuming for sales staff and sometimes led to misunderstandings and confusion. The team recognized that the complexity of the sales configuration process meant that it wouldn’t be sustainable as the company grew.
So in 2021, Recollective enhanced sales efficiency with a Configure, Price, Quote solution. “The solution lets us quickly model different licensing options for a customer so we can offer multiple options with greater accuracy and fewer mistakes,” explains Jared Nguyen, Senior Director of Strategic Projects. “We’ve had the solution less than a year but it’s already delivering huge efficiencies.”
3. Streamline finance and billing activities.
Accurate and fast invoicing is key to cash flow. If invoices go to the wrong contacts or aren’t delivered via the right payment systems, payments can be delayed.
With billing now incorporated within its CRM platform, Recollective can invoice accurately and at speed – either to schedule or on the fly. “With the ability to send out billing notices immediately and always to the right contact, we’ve simplified processes for the finance team and reduced the average age of invoices,” reveals Thompson. “This has had a dramatic impact on cash flow, freeing up funds for more product development and innovation.”
4. Enhance customer service.
In the past, Recollective had tried a number of stand-alone customer service solutions, but with limited integration and reporting capabilities, they failed to offer the visibility that the growing company needed. “We wanted a more robust solution that would help us build a holistic view of the customer throughout their journey,” comments Thompson. “We achieved this by unifying service with sales in a single platform.”
With all customer information in one place and more effective case routing, Recollective has driven down response times to under 30 minutes, consistently exceeding its SLA of an hour, which is crucial for customers in the midst of a research project. “The service team is really proud of the improvements it’s achieved, and customers are happy as they get a faster response and never have to repeat themselves,” confirms Nguyen. “Service Cloud also captures data points in support requests and feeds them directly to our dashboards, so we can identify possible technical issues or areas for improvement.”
5. Continuously improve processes and practices.
Not content to rest on its laurels, Recollective is continuously improving its customer experience with a programme of optimization. “As a software company, we have to stay at the forefront to be competitive,” says Thompson. “Customer experience underpins our growth, so we’re constantly looking for new ways to automate and streamline interactions so they deliver greater value for the customer and efficiency for us as we scale up.”
For example, Recollective’s implementation and research services teams now use an integrated project management solution from the Salesforce AppExchange to simplify time tracking and resource management.
Next on the agenda, Recollective plans to rollout a premium telephone support option and integrated web conferencing to provide a more collaborative issue resolution environment. It’s also exploring online training solutions to help customers to get up to speed on its platform faster, and ecommerce solutions to simplify procurement and onboarding.
“Regardless of how complex and unique our business processes are, Salesforce offers the robustness and flexibility we need to make it easier for our customers to do business with us,” concludes Nguyen. “With data and productivity tools in one place, we can identify inefficiencies and design new processes so we can continue to offer our customers a leading-edge research platform and a great experience.”
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