CompassLearning Boosts Service and Response Times with Salesforce Call Center and Customer Portal

“When customers engaged us for a support request, typically our response times had been measured in days; now we measure in minutes and hours. Salesforce really drives our customer service values because it is so responsive to what we truly want.”


Challenge
  • CompassLearning— an innovative, research-based educational technology corporation—required a CRM system it could deploy quickly with low upfront costs.
  • Customer support requests from educators and administrators took days to address.
  • Field engineers lacked a consistent place to store and retrieve support tools, case notes, and collateral.
  • To provide the best customer service, CompassLearning needed a secure, intuitive portal solution beyond its existing static Web site.

Solution
  • With help from salesforce.com partner Astadia, the company deployed Salesforce Enterprise Edition, then upgraded to Unlimited Edition for the Salesforce Sandbox testing environment and more storage space.
  • CompassLearning uses 212 Salesforce licenses for traditional SFA; it has an additional 4,000 licenses used by customers to access Salesforce Customer Portal.
  • Salesforce.com partner Appirio helped CompassLearning deploy Customer Portal, allowing customers to manage support cases, upload and download files and search the knowledgebase.
  • Salesforce Call Center handles ~3,000 technical and support calls per month with 12 support reps; in addition, 40 field service personnel use the application for case management and time tracking.
  • Two-way integration between JD Edwards and Salesforce syncs customer data, contract entitlement, and other customer data so users can access source of record information in one place.
  • Over 50 sales reps at CompassLearning utilize the Forecasting and Opportunity management features in Salesforce.
  • Custom tabs such as Time Cards, What's New, and Website Status shape the application to fit the way the company does business.
  • From the AppExchange, the company downloads and installs solutions like VerticalResponse, an email and direct mail application.
  • The company is piloting Salesforce Mobile on smartphone devices.

Results
  • Customer incentives to renew support and maintenance agreements tied to the use of the Customer Portal drive increased revenue.
  • Customer response times once measured in days are now measured in minutes and hours; 98 percent of calls are answered within 60 seconds.
  • Reps are much more efficient in triaging and diagnosing the support call.
  • Field service engineers access notes input by call center agents minutes after a case is logged so dispatches are made closer to real-time.
  • The SaaS platform helps the company develop its applications with more agility.
 
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