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

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 CRM Enterprise Edition, then upgraded to Salesforce CRM Unlimited Edition for the Force.com sandbox testing environment and more storage space.
• CompassLearning uses 212 Salesforce CRM licenses for traditional Salesforce CRM Sales; it has an additional 4,000 licenses used by customers to access Salesforce CRM's customer portal.
• Salesforce.com partner Appirio helped CompassLearning deploy Salesforce CRM's customer portal, allowing customers to manage support cases, upload and download files and search the knowledgebase.
• Salesforce CRM's 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 CRM 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 CRM.
• Custom tabs such as Time Cards, What's New, and Website Status shape the application to fit the way the company does business.
• From AppExchange, the company downloads and installs solutions like VerticalResponse, an email and direct mail application.
• The company is piloting Salesforce CRM's mobile access on smartphone devices.

Results

• Customer incentives to renew support and maintenance agreements tied to the use of the Salesforce CRM's 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 cloud-computing platform helps the company develop its applications with more agility.