Vicon Boosts Visibility and Customer Satisfaction with Integrated Sales and Service

"Using Salesforce, we have a better handle on our business processes. We communicate better within the company and with our customers. And we did it all without additional staff, keeping our overall costs down."

Overview
Challenge
  • Needed one companywide CRM system for consistency of communications and real-time visibility
  • Desired a single set of processes that would improve worker productivity and efficiency
  • Required greater management visibility into pre- and post-sale customer interactions and agent workloads
  • Wanted to control costs, especially in areas such as return materials authorization (RMA) and inventory management
Solution
  • Vicon chose Salesforce for service and support to augment its existing Salesforce SFA implementation, achieving its goal of establishing a single CRM system for all customer interactions. The company used Salesforce Analytics to configure real-time dashboards for better visibility across sales and support. salesforce.com's Force.com Builder allowed Vicon to create, deploy, and manage new business-critical applications
Results
  • Real-time tracking of key company metrics for sales, service, and support via custom dashboards
  • New global RMA process with quicker and better results at much lower cost
  • Greatly improved staff efficiency due to single source of all business information and customized agent consoles
Full Story

While singular in its ability to offer an integrated solution for both digital optical and video-based motion tracking, Vicon was facing an all-too-common business problem. The company was employing two applications for customer relationship management (CRM): Salesforce and RightNow. Having disparate applications for sales and service was creating problems with access, visibility, productivity, consistency, and ultimately, cost. The solution: a single CRM system from salesforce.com for all customer interactions.

Choosing the Right CRM Path

Vicon is the result of the combined business of Vicon Motion Systems and Peak Performance Inc. and is part of OMG plc, a publicly traded company. With offices in England and the United States, the company has established itself as the leader in motion capture and analysis.

As the contracts for Vicon's two on-demand CRM applications were coming up for renewal, the company faced several critical decisions: What would be best for the company in terms of information gathering, analysis, and support? What would give the company's staff the best chance to succeed? And which system would provide management with the best corporate overview while maintaining financial parameters?

Ultimately, Vicon selected Salesforce for service and support to supplement its Salesforce SFA application for a single, integrated CRM solution that could be used by almost half of its 100 employees. Vicon was impressed with many Salesforce features, including real-time reporting capabilities for a better overall view of company actions and results as well as the ability to rapidly customize the application.

With improved visibility, the company could more quickly deal with customer-related issues, such as agent workload or return materials authorization (RMA), a key component of Vicon's services. Salesforce includes an agent console that was much more user-friendly than RightNow's product. Using the console, Vicon customer service agents work with improved productivity. Salesforce also makes it much simpler to analyze customer data sets and track and improve areas such as bug tracking.

Improving Tracking and Efficiency of Standard Processes

Inventory oversight, such as tracking cameras sent to customers around the world, is an important, ongoing function at Vicon. The lack of a standard, global process for dealing with RMAs meant each individual return was much too complicated, occasionally leaving customers waiting for inventory or paperwork. With Salesforce, Vicon uses specific custom dashboards and processes to manage the entire inventory management function, from request through scheduling, material exchange or repair, and ultimate follow-up. The overall process is much quicker and clearer, and now staff members—regardless of location—can track the precise, real-time status of each RMA.

"We knew that creating dashboards with Salesforce Analytics would be critical to maintaining an overall view of the company," says Jason Hunter, customer support engineer at Vicon. "We didn't realize that they would be so easy to build and customize to provide the exact functionality that we needed."

Better Visibility at All Levels

By creating custom dashboards in Salesforce, Vicon has a substantially better overview of day-to-day operations, along with business-specific, biweekly summary reports. With just a few clicks, management can track vital business metrics such as open case status, cases per agent, most popular customer interaction channels, and much more.

From the sales perspective, the use of Salesforce has improved both pre- and post-sales operations. Agents now employ a complete sales and customer history, on one screen, to guide their next interactions. This approach has not only improved customer satisfaction levels but has garnered positive feedback from employees as well. Salesforce has also enabled an extended view of post-sale customer interactions. Contractual obligations, renewals, and follow-ups are no longer haphazard events that sometimes fall through the cracks but are instead specifically assigned by account.

"Salesforce is an elegant tool for gathering and sharing information, particularly for our business, with four offices worldwide," says Brian Nilles, Vicon's U.S. CEO. "Now we have account information that covers someone from first contact as a prospective customer through his or her life with us, including cohesive management of items such as extended warranties, software and firmware updates, bug reports, and product enhancement requests. Adopting the whole Salesforce pipeline has really enabled us to build organized value into our contact with our customers, which has great value both for us and for our customers.

The Advantages of a Single Source

With Salesforce, Vicon created an environment that makes it easy to manage customer queues so that each client issue is assigned to the proper agent or team. The company can track all contracts, materials, and due dates for its RMA process. Custom dashboards present company-specific information to management in the format they need, with up-to-the-minute updates. Data is entered once, reducing errors and costs. Business insight and process have greatly improved, resulting in better staff productivity.

By employing one on-demand system, Vicon now has standardized processes and consistency across the company, regardless of office or country. This, in turn, has helped improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction levels, given management a real-time view of the company, and kept operational costs under control.


View All Snapshots