Enterasys increases customer satisfaction to 95 percent with the Service Cloud

For long-term success, it isn’t always how much you do that counts, but how much you do well. Enterasys Networks, Inc. (formerly Cabletron Systems), was doing fine but knew it could improve customer satisfaction. Managers recognized that if the company could get more out of its resources, employees could make better decisions and improve service for more than 6,000 customers in 70 countries.

With 750 employees spread across the globe, the Massachusetts-based company needed to bring together disparate silos of information to respond more quickly – and with better results – to its clients. It needed greater consistency in its multi-channel responses to customers. It also wanted real-time, enterprise-wide visibility into its technical support operations. And, like any other company in today’s economy, Enterasys wanted to do all this while lowering costs.

Defining Requirements

Enterasys wanted to replace its Siebel/Scopus solution with a cloud-computing one that would be easy to use and enable a customer self-service portal. The company had four key goals:

• Increase customer loyalty by expanding customer contact methods and adding survey response management to the call center
• Improve call agent and management productivity by bringing more focus and discipline to call centers, tracking product and escalation trending more closely, and adding real-time call center industry benchmarking
• Increase total visibility by automating customer communications and building dashboards to share account insight across the company
• Modernize call center operations with custom integration to legacy Scopus and SAP systems.

Enterasys evaluated Siebel and Microsoft, among others, but chose Salesforce CRM Service for its Global Technical Assistance Center. Salesforce CRM was easily deployed to 150 services and support professionals in a month and came, out of the box, with all the tools Enterasys needed for routing, queuing, and escalating cases. Salesforce CRM can also address product support, order desk, field service return authorization, and telemarketing. Enterasys was also able to customize Salesforce CRM to fit its business, a dramatic improvement from previous solutions which forced it to adapt the business to match a system. Integration went smoothly, and data on more than 6,000 customers was merged without mishap.

Benefits of a Flexible System

Handling about 1,000 support cases per week with Salesforce CRM, Enterasys now saves about 10 minutes per case. When translated into dollars and head count, the company saves nearly $500,000 a year in this area alone. On top of that, first contact closure rates have improved by 20 percent while case resolution time has decreased 66 percent. Add in the staff efficiency gains through workflow automation, more business control, and higher customer satisfaction and the savings are endless.

"We've revolutionized our technical support with the Service Cloud," says Vala Afshar, vice president, global technical services. "Salesforce CRM gives us complete visibility into our worldwide customer support, and helps us improve service while reducing costs."

After the company addressed the basic task of responding to inquiries, Enterasys extended Salesforce CRM to pull together more of its service processes in the cloud. Enterasys uses the system for engineering escalation management, partner and channel support, benchmarking capabilities, and survey response management.

The solution was readily adopted and call agent efficiency gains were significant. Older ways of processing email requests and collating data were streamlined. Case records are now auto-created into a database. Skills-based assignment rules route cases to the most appropriate agent or team. All inquiries are documented, and e-response times are measurably improved. Another important advantage is that more than 500,000 communications to customers and partners remain consistent throughout the organization, regardless of channel.

"Our customers see the effectiveness of our support as one of the main reasons for staying with Enterasys," Afshar says. "The success of our support is directly linked to the business intelligence tools we use, building a rapid response system with total visibility."

Insight Through Analytics

Using some of the available dashboard functionality, Enterasys created a custom object and an ongoing schedule for importing data from Excel spreadsheets and then made worldwide support metrics available for real-time analysis. The best part: Everything from concept to utilization took just two and a half days.

Enterasys can quickly build additional dashboards to give agents and management complete visibility into critical areas of the call and operations center. With dashboards so easy to use and customize, the growing company can efficiently handle more cases with the same number of agents. Enterasys now uses more than 200 dashboards to help manage the business, offering granular insight into areas such as call center performance, support engineering performance, engineering escalation management, customer satisfaction, at-risk support revenue, and global performance.

Advanced predictive analytics help the company be more proactive to customer needs, and integrated sales and service analytics – which provide total customer and partner visibility – help maximize customers’ total lifetime value. Enterasys is also using Salesforce CRM for performance scorecards that keep tabs on the organization’s health and help improve agent efficiency and effectiveness.

Understanding that customer satisfaction drives and predicts loyalty, Enterasys also brought survey management in-house. Not only does this save money but it also lets the company consolidate and parse information in any way it chooses. Enterasys now sees early-warning indicators of dissatisfied or at-risk customers. These types of metrics have fostered real-time action and coordination across departments. Customer response has been positive, and satisfaction numbers have risen more than 10 percent.

Bottom Line

Enterasys now has improved visibility into staff, customer, and partner activities. Contact via channels has grown by nearly 40 percent while enhancing agent efficiency, and in-depth survey results have helped drive customer satisfaction levels to new highs of 95 percent. The company is moving ahead in other areas too. In Europe Enterasys has extended the functionality afforded by using Salesforce CRM Service to enable collaboration and lead sharing with partners by integrating its partner portal with the Force.com Web services API. For Enterasys, this is just one more step toward success in the cloud across the enterprise.

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