“Force.com empowers small organizations that lack IT resources to nimbly implement world class business applications. It has brought many of our business processes out of the dark ages and into the enlightened reality of cloud computing.  It’s a true renaissance in business software!”


— Vicon

Vicon Boosts Visibility and Customer Satisfaction with Integrated Sales and Service

Challenge

  • Vicon sought greater consistency, visibility, functionality, and productivity across its sales and support organizations
  • The motion capture and analysis company also wanted to improve its customer knowledge and visibility into overall business operations
  • Vicon wanted to improve the professionalism of implementation and training teams and to consistently deliver quality pre- and post-sales support
  • Cost control and improved efficiency were also goals, especially in areas such as return materials authorization (RMA)
  • Finally, the company desired a single CRM system, rather than two

Solution

  • Already a customer of Salesforce CRM Sales, Vicon selected Salesforce CRM for comprehensive, multichannel, on-demand customer service
  • The company created business-specific dashboards and implemented customer business processes
  • An optimized workspace for customer service agents improved agent efficiency

Impact

  • Vicon experienced improved insight into customer interactions, both pre- and post-sales
  • The company was able to define easy-to-follow processes that streamlined business operations while keeping within cost parameters
  • Staff knowledge improved, leading to higher efficiency and better interactions
  • With one CRM system in place, Vicon vastly improved cross-company consistency
Back to top
Full Case Study

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 CRM 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 CRM Service to supplement its Salesforce CRM Sales application for a single, integrated solution that could be used by almost half of its 100 employees. Vicon was impressed with many Salesforce CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM, 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 CRM 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 CRM, 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM, 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.

visit Vicon

SasSy Recommends