American Home Shield Leverages Force.com for Customizations, Integrations, and New Applications

Challenge

• American Home Shield, the nation's leading home warranty company—servicing 49 states and more than 1 million homeowners—wanted a common CRM solution for all of its sales representatives.
• Sales reps were managing their own contacts and customers with individual contact management tools, which meant the company lost valuable relationship history every time a rep left.
• Company management needed a better way to keep track of key sales information and provide automated support for its unique sales process.
• The geographically dispersed sales organization needed a solution with anywhere, anytime access, an intuitive Web-based interface, and offline capability.

Solution

• The sales-led initiative selected Salesforce CRM Sales because its cloud-computing architecture allowed the company to deploy with minimal IT support.
• Using the Force.com builder, the company customized Salesforce CRM to track the complex relationship between real estate agents, warranties, and end customers.
• Integrations, powered by the Force.com API, synchronize a legacy customer support system, master customer data, and finance information with Salesforce CRM.
• Bidirectional integration with the company's enterprise system flows call-center information to Salesforce CRM and sales information to the enterprise system, maintaining a holistic customer view.
• Via Salesforce CRM integration with Microsoft Outlook, sales reps access contacts and automatically log email interactions within Salesforce CRM.
• A sales force optimizer app based on an AppExchange marketplace application maintains employee information within Salesforce CRM, giving the company a 360-degree view of its staff as well.

Results

• Comprehensive, consistent sales information—approximately 125,000 accounts, more than 1 million contacts, and between 250,000 and 500,000 records—provides management real-time visibility into key sales metrics.
• With the customized Opportunities tab, American Home Shield executives can track listings and closings on a month-by month and year-over-year basis not only for accounts but for individual agents within those accounts.
• An innovative incentive program keeps adoption at 100%.
• Using Salesforce CRM, promotional budgets are now managed with greater accuracy.
• With all customer touch points captured in Salesforce CRM, the sales team now has a complete view of activity within accounts.