FFF Enterprises Improves the Health of Its Business with Salesforce, Force.com Mobile, and Custom-Built Applications

"Salesforce allows us to devote more time to customers and less time to chasing down information. The call volume into our sales support centers has dropped because now our sales reps know they can retrieve key customer and order data in Salesforce."

Overview
Challenge
  • With a large sales force working across four different time zones, FFF Enterprises' processes for staying in touch with customers were labor- and time-intensive. FFF's three "touch point" groups for customers—field reps, sales development reps, and the customer care team—all needed to work collaboratively and stay in close contact about accounts.
  • However, without wireless devices that could access Salesforce, the company's mobile workers were at a disadvantage, information-wise. Several phone calls and emails might be required to find out the answer to a customer's order question. In addition, field reps couldn't update customer records on the fly—they often had to wait until they returned to an office hours or days later.
Solution
  • Equipped with BlackBerry 7750 devices with Force.com Mobile, about 17 mobile field reps can now access Salesforce and retrieve answers to customer queries in real time. Routine calls from field reps to the customer care team have been greatly reduced, leaving more time for handling complex customer inquiries.
Results
  • FFF Enterprises has created custom objects in Salesforce and mobile-enabled them using Force.com Mobile so that field reps can quickly search Salesforce for specific products ordered within a region—a useful feature when there are limited allocations of supplies such as flu vaccines. FFF has also customized Force.com Mobile by creating an auto-prompt that asks field reps if they would like to capture information about a customer they're about to phone or email. Filling out the form takes just 20 seconds, versus the hours or days it took for a field rep to return to the office to access Salesforce.
  • "Force.com Mobile helps us touch customers in real time, in a much less labor-intensive way: No more lugging laptops into the field," says Jennifer Wobser, business systems analyst at FFF Enterprises. "Because we can capture each customer interaction instantly, our CRM solution is richer and more effective."
Full Story

Force.com Mobile Benefits

  • Customizable: FFF Enterprises uses custom objects to help field reps find orders by product and by region
  • Central lifecycle management: Administrators can manage and update mobile devices over the air from a Web site
  • Secure, reliable data transport: Critical for a health care company that's subject to HIPAA privacy regulations
  • Captures valuable data: Field reps enter customer "touch" information instantly, instead of waiting hours or days to return to the office

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