The Customer Satisfaction Curve Rises Towards the Top at Bottomline Technologies 

Challenge

• Bottomline is a leading provider of financial process automation solutions, including Payments, Document Process Automation, and Purchase to Pay.  The firm employs 660 staff and has revenues of £70 million 
• Having deployed Salesforce CRM SFA five years ago to spearhead tightly integrated and effective sales management, Bottomline turned its attention to Operations and Customer Support.  In the U.K., an existing bespoke support system was proving difficult to adapt and demanded intensive resources to manage it

Solution

• Bottomline deployed Salesforce CRM Service & Support to 59% of its total Salesforce CRM user base to create a dynamic, multichannel service offering which adapts easily to business change management
•  A branded Customer Portal is being offered as an added-value service and has been adopted by the majority of customers to make it quick and simple to log and track a case, explore the knowledge base, find solutions―all of which is geared to delivering rewarding and consistent customer support
• A solutions knowledge base covering products, modules, and frequently asked questions not only helps customers find the right answers the first time themselves―it also boosts agent productivity
• The Force.com Platform has been extensively deployed to configure the Service and Support system around customers’ needs.  This includes the configuration of assignment rules, queues, escalations, and service level reporting
• The Salesforce CRM system has been seamlessly integrated with multiple third-party apps, including Big Machines (order configuration), Amazon S3 (document storage), and Vertical Response―an AppExchange application for executing targeted email campaigns directly from Salesforce CRM
• An integrated Clicktools customer and product survey system enables Bottomline to send each customer a survey form once a support case is closed.  Results are synchronized weekly in Salesforce CRM, dashboards refreshed to display the results, and positive survey comments are broadcast internally on ‘Happy Mondays’
• Bottomline is using powerful logic and workflow intelligence in Visualforce to design application user interfaces, based on the Apex programming language.  For example, the firm was recently undercharging maintenance fees and Visualforce helped create an intuitive, easy way for sales reps to check the status of each maintenance contract, link the correct product to the case, and ensure prompt payment of the correct maintenance fees

Results

• First line support resolves 60% of cases during the initial enquiry, with automated priority workflow for more complex second line enquiries
• Service level compliance has risen from 88% to 95% in 12 months of using Salesforce CRM Service & Support
• In the last five years, Bottomline has acquired five businesses―each has been integrated and configured quickly into the Salesforce CRM system with the minimum of customer disruption
• The Customer Portal is proving to be particularly popular with customers―it has 1,700 registered users, a high volume of cases submitted, and has enjoyed strong demand for Solution searches
• Using the embedded Clicktools survey system, more than 13,000 surveys have been sent out, and over 1,500 responses received in the last quarter.  Overall, Bottomline’s customer satisfaction index and number of customer recommendations are gradually rising