Veolia Makes a Clean Break from On-premise CRM, Boosting Sales Productivity and Customer Satisfaction with Salesforce.com Software as a Service    

Challenge

• Veolia Environmental Services is the UK’s leading waste management provider, offering an impressive range of waste management services and solutions to local authorities and commercial businesses.  The firm has revenues above £1.1 billion (2007) and employs almost 12,500 staff  
• With two previous CRM implementations beset by project creep and a tendency to integrate the system with all existing applications, Veolia needed a CRM system that was quick to deploy and easy to use   
• The business needed a more effective system to manage interactions with its 70,000 small business customers (such as shops, restaurants, and supermarkets) and to provide staff with a simple and consistent method to log calls and highlight any actions that were needed

Solution

•  Veolia deployed Salesforce CRM SFA, Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support, together with a mobile version of the Salesforce CRM ‘cloud’ model―Salesforce CRM Mobile―to 400 field staff.  The Software as a Service (SaaS) bypassed the traditional pain of long implementation cycles, by delivering standard applications to multiple users via the internet
• The firm is using Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support both in depots across the U.K. and on customer premises to promote excellence in service and work in partnership with customers, to minimize the impact of waste on the environment and the local communities, and to promote minimization, reuse and recycling where possible
• Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support provides users with a unified agent console, workflow and escalation, case management, a knowledge base, and email management
• Using Salesforce Mobile, 90 field sales professionals can capture customer information, review customer profiles prior to meetings, record meeting minutes, and generally minimize sales administration.  Veolia is now working on using mobile technology based on digital pens to capture the data

Results

• The SaaS system was assembled and launched in only three months―allowing the firm to capitalize on its competitive advantage and adapt to change more quickly
• Using Salesforce CRM, Veolia has a customer-oriented view of its business.  The firm addresses customer requirements more quickly than before, and provides more consistent and rewarding environmental services
• Veolia enjoys the speed of implementation and usability of SaaS, plus the fact its relevance can easily be conveyed to the business, whereas a client/server model requires discussions about cost and upgrades  
• The firm has total visibility into its sales pipeline, including leads, accounts―and tracked opportunities  
• Veolia is currently evaluating the deployment of Force.com Platform as a Service (PaaS) to accelerate the assembly and deployment of new applications; plus a Customer Portal to help take the service experience to an even higher, more personalized level

About Salesforce

• Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company.
• The Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud, are applications for sales and customer service (also known as customer relationship management or CRM). Salesforce CRM solutions help to deliver more business success for thousands of companies across the globe.