Salesforce Service & Support Helps Make Boots a More Rewarding Place to Work

Challenge

• Boots is the UK’s leading pharmacy-led health and beauty retailer.  The firm has combined its two UK retail businesses, Alliance Pharmacy and Boots, to create a unified, multi-format strategy and knowledge base
• Boots PeoplePoint is the company’s Human Resources (HR) Shared Service Centre.  Until recently, PeoplePoint used SAP CRM which Boots was finding increasingly difficult to modify and support
• Previously when PeoplePoint needed to adapt its CRM system, the HR team would involve IT and business staff to enable this.

Solution

• Boots has deployed Salesforce Service & Support to 65 HR professionals in the UK to create an adaptive, multi-tenant HR support system.  Salesforce.com was chosen based on its ease of use and upgradeability
• Powerful case management functionality allows the team to document employee issues, use the knowledge base to help resolve them, report them, and create the necessary 360-degree staff view.  Configurable security and permissions also enable HR teams to restrict views appropriately according to the nature & confidentiality of the content and manage individual cases.
• PeoplePoint supports hundreds of daily incoming enquiries from Boots’ retail stores from around the UK and the Support Offices in Nottingham and Feltham.  Using Service & Support, the HR administration team provide personalized case management for the company’s line managers who need to respond to employee issues—for example on performance/disciplinary matters.  General HR policy information is also available to employees who contact PeoplePoint covering issues such as absenteeism, holidays and maternity leave
• Relevant workflow and team queues ensures appropriate case notification, escalations and allocation among the team

Results

• Developed and launched in only four months, Salesforce Service & Support is helping Boots’ HR team in the UK to respond effectively and in a personalized mannerto employee enquiries. 
• Boots is able to rapidly customize the Software-as-a-Service without engaging the technical support team.  For example the team has developed a case ranking process, which automatically escalates the most urgent HR cases, such as race discrimination issues
•  Individuals can view and act upon more than three hundred HR reports; these are helping to continuously improve service quality while decreasing costs and may ultimately support cost reduction
• Boots took advantage of the power of the Idea Exchange to promote an idea associated with ‘advanced look-ups’ that would further better usability and increase efficiency.  As a result, the proposal was subsequently incorporated into a forthcoming edition of Salesforce for all Salesforce users
• Salesforce Service & Support provides Boots with the visibility it requires into HR issues to make informed business decisions