American Water Heater Company Runs Warranty Call Centers in U.S. and India on Salesforce Service & Support

Challenge

• American Water Heater Company, a leading manufacturer of high-quality water heater products, needed a CRM system to handle its growing warranty-related call center needs
• The company let updates to its antiquated and ineffective software system expire
• American Water Heater considered using a partner to handle call volume overflow
• Any solution the company chose had to integrate and automatically sync with its inventory management system
• Because the system would have to be configured to fit the company’s unique call center workflow, it had to be easily customizable

Solution

• American Water Heater selected Salesforce Service & Support for its flexibility, on-demand model, and ability to interface with the company’s inventory management system
• Implemented over the course of five months to 60 users in the U.S. and India, the deployment involved a comprehensive data transfer for the retrieval of historical customer data
• The company uses Salesforce Service & Support as its warranty call center solution for fielding support calls from users requesting services such as step-by-step repair training
• Custom objects built into the system handle such accounts payable functions as generating reimbursement check requests and return authorizations and credits
• Cases are used to help customers troubleshoot water heater problems, find solutions, and place orders for parts
• Because the warranty service runs on Salesforce Service & Support, user adoption is 100 percent
• An interface with the company’s inventory management system enables nightly batch synchronizations of asset records that document the 9,000 water heaters American Water Heater manufactures daily

Results

• The company’s partner call center in India has easily been able to use Salesforce to handle call overflow amounting to an additional 5,000 calls per week
• Executives enjoy greater visibility into customer data and can more easily track user error
• Salesforce.com’s on-demand platform mitigates the need to maintain costly software and servers
• The reliable system captures all pertinent information—tying in accounts payable, inventory management, and customer service—improving overall service levels
• Streamlined information consolidated on one system helps the company run reports and reach its goal of identifying warranty drivers, for example, which products generate the most warranty calls