Wolseley Builds a Successful Future with salesforce.com  

Challenge

• Wolseley plc is the world’s No.1 distributor of heating and plumbing products and is a leading supplier of builders’ products to the professional market.  Its subsidiary BCG is a leading UK distributor of bathrooms, kitchens, and heating products 
• BCG needed to increase sales efficiency.  Previously Area Sales Managers visited retailers and merchants on an ‘ad hoc’ basis when in the local area, and an IT tool was urgently required to track progress on an account-by-account basis
• The company also needed to improve customer connectivity.  BCG handles up to 7,500 customer contacts daily, however, only a small proportion of these were recorded and managed properly.  There was unnecessary churn; and customer service processes were difficult to manage 
• The third goal was to introduce 360 degree customer reporting.  It was difficult to get an accurate view of what was going on in the business, owing to the use of multiple reporting systems, and to the fact most metrics were produced manually using excel spreadsheets
• BGC chose salesforce.com based on the ‘pay-as-you-go’ subscription model; its ease of use and simplicity of configuration.  The modular approach also allows a phased implementation across functional areas

Solution

• Using the Service Cloud, all non-transactional processes have been incorporated into the multi-tenant solution as ‘cases’ (a categorized and assigned customer issue which is tracked through to resolution)
• Multiple custom case types have been built in the system to track issues such as delivery failures, brochure requests, general enquiries, and complaints
• Email workflows and escalation rules have been built to automatically alert the relevant team of any cases open, and notify management if not resolved within the agreed SLA 
• This has resulted in faster resolution of customer issues by a ‘virtual’ team spread across six sites, and a full history of issues is now available per customer

Results

• The on demand CRM solution drove up the productivity of the customer service, sales and logistics teams
• The Service Cloud has automated existing customer service processes and made them robust enough to withstand the disruption of major transition
• It provided an online customer data/knowledge base so that new staff recruited could pick up from where old staff left off without impacting customer relationships
• Sales productivity has increased.  For example, the six sales calls/day methodology is adhered to by external sales teams; all sales visits are planned in advance with objectives set and actions recorded so that account status is transparent to all; sales revenue versus visit frequency can be tracked in the system; and BCG has reduced the time taken for new sales recruits to become productive members of the team.  All employees also instantly see the whereabouts of colleagues, improving connectivity across the business
• Using the Service Cloud Contact Center teams can now quickly enter business key performance indicators (KPIs) into salesforce.com remotely each morning (e.g. planned deliveries, failures by customer, and call volumes).  This takes no more than 20 minutes per day, compared with two hours for each of five offices previously
• Salesforce.com users can drill down into the various dashboards, and customize data as they wish to see it
• Time previously spent collating data is now more effectively used to carry out root cause analysis of customer problems.  Corrective action is undertaken via daily, online conference calls through Salesforce CRM―reducing service failures and bringing average OTIF (percentage of orders delivered ‘On Time In Full’) each day over and above the published target of 98%
• The system is now used as the primary mailing list for BCG promotions/pricebooks ; it acts as an interface between the Contact Center and the external mailing house for the dispatch of supplier literature; and Salesforce CRM is used to send mass e-mails to customers regarding service issues and offers