One of five major providers in the saturated Hong Kong telecom market, SmarTone knows that to survive and grow its time-to-market and level of customer service must be second to none. For the 150-strong sales and account management team, that calls for immediate response to customer queries.

According to SmarTone Head of Business Markets, Daniel Leung, preparing a full customer profile including spending and usage patterns would easily take two people up to two days to complete using previous systems. “These profiles are important when customers contact us for information on individual employee or corporate’s mobile spend and usage,” he explains. “They are also how we create personalised offers to meet our customers’ specific needs, and put together offers for contract renewals.”

The extensive time needed for developing customer profiles was down to the company’s disparate systems. Without consolidation, SmarTone employees might need to access anywhere up to seven data sources before compiling a meaningful view. Now it’s instant.”

Salesforce dashboards open up a view to a raft of reports for Sales, Account Management and Marketing. These range from a customer’s single line usage to a complete view of the service consumption behaviour and spend across the customer’s entire subscribed services.

“We currently have tens of thousands of corporate customers that rely on us for their mobile communications,” Leung explains. “For our account managers to service them better, and for our marketing team to be able to create the best possible offers, immediacy and accuracy of customer data is critical – and that’s what we are getting now from the Salesforce Sales Cloud.”

For account managers, who spend face-to-face time with customers on average three times every day, mobile access to Salesforce is a customer relationship boon. “Right on their iPad, each account manager has immediate access to the holistic view of all their customers’ records,” Leung says. “It’s up-to-date, easy to interrogate and complete. They need to be connected to customer data wherever they go in order to satisfy their customers, and that’s exactly what the Salesforce Customer Platform gives us.”

Chatter gives SmarTone a channel for promoting best practices within the sales and account management teams internally. “Chatter is proving popular in situations where people are looking to lay their hands on documents immediately or to get quick support from other team members to help them do their job better,” Leung says.

SmarTone’s central library in Salesforce delivers a secure and version-controlled place to go for procedural documents that helps promote consistency and drives success. “Already we have more than 200 documents in our Salesforce library, and it is growing all the time. Essentially, it is a dynamic knowledgebase that helps our people do their jobs faster and better; and that means our customers are served faster and better.”