Sutton Tools is a family-run, global enterprise that started in 1917, manufacturing threading taps and gauges before expanding into a broader range of cutting tools, These include milling tools and drills used by trade professionals and DIY enthusiasts, as well as those in areas like aerospace, defence, and electronic manufacturing.
Manual processes and siloed data complicate selling and make it difficult to scale
Sutton Tools first came to Salesforce as it needed a better way to manage the complexities of selling into multiple channels. It also sought to bring together the data created by its sales reps worldwide and build a 360-degree view of customers.
As the business has evolved and grown through acquisition, it has turned to Salesforce to solve new challenges, such as scaling sales and service. These activities have traditionally relied heavily on manual effort and domain knowledge, which wasn’t practical as Sutton Tools expanded globally and grew its product range.
Agentforce augments workforce to support global growth.
Sutton Tools has steadily connected its business on Salesforce to power sales, service, and marketing and provide a unified view of customers and operations. The business is now unlocking new insights from this data and augmenting its workforce with digital labour. Data Cloud and Agentforce are the centre of this transformation, which will help Sutton Tools continue to scale and deliver an exceptional customer experience.
With Data Cloud integrated with Snowflake, employees and customers will have real-time access to transaction and product data. This includes up-to-date inventory information, which can be exposed to customers via self-service channels.
These channels will include an autonomous agent powered by Agentforce that customers can converse with in natural language to obtain product and inventory information. Once deployed and enabled with new capabilities like order handling, the agent could reduce call volumes by as much as 20%.
The agent is also the first of several that will help Sutton Tools scale sales and service. For example, the business is exploring an agent that could work side-by-side its customer service team to surface answers to customer’s product questions. The agent would reduce the complexity of providing support for hundreds of thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs) and create the potential for teams to support multiple brands.
One of the biggest benefits of Agentforce is that it can be applied across so many areas of our business. While we’re starting with customer service, we can see agents streamlining sales, marketing, and even manufacturing processes.
Robert SuttonCommercial Director, Sutton Tools
Increased data and automation accelerate productivity.
Sutton Tools’ data and AI transformation builds on its continuous efforts to improve operational efficiency. With Sales Cloud, the business has unified its global sales data and previously siloed data, including engineering and safety metrics. Tableau CRM serves contextual insights from this data and provides a real-time view of accounts, including sales, cases, backorders, and delivery performance. This helps the sales team stay updated with customer needs and has saved over a hundred hours monthly on reporting.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has freed up even more time for the sales team by automating communication. Communication is more personal, too, with a number of automated journeys personalised based on customer demographics and behaviour.
Service Cloud has also increased efficiency while enabling a better customer experience. In the past, the customer service team managed cases using spreadsheets and spent up to 50% of their time on manual data entry.
Now, agents in multiple contact centres share streamlined processes for case management. They also use Vonage Contact Centre from the AppExchange, which is integrated with Salesforce to provide a complete view of customers and capture call data automatically. So agents can spend less time gathering information and provide more personalised support.
Commerce Cloud simplifies selling and enables self-service.
As Sutton Tools has expanded and acquired new businesses around the world, it has turned to Commerce Cloud to simplify purchasing for customers in multiple countries.
In addition to supporting self-service ordering, the site provides customers with their own CRM Analytics dashboards where they can view information like order history and days to delivery.
“Focusing on the user experience and providing features beyond order entry has incentivised the adoption of the site and contributed to a 70% reduction in inbound calls,” said Sutton. “We also saw a 4x increase in online orders in less than 12 months after going live.”
These results helped Sutton Tools reduce the cost to serve its small business customers and achieve a return on its investment in a matter of months.
Sutton Tools worked with Salesforce consulting partner OSF Digital to go live on Commerce Cloud in 12 weeks. It is now continuing to work with OSF Digital on its data and AI transformation, including the deployment of Agentforce.
The business is also set to deploy Consumer Goods Cloud for wholesale distribution and Manufacturing Cloud to support demand management for key accounts.
The industries we work in are developing and changing faster than ever. Our ability to respond and quickly bring new products to market relies on having world-class digital platforms. Without that, we couldn’t keep pace.
Robert SuttonCommercial Director, Sutton Tools
Salesforce has united Sutton Tools’ entire business around a 360-degree view of customers and accelerated productivity with automation. Data Cloud and Agentforce are now helping the business unlock new insights and capacity so it can continue to scale while delivering an exceptional customer experience.
