Legend Boats makes waves by boosting the customer experience

Family. Fun. And fishing. There’s nothing like that feeling of taking your boat out for some rest and relaxation on the lake. For Legend Boats, the buying experience should be plain sailing for its customers too.

“Our mission is to create memories – not just sell boats. We have a dedicated team of memory makers working with customers to build their perfect boat from scratch. It’s all about really listening to what they have to say, and sharing our experience, so when they’re out on the water they feel comfortable, right from the first trip,” said Jamie Dewar, co-CEO of Legend Boats.

With ambitions to double the number of sales in the next five years across retail and wholesale, Legend Boats needs to keep customers at the heart of its business as it scales.

With roots going back to 1968 when two friends decided to start a business together, Legend Boats is still a family business, now run by the sons of the original founders. With a passion for helping others enjoy the boating lifestyle, Dewar and his co-CEO Marc Duhamel, are now blazing a trail to take the marine industry by storm.

With the business booming, Dewar and his team needed to get more predictive to keep up with demand, while ensuring every customer has a consistent buying experience. “We’re hugely focused on customer satisfaction and NPS (Net Promoter Scores) here at Legend, but without a suitable solution and processes in place, it was easy to drop the ball, and that could result in letting a customer down.”

With a unique business model as a manufacturer, retailer, and wholesaler, Dewar started to look for a platform that could support every part of the business. “We soon realized specialist solutions for our industry weren’t going to offer the features we needed,” said Dewar. “Rather than settle for something that didn’t feel quite right, we went for Salesforce, as it offered the flexibility to easily create those features for ourselves.”

Since 2013, Salesforce has been helping Legend Boats to deliver amazing customer experiences, from their first visit to the website, to discussing their needs, designing their boat, and providing responsive aftercare.

Legend Boats’ team of memory makers use Sales Cloud to make quoting and selling easier and more efficient. Sales Cloud supports the team through every step of the selling process, with a custom CPQ app built on Salesforce Platform ensuring that all the important details are captured at the right time. “Every customer has slightly different requirements. With a simple pick list in the app, our memory makers can sit down with the customer and help them pick and choose the engine, accessories, and finish to design their perfect boat,” confirms Dewar.

The team can get more predictive and proactive with Salesforce Inbox. “As well as automatically capturing emails against the relevant account, Salesforce Inbox provides visibility of when customers have opened emails, so the team can ensure they’re driving customer communication at the most relevant time to increase the chances of closing a sale.” And with the Salesforce Mobile App, the team can also access opportunities anywhere, any time, to keep customer communications seamless while on the road.

It’s not only retail customers that are benefitting from a better experience since Legend Boats rolled out Salesforce, but also its partner community. “Our distributors are really important to our business model,” explained Dewar. “We had an online portal, but it wasn’t connected to anything else, which meant processing an order was a very tedious process and could take up to an hour.”

In 2017, Dewar moved the partner community to Salesforce, fully integrating it with the company’s core business platform. The community is used to capture parts orders, warranty claims, and log issues. Any related conversations happen via Chatter, so they’re easy to track and review. “With the community in Salesforce, orders now take minutes to process and we’ve seen a 75% increase in efficiency.”

With Service Cloud connected to the community, any issues are automatically captured as cases. The solution is also used for tracking general information enquiries to ensure customers get a speedy response. “With better visibility of service issues, the team can deal with them more efficiently and ensure none are overlooked, which has reduced the number of open cases by 50%.”

Sales and service processes are also supported by a number of custom apps built on Salesforce Platform, including a mobile app for handling parts enquiries and a logistics tool for assigning technicians when planning the build of a new boat. “Developing in Lightning is awesome!” said Dewar. “The component-based approach makes it really fast and flexible, and it’s easy to brand our apps so they look professional.”

Dewar’s team is currently working with Einstein to develop AI-enabled tools for lead scoring and predictive forecasting.

With most of the business centralized on Salesforce, Legend Boats can pull together accurate reports and identify trends, without days of work. “Reporting is one of my favourite Salesforce features – it’s really powerful for us. Each department has a live dashboard with KPIs and score boards to help them react more quickly,” said Dewar. “Doing business is like playing sport – before Salesforce we felt like we were playing a good game, but now we’ve got a live scoreboard so we know exactly how we’re doing and where we can improve.”

Deeper insights also help the business to be more predictive, for example, with better visibility of maintenance work in progress, it can make sure it orders the parts it’s likely to need in advance to reduce any delays in repair work.

Legend Boats’ streamlined processes keep the company’s customers happy and its employees productive, with the insights unlocked by smarter reporting keeping them on their toes. “With more defined KPIs and better real-time data, we’re on track to achieve our goals for growth,” added Dewar.

Every quarter, Dewar and his colleagues analyze their IT plans to prioritize new projects that will help teams work faster and smarter to give customers the best possible experience. “We’ve got about five years of ideas at the ready, and with Salesforce we can just keep on innovating!” said Dewar. “When you’re in the business of making memories, the customer experience is the only thing that matters. With Salesforce, we’re getting more people out on the water, having a great time on the boat of their dreams.”

“Legend Boats comes from a legacy of innovation. With Salesforce, we have the platform we need to keep improving and evolving the best boat-buying experience.”

Jamie Dewar, co-CEO, Legend Boats