Pearson Education gives learners smarter service with Success Cloud.

Educators, parents, and learners of all ages rely on Pearson Education. The global learning company offers educational content, learning platforms, assessments, and computer-based testing services. So when the busy back-to-school season hits, Pearson needs to be ready to support every customer, quickly.

To provide fast, personalized support, Pearson needs to understand each customer’s needs and history. However, getting a complete view of customers was a major challenge for Pearson, due to its large size and complex data infrastructure. The company also needed to create self-service resources and communities to help customers find answers or solve challenges quickly.

Today, the company is transforming customer service with Salesforce technology and experts.

Originally founded in 1844, Pearson has evolved from a large holding company to a global digital education provider. As the company changed over the years, it inherited several enterprise resource planning systems and CRM platforms from mergers and acquisitions.

Storing information in multiple systems meant the company couldn’t get a 360-degree view of customers. Additionally, Pearson has several websites and customer support hotlines, so customers needed multiple usernames for various websites and had to provide the same information every time they contacted customer support.

“We might have one person as our customer for years,” said Milin Mathur, Director of Customer Support and Service Platforms. “We want to make sure that we provide them a consistent, good customer experience.”

The company implemented Sales Cloud and Service Cloud in 2014, replacing more than 80 legacy CRM systems. Now sales and support agents can quickly see a customer’s complete interaction history with the company, including products they’ve purchased and challenges they’ve faced.

Pearson’s next goal was improving self-service options for customers, many of whom were young adults who wanted to find answers online instead of calling a customer service line.

The company partnered with a Success Cloud program architect, who helped Pearson improve the quality of its knowledge base articles so customers could find answers on their own. The architect also helped implement a self-help wizard to show customers solutions directly within Pearson products. As a result, 50% of calls and chats were resolved through self-help, instead of more expensive and time-consuming interactions with support agents.

Pearson continues to innovate with Salesforce to better serve customers. The company reviews Salesforce data to identify challenges customers frequently encounter, then improves product designs to eliminate those concerns. Pearson is also experimenting with artificial intelligence, piloting a program using Einstein chatbots to help customers with their top support request — resetting passwords.

The key to Pearson’s success with Salesforce? “Engage your Success Cloud team early and provide them with all the information that they need in time, and then you’ll see results,” Mathur said.

Success Cloud provides resources and expertise to help Salesforce customers achieve their goals faster. Pearson worked with a success manager — a designated expert who helps customers succeed with Salesforce — to find the best resources to improve customer service. Pearson learned the best way to deploy Community Cloud to build closer relationships with its customers through a series of one-on-one coaching sessions with a Salesforce expert, called Salesforce Accelerators.  

“Success Cloud is partnering with us,” Mathur said. “Whenever we go and start any project, we bring them with us. We work as a team.”