Sprint “The Salesforce Platform helps us save millions of dollars each year.”

In the communications industry, loyal customers are the key to success. Nobody knows that better than Sprint, rated #1 for customer satisfaction and the third-largest telecommunications provider in the United States.

Sprint's success is no accident. A focus on working as a team to provide great service and maintain strong customer relationships is core to the company's philosophy. When Sprint wanted to use new technologies to share information across groups and manage relationships with business customers more efficiently, it called on Salesforce for help. Sprint consolidated customer information, automated processes, and built apps to make it easy to share data with retail stores.

The transformation started in sales. Information on business customers from multiple CRM systems was consolidated into customer profiles in Salesforce. "We've made Salesforce a one-stop-shop for our sales teams for business processes and customer intelligence," explains Paul Eide, Manager of Program Management and Business Analytics. More than 6,000 employees now use Sales Cloud to track accounts, contacts, and opportunities for improved visibility and real-time analytics.

Reps can quickly identify the best opportunities with Data.com, part of the Sales Cloud, driving new leads and reducing the time to close enterprise deals by 25%. And, a fully-integrated configure-price-quote system helps Sprint's sales teams quickly build complex pricing models using up-to-date account information.

Customer visibility is enhanced by Chatter, which helps reps share and information and collaborate on deals so they can address customer needs quickly and provide consistently great service. Chatter groups with as many as 3,000 members ensure that everyone stays up-to-date on the information needed to get their jobs done. "In a social world, it's important that everyone can access the information they need when they need it," explains Eide. "Chatter helps us do that."

Salesforce also helps Sprint's corporate sales teams connect with the front lines in its 1,100+ retail stores and 800+ dealer locations. Using a custom Internet portal, retail staff can easily share business leads with sales, and no leads get dropped. In the future, retail personnel will be able to collaborate with customer service professionals to solve customer issues on the spot. "Social brings everyone in our company together to help customers," says Eide.

Sprint's transformation with Salesforce has gone beyond sales to address additional core business processes. Using the Salesforce Platform, the company replaced legacy apps that were expensive to maintain with new, cloud-based ones. "The Salesforce Platform is so flexible, we can easily customize it to meet our unique needs," says Clint Slusher, VP, Operations and Planning. "Retiring legacy apps has saved us millions."

Custom apps built on the platform automate processes including managing waitlists for hot new phones, scheduling corporate briefings, or tracking churn data, so reps can proactively reach out to customers in danger of defecting or counteract competitive promotions. Another app manages the discount approvals process and recaptures almost $70 million in unauthorized discounts each month. "Becoming a customer company isn't just about building closer relationships," says Slusher. "It also makes good financial sense."