Sirco Machinery

 

Sirco Machinery boosts customer service and competitive advantage with Salesforce

Custom guitars. Car parts. Knee replacement joints. From automobile manufacturers to hospitals, hundreds of organizations across Eastern Canada have purchased Haas CNC Machine Tools from Sirco Machinery to manufacture the components they need.

With Salesforce, Sirco Machinery can track each of these customers, along with their orders, parts, and service requests to ensure they all receive the exceptional experience for which the company is renowned.

“Ever since my father founded Sirco Machinery in 1960, providing the best customer service in the industry has always been our goal – and our differentiator,” said General Manager Tammy Vertkas. “By aligning our processes and teams with Salesforce, we can blaze a trail in delivering a seamless sales and service experience to our customers. It doesn’t just make us more competitive, it makes us more agile.”

With such a strong commitment to service excellence, it’s not surprising that Sirco Machinery boasts a probability rate for repeat business of close to 100%. 

A single platform to improve integration and collaboration.

Sirco Machinery specializes in providing Haas CNC lathes, horizontal and vertical machining centers, and rotary tables. The company has a 25-35% market share within Eastern Canada, which includes Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes.

Investing in new technologies and approaches to help improve customer service is a tradition that Victor Ferko has passed on to his daughter Tammy and son Dan Ferko. This focus led Vertkas and Ferko to Salesforce. “We were managing the sales pipeline and capturing customer service data in a fragmented way, which made it hard for teams to collaborate effectively,” explained Vertkas. “We wanted to break down the siloes and provide everyone with access to the same information.”

To bring together its service, sales, and management teams, Sirco Machinery replaced its disparate systems and manual processes with Salesforce in early 2017. “I was amazed by the customization potential,” said Vertkas. “My father would have loved it!” 
 

With Salesforce, we’ve automated our manual process, which means we can do things faster and better than before.”

Tammy Vertkas, General Manager, Sirco Machinery

Real-time visibility of the sales pipeline.

Due to the nature of the company’s products, Sirco Machinery has a complex sales cycle that could run anywhere from two weeks up to a year. “We worked with an amazing Salesforce partner, AppCentrica, to create custom fields, workflows, and reports, which help to ensure the sales cycle flows smoothly,” said Vertkas. “Nothing gets lost in the wind anymore.”

Every lead from every channel is captured in Sales Cloud, which gives managers full visibility of the pipeline and individual prospects. “Our sales reps used to create monthly forecast reports for their managers; now they can see the sales funnel in real time and check what’s due to close at the click of a button,” said Vertkas. “It’s massively reduced sales admin.”

Optimizing technical support with Salesforce.

As the company’s customer service champion, Vertkas wanted to bring the same visibility to technical support. Sirco Machinery has 13 field service technicians, who work closely with office-based coordinators to respond to customer requests and issues.

“A customer case can move backwards and forwards between four people up to 15 times a day as it progresses,” said Vertkas. “Before Salesforce, sharing information was much harder. Now, we can see the status of every case and all the supporting documentation.”

Even the sales team can view customer service histories, which means they can proactively discuss any outstanding cases at meetings. 

Easier access to richer information empowers field service technicians.

Service technicians are automatically notified of new service requests on their mobile devices and receive full job details and a Google Maps link. “With Field Service Lightning, our service technicians are more informed, which makes them more efficient,” explained Vertkas.

Service coordinators can add notes and photos from previous technician call-outs to a job, which provides a much richer history of customers’ machines. They can also use Service Cloud to assign standard drop-down descriptions for the next action, which helps Vertkas see how many cases are waiting for parts to be delivered, quotes to be done, or other actions to be taken.

“When I have my morning coffee, I use my personalized Service Cloud dashboard to track our service performance and tap into business insights that will drive future decision-making,” said Vertkas. The timesheets logged in Field Service Lightning by the technicians also help Vertkas to identify if there are resource or skills development issues that need to be addressed. 

A Trailblazer for exceptional customer service.

To help its service teams collaborate on customer cases, Sirco Machinery has created a number of automated workflows in Chatter, including one for sourcing approvals for the ordering of high-cost parts. “Sales, service and parts are all interlinked,” said Vertkas. “With Salesforce, we’ve automated our manual process, which means we can do things faster and better than before.”

With nearly two years of sales and service data in the bag, Vertkas is getting ready to tap into the world of business analytics. “With Salesforce, there’s a constant flow of new ideas for us to explore; analytics will enable us to make our operations even smarter,” she said. “We also want to integrate our accounting solution to streamline customer invoicing and our financial processes.”

Connecting its sales and service operations has already helped Sirco Machinery to keep delivering on the promise of its founder. “Customer service was my father’s passion. With Salesforce, we can ensure that Sirco Machinery remains a Trailblazer in the industry for delivering an exceptional customer experience,” said Vertkas.
 

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