An airport pick-up for your parents. A group booking for an international customer. A car for an employee working abroad. Addison Lee provides business and personal travellers with premium transport for the journeys that matter. But it does much more than just provide an iconic car and a professional driver.

 “A car turning up on time is table stakes – it’s about what happens next that sets Addison Lee apart,” said Ian Cohen, Chief Product and Technology Officer for the Addison Lee Group. “For too long the industry has been focused on the allocation and dispatch of cars. At Addison Lee we’re obsessed with the customer experience.”

 For Addison Lee’s agents to provide a prompt and personal service across all channels, they need to understand the customer. And that can be a major challenge given the diversity of the Addison Lee’s customer base. “We have to look at the experience through the eyes of the people that matter – whether it’s an individual passenger, a corporate travel manager, an airline, or even a driver,” said Cohen.

 With Salesforce, Addison Lee can not only track the customer experience but also enrich and optimise it on a global scale. “Customer acquisition, engagement, onboarding, and retention are all powered by Salesforce,” explained Matt Baker, Head of CRM Services at Addison Lee. “It’s become our experience and engagement platform.”

The UK contact centre plays an important role in the customer experience, responding to around 120,000 queries per month. “Salesforce has transformed how we manage customer queries,” said Baker. “Addison Lee has committed to support its passengers wherever they are in the world, 24x7. Salesforce enables us to engage our passengers in their channel of choice; whether that be voice, SMS, social platforms, or live chat. We focus on the individual and tailor our systems around that, not the traditional account based view of the past.”

 Addison Lee engages with its customers across a range of channels. For example, it uses Marketing Cloud to listen and respond to social media comments while Service Cloud powers a live chat function. With every case and every contact – past and present – logged in Service Cloud, Addison Lee can tap into insights that enable smarter forecasting and greater efficiency.

 “We can segment support requests and see how customer demand for transport changes based on certain events and seasons,” said Baker. Addison Lee hopes to unlock even more insights into both service delivery and passenger behaviour by deploying Einstein. “With AI, we will be able to predict the success of an account and identify the actions that need to be taken to ensure the best outcomes for our customers,” added Baker.

Business accounts are a major revenue stream for Addison Lee. But their success is dependent on the adoption by individual employees. “With Marketing Cloud, we can engage with people across multiple channels to ensure they are aware of our services both locally and when travelling abroad,” said Baker.

 The solution triggers automated journeys to facilitate the onboarding of new business teams and to support key stages of the employee engagement cycle, for example encouraging app downloads, training on key features and benefits or international travel support. Addison Lee wants to take personalised communications one step further by using Salesforce DMP and Data Studio to engage ‘in moment’ when passengers plan to travel. “With Salesforce, we can drive better and deeper conversations and become even more relevant to our customers,” added Cohen.

 To drive similar conversations with its SME prospects, Addison Lee partners with an external agency. “The SME market is a strong growth area for us,” explained Baker. “With Community Cloud, we can ensure new leads are generated, nurtured, and converted in a consistent way. It helps to safeguard the reputation of our brand and provides our agency with visibility of accounts before they start a renewal conversation.” The approach has proved a real success: Addison Lee more than doubled its growth rate within the SME sector.

Addison Lee has also simplified and accelerated the sales cycle with its enterprise customers, which can involve multi-million pound deals and months of work . Although every customer has different requirements, Sales Cloud enables Addison Lee to take a standard approach to opportunity management and account planning.

 Integrating with company apps and systems is often fundamental to onboarding new business clients or partners. “MuleSoft is our core platform for connecting services internally and externally, as well as providing the platform for our API integration services,” explained Cohen. “It enables us to provide a more seamless experience, which will be key as we develop new services and expand into new markets.”

As Addison Lee continues to grow its global reach and customer base, it will need to attract new drivers. The company employs around 4,000 drivers on fixed term contracts. “We want to help our drivers spend as much time as possible taking passengers on journeys that matter by providing them with a platform that enables them to access the information they need, and engage with our driver support team in the most efficient manner possible,” said Baker.

 With Salesforce, Addison Lee can manage the driver experience on a single platform, which helps to increase efficiency. “We’ve already used Service Cloud to help us transition from allocating jobs to managing relationships, but we want to do more by making it easier for drivers to do things like book a service for their car or sign a new employment contract.”

Greater automation, digitalisation, and innovation will all be fundamental to the future success and growth of Addison Lee. “Addison Lee is at the bleeding edge of the fourth industrial revolution. Salesforce enables us to become the agile and competitive organisation we need to be, there are no technology limits. We can stand up a new capability in a matter of weeks, not months,” said Baker.

It has just been awarded £20m by the UK government as head of a consortia of transport and tech providers to launch Project Apollo, the largest autonomous ride-sharing service pilot in the country. This aims to have Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) and Rideshare cars operating in Greenwich by June 2020. Along with the Oxbotica Partnership, Addison Lee will create detailed, digital maps of London’s road system.