FCR Media

With Salesforce, we can understand what our customers want, how their journey works, and make improvements to enrich their experience.”

- ALLAN FARRELL, CIO, FCR MEDIA BELGIUM
 
1,200 EMPLOYEES

50%

increase in customer satisfaction

 

FCR Media improves the customer journey with Salesforce

Businesses have to be dynamic to survive in today’s digital age. And that means responding quickly to new market and customer trends. “We used to introduce one or two new products or services each year – now we’re launching three every quarter,” said Allan Farrell, CIO at FCR Media Belgium.

FCR Media works with SME customers to manage their digital presence with website solutions, online advertising, and search engine optimisation to grow their business. It was founded in 2016 when popularity for the traditional print-based Yellow Pages directory started to fizzle out. 

“In just 12 months, we’ve transformed an old product centric company in Belgium, which had a customer satisfaction rating of just 46%, to a customer centric, dynamic & innovative digital media business and improved our customer satisfaction by 50% ” explained Farrell. “We’ve created a company that is more relevant and more agile, and suits the needs of SMEs in the digital world.”

A new business model and platform for a new age

The FCR Media group operates not only in Belgium, but also in 11 other countries, including Ireland, Sweden and the Baltic States. With more than 40,000 customers in Belgium alone, all with different requirements, FCR Media needs a flexible and customer-centric business model to succeed. “Our legacy systems were hard to change, making it very difficult to bring new products to market or adapt our processes. Agility was top of our priority list,” said Farrell.

In 2016, Farrell and his team embarked on a discovery exercise to find a new business platform. As well as meeting its agility aims, it had to meet the requirements of the company's new IT strategy, which included a ‘cloud-first’, ‘buy-before-build’, and ‘configure-before-customise approach’. “We considered a number of different platforms and partners; Salesforce came out top in every area,” said Farrell.

In May 2017, FCR Media deployed Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Salesforce CPQ with assistance from Deloitte Digital. “The implementation went so smoothly it was actually quite boring!” added Farrell. “And Deloitte Digital’s expertise helped us get the change management process right.” To complement its new agile business platform, FCR has re-engineered its processes from the bottom up in Salesforce for sales, service, and finance.

Improving sales with greater visibility of performance

More than 120 telesales and field sales reps use Sales Cloud to manage their customer relationships across Belgium. “We’ve taken an entirely new approach to sales: we’re now focusing on our customers’ needs, not the products that we want to push. It's been a big change for our sales people, but Salesforce has made it easier,” explained Farrell. “With Sales Cloud, they can view their own performance in real time, without having to wait for their manager to create a report for them. It helps them achieve their targets.”

To make it easier to access and update customer information while on the road, field reps also use the Salesforce Mobile App, which they access via their tablet or mobile.

More customer proposals in less time

The biggest efficiency gain for reps involves the quote process. “It used to take up to an hour or more to put together a proposal for a customer,” said Farrell. “With Salesforce CPQ, they can get a proposal out in a couple of minutes. This represents a massive increase in productivity and means they can send more quotes to more prospects in less time.”

FCR Media also used the Salesforce implementation as an opportunity to simplify its customer offerings from hundreds of product lines to just 30. “Our product set and price points used to be ridiculously complicated, so reps just sold the products they understood best. Now, they’re able to offer the best solution for the customer and at the best price point,” added Farrell.

Digitisation and fewer billing issues through Salesforce App Exchange ecosystem

This simplicity has also been extended to FCR Media’s finance department with help from the FinancialForce solution from the Salesforce App Exchange. With other solutions from the App Exchange ecosystem like Docusign and Conga they now provide digital signature and invoice creation. Invoicing is now so straightforward that only 1% of customers raise billing queries compared with 10% previously. With 40,000 customers, this represents a massive decrease in calls and emails to the customer service team every month.

A faster response to customer queries

Whether the customer is contacting the customer service team to query an invoice, update their details, or change their services, FCR Media’s 20 service agents can now respond faster and more accurately thanks to Service Cloud.

“Our aim is to have our customer service agents fix all queries with the customer within 24 hours. However, that is not always possible, so we’ve created automated workflows to trigger actions and alerts for different teams. For example, logging a particular type of case generates an alert for a member of the creative team to contact the customer, or if it’s a technical issue, a ticket will automatically be raised for our IT team to investigate,” explained Farrell. “By using the inbuilt chatter functionality and workflow our teams can collaborate to provide smarter service, makes teams more productive and ultimately our customers happier.”

Ongoing optimisation with marketing automation, intelligence, and SLAs to enrich experiences

FCR Media will be able to boost the efficiency and quality of its services even further when it adopts a formal SLA management strategy and integrates Service Cloud with its telephony system. “With Service Cloud’s dashboards and escalation workflows, we’ll be able to ensure we're meeting SLAs and that customers are receiving the quality of service they expect,” said Farrell. “We’ll also be able to record calls in order to improve our approach to coaching, and identify callers as soon as the phone rings.”

Continually improving its processes and empowering its people has now become part of business as usual at FCR Media. Plans in the pipeline include introducing artificial intelligence to help sales teams focus on the right prospects and the right accounts, and automating marketing emails.

“We used to send generic emails to leads. It was a time-consuming process that lacked transparency,” said Farrell. “With Pardot, we can send personalised emails and nurture leads until they’re ready to engage with our sales teams improving the lead conversion.” By integrating lead management into its sales process, FCR Media will be able to achieve its goal of contacting every prospect within an hour, which will increase conversion rates.

“With all our core teams all using Salesforce, we now have a 360-degree view of the customer and their interactions with our business,” said Farrell. “We can understand what our customers want, how their journey works, and make improvements to enrich their experience.”

 

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