Nic of Time
1,500 customers between two service reps
Salesforce customer since 2019
22%
annual growth
Nic of Time blazes a trail in tech support with Salesforce
In many fields it’s widely agreed that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But in tech support, most people still wait for something to break before taking action. Swedish company Nic of Time is changing that. The trailblazing support provider is shaking up traditional service models by transforming into a proactive subscription-based SaaS support service that keeps systems highly available and prevents outages before they cause disruption – and cutting customers’ support bills by up to 50% in the process.
“Rather than cashing in on customers having issues, we monitor their systems to stop problems happening in the first place,” explained Arne Lantz, Nic of Time’s founder. “Salesforce is helping us to hit our growth target of 22% year-on-year while giving customers and amazing experience – including becoming their very own tech support team directly from their mobiles.”
The company, founded 2014, began its digital transformation 2019, replacing a ticketing solution with a comprehensive Salesforce platform comprising Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Pardot, and a customer community built on Experience Cloud.
Providing support services with a difference.
Smaller businesses are the norm in Sweden – 94.7% of companies have between 9-99 employees. As such, most organisations prefer to outsource tech support to specialists like Nic of Time rather than hire an in-house IT team.
“We act as an advisor, a problem-solver, and a resource to help our clients achieve their dreams,” said Arne. “That means getting closer to customers and building strong relationships so we can understand their unique needs and how technology can help them thrive.”
Nic of Time has always been a business that does things differently. The company follows a blue ocean strategy to redefine tech support, and it’s working: many of its 1,500 customer users are now happy advocates of its subscription model and highly efficient services.
“Customer engagement is a key differentiator in our industry – when customers contact us, they always get through to a person. No queuing systems, no automated messages, and no hold music before getting help,” added Arne.
Time for change.
The company decided to make the customer experience even more personal, and turned to the world’s #1 CRM platform, Salesforce, to unlock 360-degree visibility of the customer. “I always thought Salesforce was purely an enterprise solution – and I couldn’t be happier to say that I was wrong!” revealed Arne. “The Salesforce team showed me it was the perfect solution for our needs, and the ongoing support we’ve had to make the platform work for us has been amazing.”
Nic of Time worked with partner, CloudRoute, to implement Sales Cloud for CRM, Pardot to support email marketing, and to customise Service Cloud and Experience Cloud with workflows to suit its unique business. “We say that Salesforce puts the ‘Nic’ in Nic of Time – it’s our network intelligence centre,” added Arne.
The platform is integrated with seven other systems to streamline processes such as billing and invoicing, as well as a sales intelligence app from the AppExchange.
Transforming customer support with 360-degree visibility.
With Salesforce as the single source of truth at the center of the company’s customer support operations, Nic of Time has been able to realise enormous economies of scale – currently all 1,500 of customers’ users are managed by just two service agents. Tickets are raised and categorised in Service Cloud before being passed to service agents to action.
The company is also preparing to launch a customer community on Experience Cloud to empower customers to self-serve and provide a place for information sharing. The team will post relevant articles on the community about workplace technology, and in phase two will personalise content by line of business to add even more value to customers.
As well as resolving issues, Nic of Time monitors customers’ IT environments and pulls reports ranging from incidents or GDPR compliance, to IT costs and lifecycle management, for example. Customers will soon be able to access these reports by logging on to the portal and via mobile.
“Our customers are not techy people, but they’re still responsible for reporting to the CEO or CFO about IT. We give them access to their own data in user-friendly reports that they can take to meetings with their business decision makers, with no ‘Excel hell’ time consuming hunting for figures,” said Arne.
Greater personalisation boosts conversion rates.
With Sales Cloud, Nic of Time has automated the sales processes, freeing up staff to have more personal conversations with customers at human touchpoints. Prospective customers sign up via the website and are taken through an automated journey to provide them with basic information that answers common queries.
Leads are segmented in Pardot by business size and line of business, then customers are sent on personalised journeys based on buyer personas. The team can perform AB testing or look at analytics to tailor campaigns to have the maximum impact. With Salesforce, new customers can be onboarded in less than 24 hours.
“People come to our website from word-of-mouth recommendations, then Salesforce helps us nurture and convert more leads until we’re ready to step in,” added Arne.
A small team with a big reach.
Salesforce helps Nic of Time to achieve big ambitions with a small team. Better access to data and greater automation have freed staff up to focus on delivering more value to customers. “Being a trailblazer is really important to me. With Salesforce I can bring my vision to life and really enrich the customer experience,” said Arne. “I’m happy to report that Salesforce is for everyone, not just for large enterprises!”
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