Solar
“We have one simple aim: to help our customers become as efficient as possible. Salesforce helps us to do this.”
Solar energises customer experience and sales efficiency with Salesforce
The true mark of a trailblazer is a brand that’s become a byword for an entire category. Take Fastbox, a service launched by Danish sourcing & servicing company Solar that allows customers to order and take delivery of products within just one hour. Fastbox has since entered the Danish vocabulary and Wholesalers across Denmark have begun to copy Solar’s Fastbox Service.
Just don’t call Solar a wholesaler. “We’re much more than that,” said Marlene Løvbjerg, Director Business Development at Solar Denmark. “We’re a sourcing & servicing company with one simple aim: to help our customers become as efficient as possible. We put the customer first by working in partnership with them to optimise their processes, save them time and anticipate their needs. Salesforce helps us to do this.”
“Fastbox is just one example of how we’re doing this. Rather than requiring our customers to drive to our stores to pick up the supplies they need, they can order via our Mobile App and Web Shop and have the products delivered on site within the hour. Our competitors now have similar services - but still everybody calls it Fastbox! That’s how much of an impact we’ve made.”
“Salesforce has given us clarity and allowed us to share knowledge and break down silos”
Solar smashes silos and shares knowledge with Salesforce
Sales Cloud 360 drives explosive growth in lead conversion rate
The results speak for themselves. From adopting Salesforce until today, Solar’s Net Promotor Score (NPS) has risen 16 percentage points. Meanwhile, the company’s lead conversion rate has exploded from 23% to 65%. “I would say the growth in the hit rate is to a great extent due to our adoption of Sales Cloud 360,” said Løvbjerg.
“Of course, we still want our satisfaction score to be even higher. The 360 view we now have is helping us raise it. As soon as someone contacts us, all the relevant customer history pops up, so our sales and service people have all the information they need. Then, with just a few clicks they can bridge the details of the call into the backend system. It saves us time and elevates the customer experience. Our customers are very impressed by how well we know them when we pick up the call.
Solar provides the personal touch and boosts customer satisfaction with Sales Cloud
Local knowledge is crucial for a company that’s growing across borders but still needs to keep that personal touch with its customers. “It used to be the case that customers in Copenhagen would not want to speak to sales or service personnel in, say, Jutland because they wouldn’t have the local knowledge – and vice versa” added Løvbjerg.
The 360 view is also helping Solar build structure and intelligence into its sales process and unlocking greater value through cross and upselling. In Sales Cloud, sales teams can log what they call ‘action opportunities’ for close collaboration on sales activities involving both the Account Owners and Solars highly skilled sales reps in the Special Sales departments. This ensures that we present the full scale of products that Solar can deliver.
Sales Cloud facilitates intelligent, proactive sales
“Some of the really big projects can take many years so we need to be really proactive in actually being with our customers at every step of the journey and being ready to offer them a quote for what they need when they need it,” explained Jordan. “With Sales Cloud we can closely monitor every project and see it’s status. That means we can be much more proactive, giving us a real advantage.”
The development of more intelligent sales and service functions is an ongoing process. Solar is in the process of adding customer contracts into Salesforce to drive even greater clarity of the customer journey, giving access to key information such as specific customer terms and conditions with just a few clicks.
Sales Cloud also shines a light on internal performance. “All managers and salespeople have their own dashboards, showing key information and metrics like opportunities, quotations, customer visits, revenues, NPS score etc,” said Løvbjerg. “It’s a real leveller and it means that everything is in the right place. It gives us greater control and means we can make sure we are focusing on the right things.”
Sales teams get full customer service history with Service Cloud
Given the scale of Solar’s ambitions, access to each customer’s service history is hugely important. The company has big plans for driving greater digitalisation of customer experiences, increasing market share and profitability and establishing greener ways of working. To hit the latter goal, Solar is now delivering Fastboxes on e-scooters in major cities and rolling out a robotics solution to boost warehouse productivity and save both energy and space.
That 80% of its Danish customers are already making repeat orders via Solar’s Mobile app or Webshop speaks volumes about the customer experience the company is delivering.
“This makes things better for us and the customer. It means we can track the cases our customers have with us and it means that our personnel have all the information they need when they’re interacting with customers. For example, if a salesperson have a customer visit, they can see if the customer have called customer service recently and how quickly an issue was resolved. It means they are properly prepared before they reach out. Ultimately, this is helping to drive customer satisfaction and sales”, said Jordan.
Solar sails into a brighter future with Salesforce
A few years ago Pardot was added to its Salesforce suite to make digital marketing more responsive and precise. “Pardot allows us to do more trigger-based marketing depending on what our customers and prospects have expressed an interest in,” explained Jordan.
“It gives us much richer real-time information about customer engagement with our marketing assets, which has helped improve the collaboration between marketing and sales. This has helped our marketing colleagues - and that is really the essence of what we’re trying to do: work more efficiently and develop partnerships with our customers to help them unlock greater efficiencies themselves. Salesforce is a very important part of that journey.”
Keep exploring stories like this one.
Corilus is in the best of health with Salesforce .
AMS-IX operates one of the world’s biggest hubs for internet traffic – and it wants to get much bigger. Find out how Salesforce is helping.
AXA Business Insurance is improving customer conversations.
Questions? We’ll put you on the right path.
