Ankidyne Playground builds loyalty and revenue using Salesforce

Founded in 1993, Ankidyne managed operations manually for almost ten years before seeking tools to help it grow further. It tried using spreadsheets and built its own CRM, but after a few years these became too complex to manage. It was then, in 2010, that Ankidyne turned to Salesforce and began using Sales Cloud to manage leads before rolling it out across the company.

Today, everything from marketing to sales, service and manufacturing is connected on Sales Cloud and it provides Ankidyne a complete view of customers and business processes. With tools like the Salesforce Mobile App it also helps employees work more efficiently. Sales reps use the app to capture and access information when in the field meeting customers about projects. There are plans to integrate the app with Geopointe from the AppExchange so they can also capture the exact location of projects.

“We kept looking for the right tools to manage our customer relationships and once we found Salesforce our transformation happened at lightning speed,” said Mr. Padmanabhan. “We now have 200 employees using it every day to improve customer satisfaction.”

For Ankidyne, one of the greatest benefits of Sales Cloud is that it makes it easy to keep in contact with customers throughout the lifecycle of its products which average 10 - 15 years. So when customers are refreshing playgrounds or building new ones, Ankidyne remains top of mind and sales reps can respond to opportunities more personally. It can also prioritise opportunities by considering customers’ previous activity, including promptness in payment, frequency and volume of orders and how much time it takes them to convert.

“Our revenue is 3x what it was before we began using Salesforce and that is because of the seamless connectivity we have with our customers today and an increase in repeat business. We also have the ability to identify high potential customers and pursue cross-sell opportunities,” said Mr. Padmanabhan.

In addition to transforming the customer experience, Salesforce has helped Ankidyne modernise its manufacturing processes, including inventory management. The company has an inventory management database built on Lightning Platform which includes information on more than 3,000 parts. This connects to Sales Cloud where employees can easily manage inventory and generate detailed work orders including parts and pricing.

“Salesforce improves the accuracy and efficiency of inventory management and helps us measure other manufacturing processes so that we can find ways to improve them. For example, we can look at which of our 11 teams builds a product the fastest and ask the other teams to copy what they do,” said Mr. Padmanabhan. “We also find that teams are competing and sharing best practises to do things even faster.”

Ankidyne is now working on improving the quality of manufacturing by using Salesforce to analyse customer feedback and identify any common complaints. It can then investigate these issues and make improvements to product design and manufacturing.