L&T Electrical & Automation wins more customers with smarter sales and faster service

Many companies talk about innovation. But Electrical Standard Products (ESP), a business unit of L&T Electrical & Automation, which is part of Schneider Electric India Private Limited, actually walks the talk. 

“We build future-ready and sustainable solutions for the electrical industry,” says Naresh Kumar, Head, ESP. “Millions of B2B and B2C customers across India depend on our solutions to meet their electricity distribution and control needs.”

ESP embodies its core value of ‘dare to disrupt’ not just in its products, but also in its processes. The Digital Innovation & Technology team, led by Sibasish Pani, is always innovating to improve processes through automation, analytics, and AI.

In 2020, the team started digitally transforming customer and employee experiences using Salesforce.

Bridging gaps in customer experience through CRM

ESP’s earlier CRM solutions saw low user adoption due to data quality issues and limited scope for reporting. 

“Our sales and customer data was scattered across three different systems, hampering sales activity planning and collaboration,” recounts Kumar. “A lack of visibility into customer interactions across teams impacted the quality of customer experiences.”

It was time for a change. 

The ESP team started its CRM transformation journey by bringing together stakeholders from sales, service, and marketing to articulate their CRM needs. Consultants then shadowed customer-facing teams to identify their unsaid requirements and followed it up with a design thinking workshop to lay the foundation for a new CRM.

“Our goal was to improve employee efficiency, cross-functional collaboration, and customer experience,” explains Pani. “Of the three CRM solutions we evaluated, Salesforce was the clear winner for its 360-degree customer view, user friendliness, mobility, inbuilt analytics, and native AI.”

Adds Kumar, “Since implementing Salesforce, we’ve seen tremendous improvements in customer engagement. More opportunities are now converted to orders. 

“What’s more, digitising our CRM processes has boosted efficiency. And thanks to timely customer insights, strategy planning has improved. Overall, we’re creating truly customer-centred experiences with Salesforce.”

Making customer journeys frictionless with a 360-degree customer view

Using Salesforce, ESP has united all its teams around a single customer view. Marketing, sales, business development, service, and finance teams can now collaborate with ease, and stay updated on everything that’s happening across the customer journey in real time.

“All our customer interactions are captured in a single source of truth,” says Pani. “So, each team can seamlessly pick up a customer conversation from where the last one left off.”

Selling smarter and growing revenue faster through automation

With Agentforce Sales, ESP has automated sales processes, from lead and opportunity management, to order creation and reporting. Over 129 hours have been saved through this automation. 

Email campaigns are easily built and sent out through Salesforce’s marketing automation software - B2B Marketing Automation. Leads generated from these campaigns are then automatically assigned to the right sales branch based on pin code.

At the branch, field sales reps use the Salesforce mobile app to identify new opportunities, capture customer information, and manage customer lists on-the-go. 

Reps can also forecast opportunity scores and win probability through Salesforce AI. 

“With Salesforce, our sales reps have complete visibility into sales targets and customer data, which helps them sell faster and smarter,” says Pani. 

All the financials associated with sales activity – be it sales budgets or spend approvals – are also streamlined for efficiency. Orders are automatically pushed to a third-party system for processing, while sales invoice data flows back in for performance tracking. 

“Our finance team is delighted that all sales financials are now in one place,” says Pani. 

ESP also uses Salesforce Event Monitoring to track sales user activities such as logins, logouts, and reports. “In one year, the volume of sales activities conducted through our CRM have quadrupled,” says Pani. “So have the average number of sales calls, with each rep now making over 100 calls per month.”

ESP has built multiple innovative features on Salesforce to make the lives of both its customers and sales reps easier. 

One such feature tracks the usage of field sales vans.

“When a sales rep books a van to visit customers, all the activities conducted through the van are tracked on Salesforce,” says Pani. “This way, we can monitor the utilisation of our assets every month, optimising both van usage and sales efficiency.”

The company has also built a rich knowledge portal for customers to access product brochures and manuals. If the customer wants to purchase a solution, sales reps can generate a quote on the spot. 

Another innovative feature is the ‘CACO’ or ‘comprehensive analysis of competitor offerings’ module. Through it, sales reps can easily capture data on competitor product prices and discounts. The tool then automatically calculates how much of a discount can be offered to customers to match competitor prices.   

“Earlier, those calculations would take us 2-3 hours,” explains Pani. “But with automation, they can now be done in just 15 minutes.”

For its channel partners, ESP has built a tool to simplify partner onboarding, agreements, certification, and discontinuation.

Meanwhile, powerful reports deliver real-time visibility into sales trends, KPIs, and metrics like coverage ratio and success ratio. 

“We’ve created wonderful dashboards and prediction models with Salesforce CRM Analytics which help us easily visualise and improve sales performance,” says Pani.

ESP has transformed its service function too. Through Salesforce Service Cloud, contact centre agents can swiftly capture all customer service requests, and assign them to the right field service engineers based on pin code. The streamlining and automation of service requests has resulted in a 26% reduction in case resolution time. 

“Having a seamless platform like Salesforce helps us improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our service processes,” says Hrishikesh Kale, Head, ESP Customer Support.

At the service site, engineers use the Field Service mobile app to record service details, capture the customer’s digital signature, and submit a report on the spot.

“Customers are thrilled with the speed and quality of our digital service reports,” says Kale. “Overall, our customer net satisfaction scores have improved from 84% to 96%.” 

Meanwhile, service managers can use rich customer service analytics to understand why a service issue occurred, and how to prevent it.

ESP’s Salesforce implementation journey was ably supported by PwC.

“PwC helped us benchmark and refine many of our processes based on industry best practices,” says Pani. “With their insights, we’ve made our CRM truly effective and efficient.”

“The total login percentage or TLP of our CRM has shot up to 95%, thanks to the user benefits of Salesforce,” says Vinay Kumar, Data Analyst, Digital Innovation Department, ESP.

The company now wants to connect other stakeholders like channel partners and even customers on Salesforce. 

“Our goal is to predict and proactively fulfil customer needs,” says Kumar. “We also want to pursue the right customers and opportunities using automatic recommendations from Salesforce. And finally, build a sustainable ecosystem aligned with customer expectations. We’re excited to keep innovating around these goals on Salesforce.”