3 weeks’ work in 1 day: How Schneider Electric serves customers faster.

Schneider Electric is putting efficiency and sustainability at the core of its purpose and mission. Since 2018, the company has helped its customers save and avoid 347 million tons of CO2 emissions by providing digital energy efficiency solutions for buildings, data centres, infrastructure, and industries.

From homeowners to grid operators and manufacturing giants, thousands of customers in more than 100 countries rely on Schneider Electric to help them use energy and resources more efficiently — a need underscored by recent energy and supply chain crises, as well as the imperative to slow down climate change. Power distribution, smart grid, and software-driven automation solutions are just a few ways the company helps customers achieve ambitious efficiency and sustainability goals in uncertain times.

But enabling energy efficiency depends on efficiency behind the scenes.

“We used to just do energy distribution. Now we can prevent issues,” said Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman and CEO. “We can tackle building efficiency and bring predictive maintenance capabilities so our customers don’t have to suffer problems.”

Using its 10-year partnership with Salesforce, Schneider Electric makes it easier for customers and partners to solve energy efficiency and industrial automation challenges by giving its 40,000 frontline employees a 360-degree view of the customer and technology to work more efficiently.

Let’s see how Tricoire and team use Salesforce Customer 360 to provide energy stability to customers and distributors in an unpredictable world.

Digital innovation is transforming the world of energy. As businesses around the world embark on their journey to net zero, they turn to intelligent, integrated solutions that enable energy monitoring, optimisation of consumption, and integration of renewables in the electricity mix. But the only way to get these innovations quickly into customers’ hands is to sell them as efficiently as possible.

Schneider Electric’s sales reps can now each generate up to 500 opportunities a day — a task that previously took three weeks.

Using Sales Cloud and CRM Analytics, the company created a Digital Opportunity Factory that uses AI to find sales prospects who have an unmet need, or “white space” opportunities that Schneider specialises in serving.

How it works:

• White space opportunities are identified and classified
• Opportunities are then assigned to the appropriate sales professional
• Einstein Discovery scores opportunities throughout each sales stage
• Sales reps see AI-generated recommendations for progressing each opportunity

“Today, Sales Cloud covers the full opportunity lifecycle,” said Irina Zubova, Vice President, Sales Management and Support. “Every step of this journey is followed within Sales Cloud.”

Since building the Digital Opportunity Factory, Schneider Electric reduced time to close by 30% and earned a 15%–20% success rate from lead to order — up from 2% in past campaigns.

Each year, Schneider Electric fulfils thousands of customer requests for innovative energy management solutions. Some requests, especially those from distributors, contain massive and highly complex orders that resulted in lengthy quoting and fulfilment processes. 

Now, sales and project teams need as little as 15 minutes to complete the quote-to-order process for orders of the same scale.

Used in the company’s North American region, a new automated quoting system, built on the Salesforce Platform, saves sales reps hours of precious time while reducing human error.

How it works:

• A sales rep completes a proposal in Sales Cloud
• AppExchange partner FinancialForce matches the proposal to an existing project
• MuleSoft transfers the proposal data to an open source database
• Heroku processes the data — up to 5,000 records at once — and sends it back to Sales Cloud

Once quoting is complete, Salesforce Flow saves teams even more time by automating order fulfillment. With a more efficient quoting system and faster order fulfillment, Schneider Electric can make customers and distributors happier.

While sales reps need data visualisation at a granular level, others, like executive leadership, prefer a bird’s eye view.

“Leadership needs to have a consolidated view of the organisation, down to the entity,” said Zubova. “This is what we can provide with CRM analytics dashboards — the business intelligence we have today.”

CRM Analytics gives leaders real-time visibility into global sales operations, commercial performance, compliance, and more with AI-powered analytics and intelligent insights. From a single dashboard, executives view the company’s most important metrics in detail and share comprehensive business plans and service recommendations with stakeholders.

“Our CRM Analytics portfolio covers the full scope of Salesforce functionalities today,” said Cem Yöndem, Vice President of End-to-End Digital Customer Relationships, IT Platforms. “This includes Sales Management, Customer Support, Quality, and Services domains for more than 15,000 users worldwide.”

The company builds low-code apps with the Salesforce Platform to speed up case resolution and boost employee productivity. One app, called issue-to-prevention (I2P), helps sales and service teams collaborate with research and development to solve cases in real time.

For example, if multiple industrial customers who’ve purchased smart factory software receive the same error message, service and quality teams can batch those cases into a single issue. This not only prevents duplicate case resolution efforts, but notifies development teams of a potential problem with a particular product.

The I2P app also builds intelligent models from historical data to predict product issues before they become problems for customers. This way, Schneider Electric can take proactive measures to ensure its energy management solutions remain reliable and, most importantly, customers are satisfied.

With Schneider Electric’s customer base spanning a wide range of countries and industries, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for customer support. To tailor service to customers’ unique needs, the company empowers Customer Care Centre agents with Service Cloud.

Customer Care Centre agents are ready to respond to customer outreach with a 360-degree view of the customer’s data. If a customer’s shipment of lighting control components gets delayed, the agent can pull up the customer’s account and order information without having to ask for the order or tracking number. With this information, the agent provides an updated ETA or expedites a request through a custom workflow.

“We have around 8 million interactions coming to customer support per year,” said Zubova. “The Customer Care Centre is the first line of support for our customers, however they prefer to contact us — phone, email, or digital channels.”

Customers can book a call or video chat appointment with technical support agents via Scheduler. Or, they can take advantage of self-service resources, such as knowledge articles and tutorials, for quick answers to commonly asked questions. Self-service options like these deflect cases, allowing the Customer Support Centre to distribute its workload more evenly and free up service reps to focus on more complex cases.

Get our bi-weekly newsletter for tips and insights tailored to your role.

Schneider Electric partners with Salesforce Professional Services for expert guidance and implementation best practises. The team of strategic experts ensures that Schneider Electric maximises its Salesforce technology by:

• Embracing a platform mindset to optimise solutions and limit customisations
• Providing direct access to innovation to influence product releases
• Designing a roadmap that takes the company from vision to value, faster

INNOVATE FASTER WITH SALESFORCE PROFESSIONAL SERVICES