Capita

“With Salesforce, we have a single view of all our interactions, which helps us bring the best of Capita to help solve client challenges and create better outcomes for their citizens, customers, and employees.”

Ismail Amla, Chief Growth Officer, Capita

130K+

pieces of communication deployed through email and social channels

PRODUCTS USED

see all salesforce products

Capita delivers better outcomes for its client and stakeholders with Salesforce

Making a contribution to your pension. Changing your mobile phone. Accessing remote medical advice. Every month Capita supports more than 30 million people with services and solutions that make their lives easier and simpler. “We believe that everything can be improved and evolved,” explained Ismail Amla, Capita’s Chief Growth Officer. “With Salesforce, we can challenge ourselves to deliver better outcomes for all our stakeholders.”

And Capita has thousands of stakeholders - from clients and investors to partners and employees. “We put purpose at the centre of everything that we do; we are committed to driving progress for the individuals and communities we serve,” said Antonia Wade, Chief Marketing Officer at Capita, which is one of just two FTSE companies with employee representatives on the board.

Bringing teams and processes together around the world

Capita is the UK’s largest business processes outsourcer, providing consulting, digital services, and software solutions that help to simplify the connections between businesses and customers and between governments and citizens.

Capita’s ability to support such a broad spectrum of projects and clients has been made possible by multiple mergers and acquisitions over the last 40 years. But this diversity came with a catch. Capita had become disjointed, which meant teams in different divisions couldn’t collaborate as effectively as they wanted to.

“Clients were asking us how they could get greater value from our relationship but the account teams didn’t have sufficient visibility to make proactive suggestions,” explained Wade. “We needed to transform how we worked to enable our people to have more strategic conversations and drive growth.”

Capita consolidates 30+ CRM platforms into one with Salesforce

When Capita started its multi-year transformation, it had more than 30 instances of CRM. “To enable one Capita, we first needed one CRM,” commented Amla. “We needed to mobilise everyone around a common purpose and a common platform.”

Capita’s Salesforce implementation was not just a technology project but a change programme involving teams in India, South Africa, Poland, the UK and Ireland as well as massive volumes of data - the marketing team alone has 200,000 records.

“We used various Salesforce Accelerators and implementation frameworks and worked with a great partner, PwC, which helped to keep the transformation on track,” said Amla. “We executed 11 releases on time and on budget in just nine months - it was pretty incredible especially as we had other major roll-outs underway too.”

Real-time visibility of sales pipeline drives smarter decisions

Capita’s one CRM platform is founded on Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Pardot — and it’s expanding all the time. Capita plans to use MuleSoft to enable integrations with other core systems for enterprise resource planning, finance, and human resources, and to deploy Salesforce Engage, Salesforce CPQ, and Quip to simplify account planning and client quotes.

Within a couple of months of going live, the one CRM platform had already made a massive difference to client relationships, marketing campaigns, and sales performance. Capita now has end-to-end visibility of its pipeline and can see which propositions are proving most popular and the margins involved. “It used to take months to get a pipeline report. With Sales Cloud, it’s available in a dashboard in real-time all the time,” said Amla. “We’ve closed the air gap that used to exist between our forecasts and the actual sold total contract. This has a massive impact on our quarterly and annual results and helps us make more informed decisions.”

Salesforce dashboards now feature at every executive committee meeting at Capita. “That’s when it became real. When I switched from a static presentation to a live dashboard,” added Amla. “Every exec wanted a Salesforce log-in after that meeting!”

Helping clients saves lives and livelihoods during pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, Capita created a number of Sales Cloud dashboards to understand the impact on its business. “Within a couple of days, we could see which opportunities in the pipeline were still progressing and those that had stalled,” explained Amla. “It enabled us to be quite forensic across the entire Capita portfolio, which wouldn’t have been possible before.”

By boosting visibility and agility across its business, Capita was able to help clients respond more quickly to the pandemic. For example, it enabled one client to scale up its customer service team to handle a tenfold increase in call volumes and played a pivotal role in bringing retired clinicians back to the NHS during the crisis. “With Salesforce, we were able to help our clients save lives and livelihoods during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Amla. “It made it easier for us to provide a pan-Capita response and co-ordinate teams in different divisions.”

Scaling up marketing to meet increased demand for content

Communicating these end-to-end capabilities to new and existing clients was a priority for the marketing team during the pandemic. With Pardot, Capita was able to quickly mobilise pan-Capita campaigns and respond to increased demand from the sales team for more marketing content. Within a month, the team deployed more than 130,000 pieces of communication through email and social channels and organised 16 webinars.

Pardot has also helped Capita understand how different marketing outputs are consumed and their impact on lead conversion. “You need to see what works otherwise you can’t repeat it,” said Wade. “With Pardot, we can get smarter at attribution modelling and support the buying cycle more effectively. It’s helped bring marketing and sales closer together.”

Evaluating marketing performance isn’t just important for ROI but also team morale. “With Pardot, we can show people the impact of their work with real numbers,” added Wade. “It enables us to deliver a richer consumer experience across multiple channels and frees up the team to focus on creating great content and engaging with clients.”

Capita made the decision to use Pardot, to give it more visibility and freedom across its divisions, and to better empower its marketing and sales teams. As part of the Advanced solution, Capita has access to Pardot Business Units, which lets it partition and manage data for each brand, and market to each brand’s customers in a highly targeted way. “With Pardot Business Units, we can successfully drive cross- and up-sell opportunities,” added Wade.

Pardot Advanced unlocks greater granularity into marketing analytics too: the team can consolidate data from all Pardot Business Units accurately and without manual intervention. Another feature of Pardot Advanced is Pardot Einstein. The AI-powered insights in Capita’s campaign performance helps the team better understand which customer segments are highly engaged, and where to focus campaign efforts.

Likewise, Pardot Einstein helps the sales team understand which sales leads to prioritise. Capita also uses Salesforce Engage to empower sales with pre-approved marketing content to send to prospects and customers. “Not only does this boost efficiency for sales,” said Wade, “but the team can use real-time alerts to engage with prospects ahead of competitors.”

Capita makes people’s lives easier

More than 1600 people now use Salesforce at Capita; for one division, it has even completely replaced email. “One of the leadership team just uses Chatter for collaborating on business development activities,” explained Amla. “Salesforce has become embedded in the business really quickly and is now an institutional part of how we work at Capita.”

As Capita continues to expand its one CRM initiative to more teams and capture more data, it will be able to deliver greater value to its clients. “With Salesforce, we can unlock a single view of all our projects and interactions, which helps us bring the best of Capita to every client challenge and create better outcomes for more people around the world,” said Amla.