ICS

The Brief

It’s common for growing businesses to experience inefficiencies in the way that that they do things. There’s always that question… surely there’s a better way to do this? Essentially this occurs when the input required to do a task or process, highly outweighs the outputs for the business.

ICS had been using Salesforce for a number of years as a way to store data. However, there were multiple processes, excel spreadsheets and other tasks which didn’t work coherently, and they needed a solution to bring them all together.

Knowledge within the organisation on how Salesforce could work and the benefits it could offer was limited, and so this was the first thing to address.

 “Working with M4B allowed us to understand how we could improve our existing business processes by taking advantage of some of the key functionality within Salesforce. By automating certain tasks within the business, we have saved a considerable amount of time, which we now spend on serving our customers better.”
Andy Stevens – ICS Marketing Manager

The work

Step 1: Salesforce discovery workshop

The first thing that we needed to address was the lake of knowledge of what Salesforce is and the power it has to transform the way a business operations.

We held a discovery workshop which aimed to give a broad overview of some of the key Salesforce functionality that they had at their fingertips. We touched upon workflow automation, approval processes, data integrity tools such as validation rules, reports, dashboards and app exchange plugins which could add value to the way they work.

Once the various teams began to understand the functionality, ideas around how things could be done better started to flow.

We began to map out their current setup/processes and started to think smarter, providing solutions on the spot on how time could be saved by using Salesforce functionality.

Allocating time to discover the features of Salesforce, how the business is currently operating and how it would ideally like to see itself operate, is key when implementing smarter ways of working within Salesforce.

Step 2: Testing & Implementation

After constructing various flow charts and brandishing sticky notes left right and centre, we had clear picture of how ICS would implement the smarter processes we thrashed out during the discovery phase.

We didn’t want to disrupt the day to day usage of the system and so we utilised the Salesforce sandbox test environment to develop some of the new functionality agreed.

Improvements were made to layouts, additional fields were built to store new data from excel sheets, validation rules ensured data integrity was upheld, automated workflows eliminated a number of the manual tasks once required and formulas allowed complex financial data to be calculated right within Salesforce, which subsequently fed into important reports.

After thorough testing, the smarter processes were successfully rolled out.

The Results

An average of 50 hours saved per week by implementing smarter processes within Salesforce.

Staff morale noticeably higher as they have more time to focus on areas that make a real difference to themselves, the organisation and most importantly the customer.

Improvement in Salesforce knowledge across the organisation has led to a continuation of smarter ideas being fed in from various departments, which ultimately aim to improve the customer experience.

Cleaner data has allowed for more insightful reports and dashboards to be developed, providing members across the organisation to make informed business decisions.