- [Jessica] Hi, and thanks for joining us
for another Q and A Friday, a regular series
where we chat about issues facing manufacturing companies.
I'm Jessica Vodden, a team member here at Mountain Point,
and I'm joined by Andrew Rieser,
our cofounder and president,
and Julie Corrigan, one of our project managers.
- Hello. - Hey, Jessica.
How's it going?
Happy Friday.
- [Jessica] Happy Friday.
A few weeks ago, we did an episode
that was all about putting customer success
at the center of your operations,
and for those of you who are listening,
if you haven't checked that video out yet,
I definitely recommend it.
We talked a lot about making customer success
a part of your company's culture.
Today, with Julie, we're going to build on that idea
and show the concept in action,
kind of show some real-life solutions
to work this into your processes.
Julie, from what I understand,
you've been working for a while now with Lodge Cast Iron,
a company that really exemplifies that idea
of putting customer experience
at the forefront of everything that they do.
Can you tell us a little bit about why Lodge came to us,
and what they wanted to accomplish
in working with Mountain Point and using Salesforce?
- [Julie] Absolutely.
I started working with Lodge about this time last year,
after they had decided to go with Salesforce
as their tool of choice and platform of choice
for their customer service group.
Kind of on the opposite end of what we've seen
with a lot of other clients,
where they've chosen to implement Sales Cloud first,
Lodge was more customer focused,
and wanted to get their support team more organized,
more on one platform, more collaborative,
and so they went first
with the Service Cloud portion of Salesforce,
versus kind of doing the backward approach,
and now they're looking at doing the Sales Cloud.
Their main focus, originally,
was that their customer service team
just had a bunch of different spreadsheets
that they worked off of.
Their team of around eight customer service representatives
were working in silos,
and so they didn't have that communication
between each other.
Oftentimes customers would call in
and get one customer service rep,
and had just some issues getting the right information.
They would have to walk down to the accounting department,
or walk to the warehouse to get updates,
and so Salesforce, as a platform of choice,
was really the tool that kind of put them all together
so that they could communicate much more efficiently,
and therefore resulting in the customer experience,
both their online customers
who just purchase directly from them,
but also their big-box retailers.
They were servicing
all those different customer and client types,
and they wanted to give them
the best experience possible, as well.
They've really been able
to turn around their response times, be quicker,
and also internally, from an employee standpoint,
be able to monitor
when their highest call volume times were,
when they needed to staff more.
That's resulted in overall less overtime,
which everyone is happy about, as well.
The customer satisfaction has been raving, as well.
That was definitely their driver
for this first phase of their Salesforce implementation.
- [Jessica] Yeah, I love that.
I don't know that we have very many companies
or very many clients that actually start with Service Cloud,
and I think that just really paints a very clear picture
of Lodge putting customer service and customer focus
at the top of their list in how they wanna run the business.
Just a very cool anecdote there.
I know when we were preparing for today's conversation
you mentioned that one of the keys to really helping them
provide this level of customer support
and this level of care
was to integrate various data streams.
You mentioned they were keeping things
in a lot of different spreadsheets,
stuff was in a lot of different places,
but now everything is centralized within their ERP system.
Can you tell me a little bit about that solution
and why you think that consolidation is so important?
- [Julie] Absolutely, Jessica.
A couple of different ways.
The Omni-Channel, inbound cases,
but also where that data and how they have access to it.
Like many companies, your customer service team
is not gonna have access to that back-end ERP system,
or their warehousing management system a lot of times,
and so, as part of this project,
we've utilized a middleware solution
to integrate with their ERP which,
from a customer service standpoint,
gave the customer service team more insight
into... all the account information.
A lot of times they were being requested
to update email addresses
or a mailing address on an account,
and they would have to go through multiple streams
to get the accounting team to do that,
as they didn't have access to their ERP system.
Part of that integration
was a two-way sync between Salesforce and their ERP,
which gave them insight into the account,
but we took it really a lot further
than just the account-level integration,
so now that customer service rep
can provide up-to-date information on orders, on shipments.
They have the UPS
or the whatever shipping vendor that they've selected,
they have that tracking data available to them,
and that is for all orders across the board,
not only their online customers,
but their big-box customers, as well.
They've got that information.
They also have all their products.
They can see open inventory.
They can see all the attributes of those products,
so if any kind of question comes in related to
if we place an order for 1,000 of this product,
how quick can we get it?
So, they can see what the back-order is,
and that's all visible now,
just within their Salesforce platform,
which is amazing for them.
It just has eliminated a lot of those extra calls
and tracking down information
so that they've got it all at their fingertips.
Additionally, we talked about
other kinds of inputs and channels
that they are being able to manage.
They had an info box that they all kind of worked out of,
or they would delegate emails
to their customer service team,
and they've been able to integrate that
using some of the standard Salesforce functionality
of Email-to-Case,
and really monitor and push out cases,
and email directly through Salesforce,
so they're no longer living and breathing
within Outlook or within a shared drive, sharing out files.
All of that information and activities are being captured
within the service cloud case functionality in Salesforce.
- [Jessica] That's amazing.
Do you have a couple of seconds?
Could you share your screen
and kind of show us what all of this looks like
from their perspective?
- [Julie] Absolutely, absolutely.
I would love to show it.
One of the things I'm really, really proud about with Lodge
is we've been working together for almost a year now.
We have built out some initial dashboards for them
so that once they started really utilizing them again,
they went live with their project integration middle of May,
so by the time June came around
they had some really great data capture.
They've got some great buy-in on their side.
Their customer service managers
are really excited about Salesforce,
and have taken it upon themselves
to also build out dashboards,
and they love seeing their data come to life.
One of the first things here you see
is one of the dashboards that they have put together,
just kind of slicing and dicing that data
about their cases that are coming in,
they're able to identify
when certain products are being returned more frequently,
and so therefore they can see, why is there a spike
in how many of these returns we've seen
on a certain product?
Is there something going on in the warehouse?
Just by looking at these dashboards
they are able to pinpoint small issues like that,
that may not be identified until later on in the process,
and they're saving the warehouse a ton of money
on that side, as well.
I just wanted to kind of showcase one of the dashboards.
We have other ones that they've been able to put together
from an executive standpoint,
but from a high level
the data that they're capturing
is really just giving them a lot of insights now
into their business processes,
as well as how their service team is reacting.
But I wanted to go into one of their accounts,
just to kind of showcase the data
that we're bringing in from their ERP system
that's really giving them a lot of insight.
Again, we've got their account information here.
They're able to see a report of this particular account
and how many products they've ordered in the last 12 months.
They can see that, and volume of sales is way up as well.
This report, of course, is loading
so I'm just gonna kind of gloss over that
as it takes its time loading in all that data.
But then, over here on the related list,
any time a sales rep is coming in
and they're getting a call from somebody
at this particular account,
they can look at all their most recent orders
and dive into that, obviously, and see more,
as well as their shipments.
If it's shipping via a trackable vendor,
they could click on that shipping link
and go ahead and dive in
to find where that package is, as well.
Then they can see any invoices,
any of the return authorizations
that have been placed against this account.
So, lots of valuable data here.
If there were any cases for this particular account,
and there isn't one on this one,
you would be able to go directly into the cases
and see any of the activity there.
Let me just see if I can pull up a quick
quick account that has a case on it
so that you can see a little bit clearer.
It's when you're doing a demo
that you can't always find the data,
but let me just go into a case
and you can kind of see what I'm talking about.
Some of their contact forms, as well,
that are out on their website,
are gonna come in here directly, as well,
using the Web-to-Case functionality.
We've used a lot of the different streams
that Salesforce has offered
to pull in their data from different sources.
This is kind of where the customer service rep
lives and breathes every day.
They're gonna get any information from the Web,
either that contact desk support form
or an email directly from a customer
using their info at Lodge email address,
and then they can respond directly from here.
They've got all the information.
They wanna go ahead and send an email out to that
that person who has requested the information.
They can do that here,
and then they've go the statuses across the top
to kind of track where they are.
As a customer service rep,
I can come in and look at all of my cases just for today.
I can look at the ones
that have unread emails associated to them.
Lot of different capabilities,
especially using some customized views,
and a bunch of different types of record types.
They also have returns, which is a big thing, I think,
in the manufacturing industry,
of being able
to do some of that claim processing and returns.
We also have returns in here,
and let me just find one of those
to kind of show you what that looks like.
I just pulled up one of the return types for the case.
This was just a different record type,
again using one of the functionalities within Salesforce,
but we did build out a custom flow
using that Return/Replace tab here,
which kind of walks you through
the customer service person
walks them through doing a return.
Either the return might be related
to a product that was on an order,
or it could be someone
who picked up their product at Target,
but called them direct and wanna return it.
Just being able to handle a bunch of different situations,
whether it's just your online customers
or your big-box retailers,
you can handle a bunch of different situations in that way.
Then, going into their return authorizations,
it's just another way of capturing
what information is being returned,
what types of products, potentially, are on that return,
and then customizing the different statuses.
Again, kind of touching back on
they were sharing spreadsheets with their QA department,
their warehouse,
whenever that product was received back on the return.
This way there is some workflow that is built in
so that when the customer service rep creates this return,
when it's actually received,
QA will be able to look at the pictures
or look at the actual product,
make sure it's the correct one,
determine what is the next step.
Do we credit this?
Do we just take it back
and put it in the seconds department?
Just a bunch of different ways that
before, they were either calling
or they were using a shared spreadsheet
out on a Dropbox or shared drive.
This has really centralized all of this,
and it now has made it reportable,
and that has been really essential to them.
One more thing I did wanna touch on,
just the product information.
This has been really, really helpful for them,
and they're looking, in a phase two,
to be able to create products within Salesforce
and push it to their ERP,
but right now it is just pulling it one way,
and it's giving them all that information
from their ERP system.
They're able to see any open orders
against an existing product that haven't been shipped yet,
and then also see any kind of inventory
that's available and on hand.
Great information
that before was buried a little bit deep in their ERP system
where they might not have access to it,
or something that wasn't up-to-date.
Their inventory that they're getting here
is actually more up-to-date than their ERP system
because it's getting pulled from their warehouse management.
It's really, really valuable to them
to be able to have all this data
integrated from their back-end systems
and make it accessible to the people that need to see it.
- [Jessica] That's awesome.
Couple of quick technical questions.
It looks like they're using Sage ERP.
Is that right?
- [Julie] That's correct.
- [Jessica] And what middleware did they use
to be able to sync all of this data so seamlessly?
- [Julie] They've used TIBCO Scribe
was their middleware solution,
which has been really easy to implement
from a mapping standpoint,
just syncing up with their SQL database in the backend
to Salesforce,
and then there's just a definition
of which fields map up to which ones in Salesforce
and pulling that data over.
- [Jessica] Awesome.
Well Julie, I know you're on a tight schedule today.
You've got a lot of meetings with clients,
so I don't wanna keep you too long.
Andrew, anything that you would like to add
before we wrap up this episode?
- [Andrew] I think the only thing I would add is,
first off, I think you guys did a great job
of telling the story around this,
the importance of integration and focusing on the customer,
and to kind of drive a point home.
What we've seen over the past three-plus years
in this manufacturing space,
and tends to be our recommendation moving forward,
is to start somewhere like in customer service,
or with Field Service Lightning, or Configure-Price-Quote,
for folks that are looking to do digital transformations
and levered in Salesforce
as the platform of choice for that.
I think that the ROI and the focus around the customer,
those, and more importantly,
kind of the interactions and processes
as it relates to your systems of record,
like your ERP systems,
that become invaluable, as we're seeing here.
We keep saying data is king,
and the more information
that can be brought to people's fingertips
the better customer service
and experience you'll be able to provide,
and answering questions, and identifying issues,
and resolving those faster, and having more collaboration.
All this is great,
and I think a great story that kind of tells that.
- [Jessica] Yeah, yeah, I completely agree.
Well, Julie, we will let you get back to your busy schedule.
We really appreciate it,
and thanks so much for showing us through the system.
For our viewers and listeners out there,
if you have a question you'd like us to answer,
or a topic that you want us to tackle, please let us know.
This is definitely a chance
for you to get free expert advice and insight
with no obligations on your part.
You can just send us
your question or suggestions for topics,
and we'll talk them through.
Feel free to hit us up on our social media channels,
email us, or call us.
Julie and Andrew, thanks again, and have a happy Friday.
- [Julie] Thank, Jessica.
Have a great weekend.
- [Andrew] Thanks, you too.