CRM Cloud Computing

Salesforce.com has been one of cloud computing’s biggest champions through devising and delivering its cloud-based CRM, collaboration and platform services to its customers. Delivering an exceptional customer experience is arguably the most important part of the firm’s business.

Salesforce.com’s (News - Alert) products have become so popular and integral to its clients’ business processes that by 2007 the need to supply superior customer service and support outstripped the capabilities of its contact center solutions, reports Radha Penekelapati, director, global support operations.

Naturally enough Salesforce.com chose to “walk the walk” and decide on a cloud-based solution for its network of 12 contact centers, located in the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, Australia, India, Japan, the Philippines and Ireland: as opposed to buying premises-licensed software. It has some 800 agents at its worldwide facilities.

In May 2008 Salesforce.com began looking into suppliers and finished the process in October 2008. In February 2009 it signed a contract with LiveOps.

Salesforce.com chose LiveOps (News - Alert) On-Demand Contact Center Platform for its scalability, global skills-based routing and real-time visibility into activities, processes, agents and calls across centers through a comprehensive and customizable dashboard, reports the firm. LiveOps also offers 100 percent inbound call recording across all locations and instant access to playbacks directly from within Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud. LiveOps can also stay ahead of Salesforce.com’s business requirements: for example by enabling management to move bundles of calls from one call center to another and make administrative changes on the fly.

Since the first contact center went live with LiveOps, in April 2009, Salesforce.com has leveraged several advanced features in the platform. One of the most important is identifying customers based on their incoming phone numbers and route their contacts to agents who already know them, anywhere in the world, without customers’ input. This feature permits Salesforce.com to build customer relationships, improves their satisfaction and shortens call time and with this reducing costs by not requiring customers to start from scratch each time they call.

Additionally, Salesforce.com leverages a dynamic 24/7 failure recovery system in all contact centers. The company also routes calls from end users and from advanced Salesforce.com users to different teams to ensure it matches the product expertise of the callers with the agents.

The results have exceeded expectations. The LiveOps platform has handled these scenarios successfully, says Salesforce.com, allowing business operations staff to make routing changes on the fly using administrative tools. It enables the CRM firm to substantially improve key performance metrics including reduced average call handling time and improved first-call resolution rates through the skills-based routing features.

Since the Salesforce.com deployed LiveOps, it has opened multiple new centers. LiveOps helps keep overhead minimal when adding agents to its global platform.

Salesforce.com has been pleased with the LiveOps platform. It says it will continue to leverage it to serve its customers’ needs wherever, whenever.

 “LiveOps, combined with the Service Cloud, has helped make our cloud-based service and support operations agile and scalable,” says Penekelapati. “There’s no letting up when it comes to ensuring customer success.”