Corporate Express Adopts Salesforce for Integrated CRM to Improve Customer Retention and Manage 7.3 Million Service Transactions Per Year

Challenge

• Corporate Express, one of the world's largest business-to-business suppliers of essential office and computer products and services, needed to streamline customer data handling to maximize customer satisfaction and sales
• The company also needed to maximize sales and service effectiveness by sharing customer information across locations and departments
• Corporate Express wanted to standardize service and support operations at 28 call centers
• By streamlining data handling, the company wanted to maximize agent-assisted selling and customer care opportunities

Solution

• Corporate Express selected Salesforce for an integrated CRM solution with Salesforce SFA, Service & Support, and Marketing
• Salesforce Enterprise Edition was deployed to 5,000 users in 15 countries worldwide
• Salesforce Service & Support was deployed in 3.5 months to 1,300 Customer Experience Center and Operational Support users in the field
• Salesforce made it easy to develop 75 unique customer case types, each with its own set of rules for escalations, notifications, and approvals
• The company also set up an integrated desktop for customer service representatives with Cisco Agent Desktop and Salesforce

Results

• Salesforce manages 7.3 million transactions per year via phone and case management activity
• Corporate Express also uses Salesforce to track 600,000 cases a year to measure performance, analyze trends, and identify root cause
• The company enjoys higher conversion rates for new customers, and better retention of existing customers
• Management is better able to track and measure sales rep activity 
• Cisco integration eliminated double-data entry to valuable time for sales and service staff
• With full access to sales-opportunity data, customer care agents have become an extension of the sales force