A positive customer experience is based on a number of internal processes that must be mastered 100%. Telecommunications operator SWAN is a pioneer in the use of Salesforce in Slovakia. The company has been using Salesforce for 15 years in the B2B area when serving large corporate clients. Lukáš Koller, Sales Director at SWAN, explained which functions make life easier for salespeople and the product department.
SWAN is one of the first Salesforce users in Slovakia. Could you tell us something about the beginnings of Salesforce adoption in your company?
SWAN provides fixed services and mobile services. About half of our revenue is B2B and wholesale, so we are quite strongly focused on corporate customers. We decided on Salesforce back in 2008. We started with it at a time when there were no clouds yet. Salesforce was a CRM and a platform.
At that time, we were consolidating companies in several countries, including Slovakia, and we needed to merge everything into the most unified platform possible. We had American shareholders who recommended Salesforce to us as a rising star that we could adopt. The preparatory phase lasted about two years, then we launched live operations.
What does Salesforce mean for SWAN today?
Today, we’re trying to do the complete customer lifecycle gambling data japan within Salesforce. We use it as a CRM, we use it for opportunities, and everything else. Right now, we have all the systems that we used before programmed into Salesforce.
Salesforce can capture virtually all company processes, which is then reflected in the customer experience. Could you describe what Salesforce covers for you?
We focused primarily on ensuring that the customer is well served. A well-served customer means well-being on the customer’s side, but also internally. It means that people from individual company departments can easily find what they need in the system, have a clear workflow, know what awaits them, and can also communicate with the external environment using one system.
It’s great when every marketer has an app in their pocket on their phone that they can look into and find out anything they need to know about their customers or potential customers.
An important part of the platform is the product catalog, where enterprise apps are rarely available through app stores. the product and its variants are clearly defined for everything we do.
Each product has a so-called provisioning plan and we can take a snapshot of each moment of implementation – we can see when it will be, how it will be, who is responsible for it, what is happening, etc.
Most of our customers are banks, insurance companies and other large B2B customers who have custom solutions. For these cases, we first had an external application, which we scrapped and programmed in Salesforce. Today, it is a standard part of our workflow. Some business cases have to be approved by me, some by the CEO or CFO. We approve several units a day, but I do it from my phone, without needing a computer when I am on the go.
I assume Salesforce is not the only system SWAN uses
We really have a lot of other systems that the company needs. We have an external DMS, everything is connected to Salesforce. So we have contracts and documents stored with us, but employees, depending on what permissions they have, can find them through Salesforce. Nobody goes into the DMS like an application, we click everything and save it through Salesforce and the DMS is just a repository.
We also use an OSS system for network documentation, service flow, circuits, etc., which we use when servicing customers or setting up new services.
We have a lot of such systems integrated in Salesforce. There thailand data is the entire customer lifecycle, not only the provisioning and de-provisioning of the service, but also support. And this is the area in which we innovate the most.
What do you plan to improve in the future?
Today we already have a customer portal for B2B customers, where they can see some data pulled from Salesforce. They can see their services, their status, invoices. They can also see the progress of resolving problems and requests, which is very important.