efex uses data and automation to reduce cost to serve.

efex provides a complete suite of IT services to help small and medium-sized businesses improve productivity, efficiency, and growth.

To drive efficient growth, efex needed to make customer interactions easier and more efficient and reduce their cost to serve.

efex has grown organically and through acquisition, steadily building their portfolio of products and services and a network of 20 branches across metro and regional cities. This has put the business in a strong position to grow existing customer accounts and win new ones. To take advantage of this opportunity, the board issued a mandate for the business to transform.

Manual processes and duplication of data and effort impacted productivity and inflated the cost of doing business. They also impacted the customer experience. Every time a customer had a question or wanted to place an order, they had to pick up the phone or send an email. Not only was this inconvenient, it meant sales reps were spending too much time selling products like laptops and printers rather than high-value services.

efex wanted to make it easier and more efficient for customers to access support and order new products. This was important not only to reduce costs but also to differentiate itself in a competitive market.

“Many IT companies are hard to deal with. We wanted to make things simple and give people a consumer-style experience where they can raise requests online, track where they’re up to, and everything is automated as much as possible,” said Nick Sheehan, Founder and CEO, efex.

efex establishes a foundation of data to automate sales and service.

efex used Salesforce prior to their transformation and chose to enhance and expand on their current deployment. One of their first priorities was to improve the quality of their data and establish a single view of each customer in Sales Cloud.

This data helps sales and service teams to personalise customer interactions and also provides a foundation for automation.

For example, in the future, efex plans to use Einstein Bots to provide automated responses to service requests. These responses would be grounded in the business’s data to ensure customers receive relevant and personalised support.

Sales team automates quoting and increases efficiency with CPQ

In its early days, the efex business operated as a printer reseller. The business continues to sell printers and other IT products and uses CPQ to create quotes and contract renewals quickly and accurately. This enables sales reps to handle contract renewals without the need to engage a pre-sales consultant. It has also reduced the risk of misquoting and reduced the time to prepare quotes and contracts by at least 50%.

Online ordering and self-service enhances customer experience and reduces the cost to serve.

efex has introduced an online portal that makes it easier and more efficient for customers to transact with the business. The portal integrates with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to provide customers with visibility of orders and cases.

Customers can now place and track new orders through the portal. Orders are sent straight to procurement, eliminating the need for the sales team to touch every order. In addition, every time a customer orders a product through the portal, their service agreement is automatically updated to include any necessary support costs. This protects efex against revenue leakage and protects customers from any surprise price increases down the line.

efex set to reimagine service using AI.

efex has most recently rolled out Service Cloud. This has provided the support team with a single view of the customer and central place to manage cases via email and phone. The business plans to switch on new capabilities like live chat and omni-channel routing which will increase the efficiency of support.

Customer Service AI is also on efex’s roadmap. An estimated 80% of customer queries received by the business are transactional questions or requests that could be solved with the help of generative AI. This provides a massive opportunity to increase productivity and efficiently scale support.

“People are more open to interacting with AI solutions like bots because they see that these solutions really do work. I also think AI will help us deliver better customer outcomes for a vast majority of issues while freeing people up to focus on more exciting tasks,” said Sheehan.