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.

efex activates their data to provide a better customer experience and reduce their cost to serve. The introduction of online ordering also frees reps up to focus on higher-value transactions.

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 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.

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%.