Legend Corporation speeds transformation and growth supported by powerful automation
Legend Corporation positions itself for efficient growth and increases e-commerce revenue by 30% month-on-month.
Founded in 1962, Legend Corporation is an Australian group of companies operating within the electrical, electronics, and industrial products sector. The group manufactures and distributes a wide range of products, including everything from power plugs to specialist tools for the utilities sector.
Legend Corporation prides itself on best-in-class customer service and on-time delivery of more than 50,000 product lines. And these accomplishments are all the more incredible considering that until recently, every single order had to be manually handled by the customer service team.
“We are in a traditional industry where things have been done the same way for a long time. However, as digital natives have come into the industry, there’s been a push to buy online, and that push has been accelerated by the pandemic,” said Alison Murphy, Head of Digital Transformation at Legend Corporation.
Murphy joined the business to lead its move away from legacy systems and enhance its e-commerce capabilities. Salesforce has played a key role in this digital transformation and set the business up for efficient growth.
Reducing risk and complexity with one trusted platform
For Legend Corporation to provide an efficient and seamless e-commerce experience, it had to modernise its technology environment. The business was completely dependent on an 18-year-old proprietary system incorporating order management, product information management (PIM), CRM, pricing, freight, and more.
The legacy system presented a number of challenges. It limited the business’ ability to automate or provide customers with visibility of pricing and stock. It also posed a significant risk as it had been built in an ageing programming language and only one employee knew how to manage it.
To overcome these challenges and avoid similar issues in the future, Legend Corporation sought out best-in-class solutions for key requirements such as order management, CRM, and an end-to-end integration strategy.
“You can put all these amazing systems in place, but if they are sitting in isolation it doesn't help anybody,” said Murphy. “So a big driver in our decision to choose Salesforce was MuleSoft and the ability to bring all our customer data and interactions into one platform.”
With its API-led connectivity, MuleSoft has enabled the development of a completely integrated solution encompassing Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Revenue Cloud, Akeneo PIM, SAP, Magento, and freight and pricing microservices hosted on AWS.
As a result of this integration, information like real-time customer-specific pricing, order status, and stock availability can be surfaced across multiple platforms by customers and employees. These include the business’s e-commerce sites.
MuleSoft has also accelerated project delivery through the rapid development and re-use of APIs. For instance, Legend Corporation completed delivery of products to Salesforce in a single day through 67% re-use of the APIs developed to integrate Akeneo PIM to SAP and Magento.
As a result, Legend Corporation moved off its legacy systems in two years as opposed to the three years initially estimated. The business also launched 12 new websites in under 12 months to enhance its e-commerce capabilities. It has further leveraged the APIs created to introduce new innovations as well, including the ability for customers to create their own accounts online.
Increasing productivity with intelligent automation
One of the first steps in Legend Corporation’s transformation was to set up Sales Cloud and establish a complete view of each customer. This includes detailed information such as customer credit limits and preferences which can be used to automate workflow and approvals.
For example, some customers have a rule that orders should only be processed if items are in stock. So now when orders come in, this rule is applied automatically and orders can be adjusted without any manual intervention.
Through this and other automations, Legend Corporation can now process up to 65% of electronic data exchange (EDI) orders touch-free. Customer service workload has also been reduced by approximately 1,000 hours per annum, freeing the team up to handle higher-value activities.
Automation has also led to a better customer experience. For example, customers no longer need to wait for the office to open and ring the customer service team to find out the status of open orders. They can now email the business at any time for automated updates. Incredibly, this solution was conceived and pushed live within a week through the re-use of existing APIs.
“In the past, a significant number of calls to the customer service team were simple enquiries like ‘where’s my order’. We’ve now reduced those calls by half, which has given the team time to learn more about our products and have more valuable customer conversations,” said Murphy.
Optimising the buyer experience
Legend Corporation’s new websites offer a whole new level of customer convenience. New customers can visit the sites and create their own accounts. They can also enter in their Australian Business Number and gain immediate approval to access trade pricing.
Integrated with Sales Cloud and Revenue Cloud via MuleSoft, the sites recognise returning customers and serve up their specific pricing. They also enable real-time visibility of stock through integration with the company’s ERP.
Orders placed through the sites or through EDI are processed automatically, meaning the warehouse can start fulfilling them right away. Meanwhile, email and phone orders take more time.
“When customers email an order, it automatically creates a case in Service Cloud which helps us manage and track that order through to completion. We continue to optimise this process but know from our reporting in Salesforce it still takes around five hours and we use this metric to show customers it’s in their best interest to order online,” said Murphy.
Legend Corporation is already hitting its targets for the adoption of e-commerce with $1 million dollars of revenue through the channel in the first 12 months of the sites going live. One customer segment is leading the charge with 30% month-on-month revenue growth from e-commerce.
Delivering success now and into the future
Legend Corporation has brought employees along its digital transformation journey by engaging super users and working with them to ensure teams have the tools and training to succeed.
It is now continuing to harness the power of the Salesforce platform, supported by its consulting partner Apisero. In addition to optimising current processes, the business is exploring the use of new features like Service Cloud Einstein and Next Best Action, which will help it to harness the power of AI.
“We’re now in a great position with best-in-class apps to support a growing business,” said Murphy. “We’re also just getting to the exciting part where we can really optimise our processes and get the best results out of everything we do. That includes harnessing the power of AI to anticipate customer needs and personalise our interactions.”
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