Established in 1988, the Ajman Free Zone is home to more than 1000s businesses, ranging from sole traders and SMEs to global conglomerates. Its vision is to become a leading global center, and the biggest contributor for achieving prosperity for Ajman residents by 2030.

In the past, the organization anisation was reliant on manual registration processes, which were time-consuming for both employees and customers, particularly as customers often had to attend in person. “We needed to make it easier for potential customers to do business with us,” said Alshaya. “We decided to go digital to eliminate travel and lengthy walk-in visits for our customers.”

As a long-term Salesforce user, Jameela Abdulla, Director of IT Operations, understood the power of the platform. In 2018, Ajman Free Zone started a major digitalization project, based on Salesforce. “We selected Salesforce because we wanted a flexible and intuitive system, but didn’t want to invest in physical infrastructure,” explained Jameela. “Salesforce offers advanced inbuilt features, simple integration, and it’s easy to use.”

Ajman Free Zone now uses a combination of Sales Cloud,Pardot, Community Cloud, and Service Cloud to manage customer leads, opportunities, queries, cases and communications.

The customer registration process now starts with Ajman Free Zone’s online community, built on Community Cloud. The community empowers businesses to perform all registration activities digitally from anywhere in the world, including registering the business, applying for work visas and permits,and acquiring warehouse space.

The organization is also launching a partner community for its B2B arm, where agents referring customers to Ajman Free Zone can manage their leads and register for commission. As well as providing greater transparency, the community will encourage closer relationships with partners. “Our online communities give us a huge competitive advantage, and as a result, new leads has increased massively in just the last four months!” said Jameela.

With this growing volume of business to manage, Ajman Free Zone needed to get smarter about sales and pipeline management quickly. Today, its 100-strong sales team uses Sales Cloud to streamline the customer journey.

When a prospect registers their interest on the Ajman Free Zone website, the lead is captured by Salesforce and automatically fed through the sales funnel . With thousands of leads tracked every month, Ajman Free Zone has the visibility to get more predictive about its business.

From conversion ratios to licensee renewal volumes, Ajman Free Zone can now forecast the future. Richer insights help the company to understand which of its services are most in demand, where its customers are based, and user performance. “By monitoring how many transactions the sales team can handle, we can make sure we optimize their workload and allocate more resources to make sure every customer is getting the best possible service,” said Sheikha Al Nuaimi Executive Director of Sales and Marketing sector.

But sales is not the only department getting smarter: the customer service team now handles customer complaints and cases in Service Cloud. With 100s cases coming in every month, the team of 50 can prioritize the most urgent cases and high profile customers, and has improved response times by 90%.

With customer satisfaction surveys sent and captured via Service Cloud, the team can ensure customers remain happy.“Keeping our customers happy is very important to us – we get a lot of business from word-of-mouth referrals,” said Fatima Salem - Acting General Director of the AFZ. “We need to protect our reputation for offering a seamless and easy customer experience.”