To serve SMEs you have to understand their challenges. CapitalBox puts customers at the heart of everything it does to help them grow, survive unexpected roadblocks, and thrive in their local communities.

“When customers come to us, they’ve most likely been turned away by banks. They’re looking for support, and they don’t want to waste a second,” revealed Darius Kudarauskas, Head of Digital Marketing at CapitalBox. “We needed to empower our people with all the information they need to serve customers as quickly as possible.”

CapitalBox is a lean company with a start-up mentality. To preserve its culture during rapid growth, it needed a central platform to take information out of silos and make it actionable for everyone.

After evaluating the solutions on the market, the team ran a proof of concept on Salesforce, implementing Service Cloud to provide a single source of truth with the functionality to support customers across multiple channels.

CapitalBox worked with an implementation partner and used Trailhead to upskill internally, turning to the Salesforce user community, and free online webinars for quick tips and advice.

“Trailhead helped accelerate our journey when we were growing quickly,” explained Varneckiene. “We now have the flexibility and agility to continuously adapt and improve operations in line with how the business evolves, without needing to involve the IT team on a daily basis.”

This agility proved particularly useful when GDPR was introduced. CapitalBox could simply apply regulations and security policies in Salesforce to achieve compliance – something that would have been impossible when working from spreadsheets.

And spreadsheets are truly a thing of the past. CapitalBox has integrated Service Cloud with other key systems to empower staff with visibility of its pipeline, customer records, partners, payments, and collections from one central platform. Any member of staff can now see the full customer history at a glance and track every step of their journey.

However new customer leads come into CapitalBox – directly through the website, via its partner network or service-to-service APIs – they’re captured automatically in Salesforce. The sales team starts working on them alongside the marketing department, which is responsible for converting and retaining customers with regular and relevant communications.

When the lead converts, it’s seamlessly passed to a loan officer to work with the customer on analyzing their needs and finding the right product to support their business long-term.

“We want to do what’s best for the customer – today and in the future,” said Varneckiene. “The only part of the customer journey that doesn’t directly happen in Salesforce is the financial calculations. Our job is to give the customer a seamless, stress-free experience during a difficult time for their business.”

When the customer is ready to sign the contract, Salesforce generates an offer and AppExchange solution, DocuSign, captures their signature digitally in seconds.

To continuously improve operations, CapitalBox uses dashboards, reporting, and data analytics. Salesforce dashboards track the volume of calls, help to predict cashflow for the coming weeks and months, and monitor customer payment behaviour to flag risks.

Data is also helping the marketing team to identify the best touchpoints in the customer journey to run campaigns, and in the future, the team is planning to explore Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to automate email campaigns.

“Becoming more data driven is helping us to make smarter business decisions. Every user can go and find the data they need, which is great for the curious like me!” commented Kudarauskas. “One of the great strengths of the Salesforce platform is that you don’t need to have IT skills to use it efficiently, it’s very accessible for less techy users.”

For users who need access to data to support functions like cash flow analysis, reconciliation tools, and payments events, CapitalBox is using the Lightning Platform and custom objects and tools to give them a pared back version of Salesforce. They can access only the functionality they require, which is more cost effective for the company and straightforward for staff.

Partner relationships have also improved with Salesforce, which streamlines onboarding and negotiations.

“The partner relationship isn’t too different from how we interact with customers. We use Salesforce to track communications, reach out at the right touchpoints, and sign contracts,” revealed Varneckiene. “The partner portal integrates with Service Cloud to streamline lead management and track how many sales come from each partner. They can also monitor the health of their portfolio, and drill down into performance metrics at an employee level.”

When it comes to tracking its own performance, CapitalBox has seen impressive results. Since implementing Salesforce, it has seen significant revenue growth without increasing headcount, and the customer base has grown by up to 40%.

Customers are also getting a better service, with cases handled 2.4 times faster in Service Cloud than they were previously. NPS has increased by 33 points, and stress levels are low.

“When we chose Salesforce, we found the right solution to scale our business seamlessly without bottlenecks. Today, our team wouldn’t know what to do without Salesforce. We collaborate better and our processes are smooth and efficient,” explained Varneckiene.