From 4 days to 4 minutes—how Vonage uses automation to respond faster
At Vonage, connecting the world starts with connecting business teams.
As communication evolves at light speed, Vonage provides the infrastructure for businesses to keep up. A global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, Vonage strives to create technology so good that users forget it’s there.
But the influx of innovative new technologies from a series of major acquisitions resulted in a handful of inevitable challenges. The new tools and systems allowed the company to serve customers in new ways, but they also produced siloed datasets and manual processes. Teams lacked a full view into the data profiles of the customers they served.
“What we’ve always done has gotten us to where we are today,” said Tara Zaleski, Senior Director of Business Services. “Unifying and automating how our people and systems work together will help us to accelerate execution as we continue to grow.”
Let’s take a closer look at how Zaleski and team used Einstein 1, one integrated CRM platform, to unite teams around a single view of their customers while managing change at scale.
The best way to scale a business is to let the data drive decision-making. Data is truth, right? It just doesn’t lie.
Tara ZaleskiSenior Director, Business Services
In Their Own Words...
In this short video (2:13), learn how Vonage uses Einstein 1 to accelerate the world’s ability to connect.
1. Bring people and processes together with a digital headquarters.
To more efficiently get information and answers to its team members, Vonage decided to create a centralized communication hub, or digital HQ, using Slack.
For example, when a sales representative enters a question into a channel, Slack automatically searches for the answer and outsources the question to Confluence if needed. By streamlining this workflow, Vonage was able to reduce the time and effort it took to collect and verify information, enabling teams to be more efficient and productive while serving customers faster.
And with Slack integrated with its Service Cloud -powered contact center application, team members have more flexibility in how and when they interacted with customers. For developers, Slack provides the tools needed to communicate efficiently and securely to automate workflows.
“A lot of our developer teams use Slack regularly,” said Savinay Berry, EVP of Product and Engineering. “They’ve put in scripts inside the different channels in Slack for our deployment processes.”
2. Unite sales teams around a shared view of customer data.
While Slack workflows helped optimize communications, Vonage’s many acquisitions introduced integration challenges between legacy systems and their existing Salesforce instances. Customer data was siloed across different systems.
Vonage implemented MuleSoft to link data from multiple systems with a unique identifier with help from Salesforce Professional Services. This gave sales and business teams a complete view of their accounts and set them up to build stronger customer relationships.
“We will use MuleSoft as the intermediary to help our systems talk to each other,” said Zaleski. “We have very successful integration layers today, but we really want to take it to the next level with the MuleSoft platform.”
Vonage also consolidated accounts across instances in its data warehouse, a virtual storage center for customer data. Instead of manually searching for customer account information in each system, teams can view it all in one place, resulting in faster, more consistent support and better cross-selling across business lines.
3. Automate complex processes to boost efficiency and productivity.
With customer data in one place, Vonage sales teams were able to more quickly understand the needs of customers and prospects.
To streamline its quoting process, Vonage now uses Sales Cloud to unify sales operations, quickly building custom workflows with Flow's low-code tools. With simplified quote creation and management, provisioning time has gone from four days to just minutes, while also reducing the opportunity for human error.
“Sales agents can easily pull products from a product catalog that are already configured,” said Zaleski. “Once the quote is created, it’s automatically sent to our customers.”
The Salesforce Platform’s low-code building capabilities enable employees without coding experience to become “citizen developers,” according to Berry. “They just need to understand how to use workflows so they can drag and drop different things.”
The benefit of the Salesforce Platform is that anyone across the business can build quickly with low code and then use code to extend and customize. This frees engineers and IT to focus on creating the innovative new products Vonage is known for.
4. Consolidate data into one system for better visualization.
For Vonage to gain a true 360-degree view of customers, the company also needed to visualize and present its data in a way that made sense to multiple teams — from sales operations to executive leadership.
That’s where Tableau comes in.
Vonage’s Business Intelligence team captures data across business units and visualizes it on a single dashboard. Executives present their updates, strategies, and decisions directly from Tableau, saving preparation time and adding clarity to their presentations.
What I love most about Tableau is that it's user-friendly. When executives need to provide readouts on their organization, they simply pull up their Tableau dashboard and use it to present. No more fancy spreadsheets and presentations where they need to dump and manipulate data. It's there for them.
Tara ZaleskiSenior Director, Business Services
The sales operations and go-to-market (GTM) support teams can better forecast and plan pipeline across multiple Salesforce instances by visualizing sales and operations data. CRM Analytics sends sales teams automated notifications around opportunity scoring, pipeline changes, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities. With these AI-powered insights, teams can make more informed decisions for their go-to-market strategies.
Connection built for the future.
Shaping the future of telecommunications requires vision, and for Vonage, it’s all about dreaming big.
“How do we communicate with each other in the next hundred years, or in the next 50 years?” said Berry. “You have to think that big, but you also have to start small and take tangible steps to get there.”
And taking steps toward making big dreams a reality requires close partnership. That’s why today, Vonage works with experts from Salesforce Professional Services. From integrating new and legacy systems to training team members on best practices, Salesforce Professional Services helps the company get the most value from its Salesforce ecosystem.
Vonage also uses Salesforce’s Premier Success Plan for expert coaching sessions tailored to its unique needs and business outcomes. This partnership has accelerated the company’s adoption of new products, empowering teams to work more effectively.
