ABSYZ provides ‘wow’ customer and employee experiences with Salesforce

ABSYZ is a Systems Integrator specialising in the AB to YZ of Salesforce implementation across industries. The company offers Salesforce consulting, implementation, and reselling services, and also lists over seven products and bolt solutions on Salesforce AppExchange.

ABSYZ started in a two-bedroom apartment in Hyderabad in 2011; today, it is a global firm with offices in four countries, over 300 employees, and an impressive 8000 sq. ft delivery centre in Hyderabad.

ABSYZ credits its steady growth to accelerated digital transformations across industries, coupled with the rise of remote working. “We have worked on more projects in the last two years than we did in the last five, developing digital tools that will support remote working,” says Balesh Lakshminarayanan, Co-founder, ABSYZ.

As a Platinum Salesforce implementation partner, ABSYZ naturally goes the extra mile to delight customers. “We continuously engage with our customers to understand requirements in detail so we can deliver exactly what they want. We don’t want to deliver just good experiences, but ‘wow’ ones,” says Lakshminarayanan.

But the company was hindered in this vision by a patchwork of tools across various functions, and manual methods of capturing and tracking data. “We had to upgrade our tech stack to achieve our ambitious vision. As a Salesforce implementation partner, and given our passion for all things Salesforce, using this solution to manage our operations was the obvious choice,” says Lakshminarayanan.

“We knew we could leverage Salesforce, which is easy to use, secure, and scalable, to deliver these ‘wow’ experiences.”

Today, at ABSYZ, every function, from sales and operations to HR and finance, runs on Salesforce. The team is constantly customising and innovating on the platform.

“As a Salesforce customer and partner, we use Salesforce to not only make our processes efficient but also learn all the ways the platform can be utilised to its full potential,” explains Nitish Kumar, VP – Salesforce Operations and Delivery.

The marketing team at ABSYZ uses Salesforce to automate campaign management, designing, customising, and scheduling campaigns on the solution. “We’ve saved a lot of time through campaign automation. What previously took a day to create, can now be done within three to four hours,” says Soujanya Rachakonda, Associate Director, Marketing, ABSYZ.

Leads from campaigns, the website, chatbot and business development teams flow into Salesforce, and are segregated and assigned to sales reps who manage opportunities through to closure and contract generation. The consolidation of leads on one platform has helped reduce lead leakage and increased the lead to conversion ratio by 35%.

With all sales activity data in one place, the team has increased visibility into the sales pipeline, enabling better opportunity management. “With structured sales data, our opportunity funnel is looking better than ever. All our renewals, contracts, and invoices are also tracked on the same platform. This streamlining and automation of the entire sales process has increased the productivity of our sales team by 25%,” says Pramukh Desai, Global Sales, ABSYZ.

“Thanks to the unified view we’re now actively tracking top-line - revenue, middle line - gross margins, and bottom-line - net profit, more effectively.”

This has also freed up valuable agent time to deliver more creative solutions to customers. With a 360-degree view of the customer, the team can make personalised recommendations, enhancing the overall experience.

With all customer data consolidated in one place, the project management team, in turn, has access to a single source of truth to manage projects and allocate resources.

“Post deal closure, the sales team seamlessly hands over to our project team for further action,” says Salil Konkar, VP - Strategy and Emerging Technologies. “Customised workflows trigger task notifications, helping us keep tabs on upcoming renewals. 

“With real-time data on resource utilisation and project status, we have insight into the overall health of projects and are able to make informed decisions.”

Timely notification on renewals also helps the Finance teams to stay on top of invoicing requirements. All contracting- and invoicing-related data flow through Salesforce. “With this streamlining, our account receivables has fallen to 8% in the last two years, from a previous 20%,” says Lakshminarayanan.

He adds: “All our teams have full visibility into customer data; with everyone on the same page, we now deliver a seamless and transparent customer experience. Our bar for customer experience and trust has been set very high.”

ABSYZ also uses Salesforce to simplify and enhance the employee experience. Employees can manage all data and processes, from recruitment to exit, on a rich employee intranet built on Experience Cloud. ABSYZ uses the intranet to track employee productivity, manage timesheets and expenses, upskill employees, and conduct evaluations. Chatter is used for internal collaboration.

The digitisation of the employee onboarding process has enabled remote employee inductions, so critical in the past couple of years. “This has also led to huge savings, reducing paper costs from INR 5 Lakhs a year to INR 50,000 a year,” says Nitish Kumar, VP – Salesforce Operations and Delivery, ABSYZ.

With the employees already being experts in Salesforce, the solution naturally saw quick adoption. “We have a 100% adoption rate of the solution across the organisation”, says Kumar. “The ease of use of the platform and its demonstrated impact has made the team enjoy their jobs more,” adds Lakshminarayanan.

The consolidation of all customer and operations-related data on one platform offers the leadership team rich insight into business performance; allowing them to actively measure KPIs and show continuous improvement.

“Everything from leads and opportunities to asset usage, employee utilisation, revenue realisation and invoices management is now measured,” says Lakshminarayanan. “When we were acquired by Youngsoft in 2019, the entire process was completed in a mere 45 days because almost all the data they needed was available in real-time through our custom reports and dashboards.”

ABSYZ is aiming for 100% automation of its processes, and will next build CLM, analytics and marketing capabilities on Salesforce.

The company also plans on expanding to more national and international markets by incorporating best practices, staying on top of market trends, and hiring the right talent. “Our goal stepping into 2022 is to grow from strength to strength. We hope to build a strong team of 1000 within the next two years and then – IPO in ten years,” concludes Lakshminarayanan.