Safexpress is transforming customer experience with Salesforce

Logistics manager Raj successfully schedules pickup of his goods from 40 different plants across the country, to be delivered to his vast distributor network. He has all his reports at the click of a button and gets regular updates on their movements – a huge relief for a consignment this size.

This is possible because Safexpress has been working to offer customers like him a seamless customer experience in the logistics space.

Safexpress is a leading supply chain and logistics service provider in India. It services over 30,000 pincodes, next only to the Indian Postal Services. The company's unified B2B solution covers express distribution, third-party logistics, and warehousing services.

“Our vision is to be the market leader and provide a customer experience that lives up to our key value of being ‘custodians first and carriers later,” says Kapil Mahajan, Group CIO, Safexpress.

Today, that means offering a highly customised and personalised customer experience. B2B customers are B2C consumers as well, and they want information tailored to their needs, and quickly at that.

Safexpress wanted to respond efficiently and swiftly to these customer needs, and they turned to Salesforce to help them do that.

To be able to offer a seamless customer experience, Safexpress took a hard look at their in-house CRM solution. This had its limitations, with data residing in silos across disparate systems.

With a sales and servicing team that was scaling to more than 700 people, Safexpress needed a single platform that could bring all of their data together by integrating with other upstream and downstream systems for customer reporting, collection and submission of invoices, etc. This would also give their salespeople a unified view of all their customers.

To that end, Safexpress had a clear objective around their technology strategy – invest in a platform, not a product.

“We evaluated multiple platforms to pick one that aligned the best with our goals. Salesforce finished in the lead, acing all the metrics we benchmarked it against,” says Mahajan. “The four key metrics we evaluated were - overall platform capability in terms of customisation, platform maturity, robustness, and scalability & availability.

“With Salesforce, we have invested in a platform that can serve as a CRM solution today, but help us with a larger omni-channel solution for our customers in the future.”

Safexpress has now consolidated all its processes on Salesforce, from lead management and invoicing, to collections and claims management. Further, they have integrated their billing system, operational ERP, contact centre and BI tools with the Salesforce platform to provide a holistic view of their customers.

Safexpress uses Salesforce to help the sales team manage leads with greater insight and efficiency. Sales teams are able to easily track leads from click to close and a 360-degree view of the customer helps them sell faster and smarter.

“The sales team now has access to data that helps them observe customer trends, identify existing pain points and tackle leads with more targeted information,” says Mahajan.

Safexpress is also using Salesforce to automate billing and collection processes. Business managers are assigned automated tasks related to invoice creation, follow-ups and collection.

“With an efficient billing cycle and multiple layers of visibility for the necessary follow ups, we’ve seen a positive change in collections. 50% or more of customers now clear invoices in the same month they have been generated,” says Mahajan.

Also, with internal teams equipped to handle data and processes better, Safexpress now serves its customers swiftly and efficiently.

Claims settlements, for example, saw five times increase in efficiency. All claim requests are logged on Salesforce and service agents have complete data to help them evaluate claims, view claims history and make informed decisions. The solution has been integrated with Safexpress’ cloud billing platform, so once claims are approved, they are processed and paid out rapidly.

Where claims earlier took four to five days to process, digitisation and integration of workflows have led to their being processed and paid out digitally within 24 hours.

Salesforce is also transforming internal processes. Employee expenses are submitted on the platform and integrated with Google Maps through APIs to automatically capture distances and time travelled. This ensures that daily journeys of the travelling sales team are now readily available for managers to evaluate and approve.

“The transition from recording these expenses on a piece of paper to now digitally recording it has been spectacular. It has made life easy for our sales team,” says Mahajan. “Expense reimbursements that would earlier take six to 10 weeks has now been cut down to half that time.”

From a strategic perspective, Salesforce is helping managers make more informed, data-driven decisions.

“We are able to capture data related to all customer visits, time spent in each meeting, and access the history of interactions with the customers,” explains Mahajan.

A single, consolidated view of queries, complaints and pending invoices has helped streamline business processes, reduce manual intervention, and provide a smooth experience to customers.

“Overall, Salesforce has helped the Safexpress team orchestrate and digitse workflows, and be more proactive and responsive,” says Mahajan.

Safexpress has their path neatly charted out. They are now looking at integrating online social platforms and tightly coupling their call centres with the CRM.

“We also want to explore working with Salesforce Einstein to help mine external data and arrive at smarter insights,” says Mahajan.

“The future looks very bright; we can customise our solutions and do anything! There has been almost no business issue that we cannot solve with Salesforce – this shows that the platform was right for us.”

Safexpress also wants to re-orchestrate their engagement strategy by creating a unified, omni-channel customer platform that provides relevant data in standardised formats with custom views.

“We want to lead the way with technology. Now that we’ve sorted out internal alignment, 2020 is going to be all about building the best customer experience platform for our customers,” concludes Mahajan.