Unimark optimises field service and boosts customer engagement with Salesforce

Unimark Hi-Tech Solutions LLP is a value-centric firm that brings high-tech global manufacturing solutions to India. Over the years, the company found that delivering customer delight was not just about selling machines, but also ensuring that they worked in top condition at all times. This led to Unimark including after-sales service as a part of its offering.

“Our success lies in our customers making money using the technology we sell them,” says Avinash Anand, Managing Partner, Unimark Hi-Tech Solutions LLP.

“Our service team is trained to do whatever it takes at the customer site to get the machine up and running. We advise our salespeople to maintain transparency in all their customer interactions. At times, we even take tough decisions like holding off on a sale because we feel it may not help the customer,” he continues.

Around 2018, Anand and his team felt that it was time to automate service processes, so they could empower field personnel to serve customers better. Unimark sought a technology solution that would help it to deliver the customer-centricity and transparency it stood for.

After evaluating various field service solutions, Anand was convinced that Salesforce Field Service would be right for Unimark’s needs. However, it became clear that integrating the solution with Unimark’s limited legacy CRM would hinder the company’s getting the most out of the implementation.

Senior leadership also saw the benefits of using Salesforce to automate many processes across the company. "And so, we decided to deploy Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Salesforce Field Service,” says Anand.

Before Salesforce, customers called the field technician directly, or logged queries over a board line or email. These were manually prioritised by a scheduler who assigned them to field technicians across the country based on criteria like availability and expertise.

The post-service report was filed only after signoffs from relevant points-of-contact on the customer side. But the reporting process was often delayed because field technicians were unable to file reports while on the road for long periods. This delayed billing and revenue collection.

The new field service solution would have to eliminate these inefficiencies as well as capture and provide complete visibility on all service activities. This would help the twelve technicians serve Unimark’s 500 active customers optimally. Scheduling and assignment of tasks would also need to be automated to help the team scale.

Anand and his team had similar expectations for the sales process. The earlier CRM offered basic features that did not track customer journeys to the required granularity. This was a hindrance in Unimark’s competitive niche where customer familiarity can make or break a deal.

With Salesforce, all customer service calls and emails are consolidated on Service Cloud, which routes cases according to criteria such as product, urgency and expertise. Service tickets are pushed to Salesforce Field Service, where the scheduler has a complete view of agent availability and other relevant details. This makes it easy to assign tasks. 

Field technicians are notified on their mobiles, helping them to optimise their schedules.

Field technicians can also create tickets on Salesforce Field Service when requested to look at other machines at the customer site. This ensures that the system captures every single service activity. The complete view helps technicians continually build efficiencies and serve customers better. 

Post-service, technicians can now file service reports on their mobiles. This leads to faster reporting and has reduced billing cycles by an average of 15 days, leading to quicker collections. 

“With all these improvements, we have seen a 25% productivity increase in our service team,” says Anand.

All sales activities and customer interactions are now recorded on Sales Cloud, including specifics of earlier interactions, nature of previous sales, and reasons for opportunities lost or converted. Chatter enables internal collaboration across the sales team.

This rich information enables the sales team to optimise their activities. For example, salespeople now know not to spend too much time on a query from a price-sensitive customer, and customer follow-ups are well spaced out.

The complete customer 360 also helps salespersons achieve customer familiarity. And Unimark has created a number of custom fields that help improve personalisation.

“This visibility across everything that relates to the customer is empowering to the sales team," observes Anand.

This comprehensive record of sales activities, all delivered through rich reports and dashboards, offers management better oversight. They are able to nudge team members in a timely fashion on following up with customers and intervene when activities per opportunity begin to drop.

Leads are primarily from partners, referrals, tradeshows and the Unimark website, and leads are consolidated and managed on Salesforce.  Anand estimates that the team will soon be able to determine which channels generate maximum returns and build better sales strategies.

Sales Cloud is also used to track marketing activity. Spends on events and campaigns are correlated with resulting leads, opportunities and revenue to determine and optimise ROI.

Unimark employees have taken well to Salesforce’s easy-to-use interface. Six months into implementation, Unimark has hit an adoption rate of 90%. The management has also found that employees take great pride in having access to the latest, world-class technology to do their tasks better. Unimark is next looking at implementing Pardot to automate marketing campaigns.

“My vision is to be increasingly hands-off and leave the day-to-day running of the company in my leadership’s hands,” says Anand. “Salesforce is helping me set up processes and systems to do exactly that.

“It is a constant journey. Salesforce has come this far with us and is taking us further.”