How Salesforce Customers in Every Industry Are Responding to COVID-19

In these challenging times, it is crucial that communities, companies and customers come together to support one another through the enormous difficulties we face.

Salesforce is founded on the principle of customer success, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded we have been proud to see so many of the companies in our Ohana acting decisively to support their employees, customers and broader communities.

Below is a regularly updated list of how some of those customers are transforming their organizations with Salesforce to respond to the challenges of COVID-19.

• Financial Services
• Healthcare and Life Sciences
• Public Sector and Non-Profit
• Retail and Consumer Goods
• Other Industries

Financial Services

• NEW: TCF Bank needed a quick solution to manage the influx of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) applications in the wake of the economic downturn caused by the novel coronavirus. In less than a week, the holding company created an intake form through Communities and an internal workflow process to feed the information back into Salesforce for processing and eventual uploading to the Small Business Administration (SBA) portal. Already, TCF Bank has managed more than 18,000 applications and is already in the process of building a loan forgiveness portal through Community Cloud.
• NEW: As a direct provider of small-ticket commercial equipment leases, Financial Pacific Leasing’s portfolio is largely made up of small business financing, which has been hit hard by forced closures and shelter-in-place orders. Staying connected with each of its 40,000+ customers to better understand their unique business situations is no small task, which is why Financial Pacific Leasing is currently in the process of launching a customer portal built with Partner Community so customers can access information in one place. In a matter of a few weeks, the company developed its customer gateway in order to directly communicate with its customers and address individual needs, which would’ve been impossible under its previous framework.
• NEW: Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) is working toward defining and coordinating its return-to-office strategy in those markets where conditions allow, while always bearing in mind its main objective since the crisis began: ensuring the health of its employees, collaborators and customers. March saw BBVA place its focus on coordinating the rollout of remote working and ensuring that the necessary resources were in place to provide optimal remote working conditions. In Spain, BBVA implemented it in just one week, making it available for over 90 percent of central services employees and more than 70 percent of branch employees. The management of the crisis is generating a very large amount of data, and the ability to analyze it properly is critical. Having the right tools is therefore essential, which led BBVA to select Salesforce Care in order to make its data analytics more robust and more dynamic, as well as to enhance its data exploitation capabilities.
• AXA Luxembourg and AXA Wealth Europe are branches of the multinational finance and insurance firm, AXA. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the IT team needed to ensure that employees were able to deliver the same high-quality customer service and connectivity while working remotely. Olivier Vaansteelandt, the CIO of AXA Luxembourg and AXA Wealth Europe, says that IT played the critical role in enabling AXA employees to work safely from home. IT turned to MuleSoft to quickly stand up solutions. “We changed our operations from paper-based work to now a paperless environment. We need to capitalize on that to avoid coming back to the previous way we were working. That’s the next step for us in IT — to go the extra mile and to finalize the transformation.” – Olivier Vaansteelandt, CIO, AXA Luxembourg and AXA Wealth Europe
• John Hancock had been handling over 4 million service calls every year with legacy, on-premise call center infrastructure before its migration to Salesforce. When COVID-19 hit and agents needed to shelter in place, John Hancock leaned in to a cloud contact center solution – built on Service Cloud and Amazon Connect. In doing so, John Hancock found new ways to tackle the daily demands of a high volume contact center, while keeping its employees safe.
• Bankers Healthcare Group was in the process of implementing Community Cloud to build an external portal to engage with clients in a more efficient way. When COVID-19 hit, they were ready to quickly shift the use case of the portal to start automating the loan application process to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program and CARES Act. In less than 5 days, a team of 4 stood up a loan application portal—cutting down the application timeline from 12 hours to 1 hour. In the first week, BHG took in over 1500 applications, totaling more than $200M in requested funding. This resulted in 1200+ approved loans, for $150M in funding.
• Pacific Life, a 150 year old insurance company in Newport Beach, California, needed to quickly transition its employees to a virtual environment due to local shelter in place orders. With Financial Services Cloud and Marketing Cloud, Pacific Life seamlessly continued its operations to service its customers, ensure that its employees could collaborate in real-time, and access their customer data.
• Deluxe is a 105-year-old company supporting more than 4.5M small businesses and over 4500 financial institutions, survived Spanish Flu, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and eight recessions. Deluxe has a COVID-19 Response Center to help engage and support its employees and customers. Roughly two-thirds of Deluxe’s workforce normally operate in physical sites, and because Deluxe houses and interacts with a lot of proprietary information, moving employees to home work environments comes with challenges. But with MuleSoft and Salesforce, Deluxe quickly enabled hundreds of Deluxe Customer service agents with a unified view of the customer to support their commerce, order management, and COVID response interactions in a WFH model. “The cloud-based technologies we put in place before COVID-19 have really been an enabler. In places where we didn’t think we could work from home or be successful, we are finding ways to be as productive or more productive and connecting even more than we probably would have been in the office.” – Mike Mathews, CIO, Deluxe Corporation
• RBC Wealth Management, one of the largest wealth management firms in the U.S., prides itself on creating an incredible digital experience for its advisors and clients — including its onboarding application process. With COVID-19, a digital onboarding process was a necessity as new clients did not want to come into a physical branch or be required to touch a mail-in application. With Anypoint Platform, RBC Wealth Management transformed its end-to-end application experience by securely exposing application data to its advisors, staff, and clients. “We were able to come together between the two organizations, and with that rollout an incredibly great digital experience for our advisors and our clients, and able to do it in an accelerated timeframe.” – Greg Beltzer, VP, Technology, RBC Wealth Management
• SWBC started WFH a few days before the Texas Government officially issued the shelter in place orders due to COVID-19. With the agility of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Financial Services Cloud and Community Cloud, they were able to quickly pivot 2,400 employees to a work from home environment in 5 to 6 days. SWBC was able to hire more team members, give back to their community, and keep their customers at the center of their business.
• Standard Life UK needed to get Contact Center staff home and working safely without disrupting customer service, but their system wasn’t designed for remote working. By standing up Salesforce Service Cloud in six days, the team now serves customers online with Forms powered by Salesforce Web to Case. By learning through Trailhead, the team went from novices to creating a next-gen online customer service center serving customers digitally – online – every day.
• Mascoma Bank needed a quick solution to help with the influx of application volume for PPP loans. They built a SBA intake lead form on their own, through Communities and connected on the back end through Financial Services Cloud.
• In today’s volatile environment, COVID-19 and market volatility has forced the wealth management industry to sharply focus on trust, transparency, and compliant communications for its clients. Financial Professionals and firms are tasked with engaging their clients differently in this new digital reality. To be more effective with client engagement, Cambridge Investment Research, Inc. is partnering with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and the Customer 360 to help financial professionals to address their clients’ financial needs and goals.
• AAA Carolinas is over 2.1 million members strong, and after it was forced to temporarily close retail branches due to COVID-19, 228 employees pivoted from their existing roles to focus on a new member outreach program using Salesforce Service Cloud to create cases and conduct personalized outreach to customers. The program was spun up in just five days, and one week after kicking off the team completed over 25,000 member calls, with over 80% of customers who were reached expressing appreciation for the call. Taking this further, personalized campaigns segmented members using Marketing Cloud then provided them with supplemental details based on their initial agent contact experience.

Healthcare and Life Sciences

• In Hawaii, the COVID-19 pandemic and strict lockdown created new needs for homebound seniors. St. Francis Healthcare System was able to rapidly operationalize a brand new meal delivery program in just a few days with the support of their partner, Pacific Point and their Salesforce account team. Using Field Service Lightning, St. Francis coordinates local restaurant meals and efficiently dispatches drivers to deliver these meals to the homes of seniors. Now in its third month, St. Francis has delivered more than 50,000 meals to date.
• Community Vision has increased the safety and well-being of its clients who are vulnerable to COVID-19 by using Field Service Lightning to conduct virtual medication prompts and ensure they continue to take their medicines at the right times. The recordings are then saved in Salesforce to give both loved ones the assurance of their safety and for organisational compliance. This virtual field service also helps minimize patient loneliness by increasing social interaction, check for signs of illness over video chat, and prioritize support workers’ safety by working remotely. Community Cloud also helps the organization stay connected to clients and families, extending care with convenient access to case notes and other information.
• Now that Bako Diagnostics facilitates over 3,000 COVID-19 tests daily, it faces an even bigger challenge – how to reach a new market of government officials and hospital systems. Bako will use Salesforce Care products to target messages and sales outreach to the right audiences nationwide. Pardot will allow educational messaging about its new 24-hour COVID testing and high level of customer service. Salesforce Maps will allow focus on areas most likely to see infection spikes, and Social Studio will help identify where there’s need for additional testing and faster turnaround time.
• Knowing the surge of COVID-19 cases projected to hit the state of Louisiana, national healthcare services management partner, SCP Health, needed a quick solution for patients to answer their questions and help them make decisions about whether and where to seek care. In just 48 hours, SCP Health implemented a new patient triage service line for nurses in their call center using Health Cloud, and in doing so, helped improve public health and safety. The service has taken over 15,000 calls in the 8 weeks since it launched.
• On April 23rd, telehealth company Fruit Street Health launched CovidMD – a risk assessment, triage, and telemedicine platform built on Service Cloud. CovidMD’s free risk assessment tool generates a health risk score for each patient based on their exposure and pre-existing medical conditions. Based on that score, patients are then given personalized health recommendations and the option to connect with a healthcare provider via live video chat.
• VillageMD, headquartered in Chicago, needed to quickly educate and screen its high-risk patient population for COVID-19. With Salesforce Care and their proprietary technology and analytics platform, VillageMD established a COVID response instance in hours, and leveraged its Salesforce-based care management app that already maximizes patient engagement through Health Cloud. Within 48 hours, VillageMD was capturing data for patients experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, promoting early detection and essential education.
• Clover Health is a Medicare Advantage plan with the large majority of its members residing in New Jersey, a state most affected by the pandemic. Leveraging Health Cloud, Clover launched multiple channels of communication and created outreach workflows to keep members and clinicians connected. This includes providing a resource website that includes FAQs and 24/7 support. Clover Health also proactively communicates with high-risk members to ensure adherence to medication plans.
• Salesforce has created a new app named Pop-Ups for Heroes alongside Ocado and Fresh Direct which aims to help NHS staff get the food essentials they need to the hospital where they work. Using this app, hospital workers can purchase and collect pre-packaged boxes containing enough food to feed a family of four for two days for £30. Currently being trialled at the NHS Lister Hospital in Stevenage, there are plans to launch subsequent pop-ups at 40 NHS hospitals, including the new Nightingale hospital, rapidly built as part of the UK’s response to COVID-19, if it’s successful. You can learn more about the initiative here.
• Clinical research firm Syneos Health is supporting those on the frontlines by launching an educational program for doctors on alternatives to ventilators. Using Salesforce Care solutions and Health Cloud they are able to rapidly spread the word about their BiPAP machines, which help stabilize intubated patients and can help alleviate the need for ventilators. And with the self-service portal, doctors can get answers directly and quickly, reserving agent bandwidth for more complex cases. Learn more here.
• Within 72 hours, MIMIT Health leveraged Salesforce to deploy telehealth capabilities, allowing them to continue to provide crucial healthcare services to patients while keeping them and their employees safe. Einstein Analytics helped with intake patient enquiries, and Care Plans in Health Cloud empowered the team to collaborate with care coordinators as they meet with patients via teleconference.
• Piedmont Healthcare worked with Slalom and Salesforce to develop call scripting and dashboards for triage nurses and call center agents to track and manage patients calling specifically for COVID-19-related care. The call scripting and logic enabled nurses and agents to guide patients through a series of questions that focused on risk, exposures, and active symptoms to appropriately triage patients to the right level of care. In the five hours after going live, over 150 calls were logged and triaged using the new technology.
• The national network of associations of people with Parkinson’s teamed up with Zambon group start-up Careapt to create ParkinsonCare, a free teleassistance program to support community members most affected by the virus. Salesforce donated Health Cloud to Careapt to make the service possible.
• The Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley is transforming its lab to support free COVID-19 testing for the community with Salesforce Platform, Shield, and Community Cloud. Salesforce implementation partner Third Wave Analytics is helping with the implementation efforts. Check out this link to make a donation.

Public Sector and Non-Profit

• NEW: The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) is the body where the railway industry in Great Britain comes together and it promotes change and innovation across all train operating companies across the UK. When the pandemic first struck, RDG needed to get information out quickly to rail customers — on services and timetables and now as we recover on which times people should avoid due to loading and congestion. The pandemic is shifting the way RDG operates moving forward and its IT team is instrumental in leading that shift using MuleSoft. To ensure that rail customers and employees have minimal contact — RDG is leveraging API-led connectivity with MuleSoft to move toward digital ticketing and increased access to information for riders, such as joined up train timetables. These types of changes give riders the ability to self-serve information and purchase tickets via the industry’s digital interfaces.
• The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the federal government department that provides leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues. Because the USDA is a government agency, there was the potential for several issues to arise when employees had to shift to remote work, such as gaining secure access to critical federal systems and data. However, since the USDA leveraged API-led connectivity with MuleSoft to securely connect its systems and data, the USDA was able to maintain employee operations.
• SCOUTS New Zealand is the country’s largest non-formal education provider. By leveraging Community Cloud, Chatter and LearnTrac, a data-driven learning management system from the AppExchange, SCOUTS New Zealand have been able to invite 13,000 Scouts online to stay connected during this unprecedented time and to deliver programs that help them build resilience. Scouts will be able to interact with each other using chat and live polls and have fun earning badges. This solution also allows scouts to structure their own learning and focus on their topics of choice. It is considered one of the best scouting responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and offers a model for other regions to follow. The solution has also put a strong foundation in place for SCOUTS New Zealand to achieve its long term goals with Salesforce. This includes reaching 25,000 young people by 2025.
• Indiana Department of Child Services is using MuleSoft and Salesforce for state-wide connectivity across all of its systems. In child welfare and child support, teams needed data from the state’s health department, such as shot and immunization records. The Department of Child Services was able to quickly reuse the APIs already created, unlocking, and consuming the necessary data from the Department of Health. On the building operations front, the state needed to manage employee access to 92 state buildings to ensure social distancing compliance and adequate PPE and hand sanitizer distribution. They used an API already built with MuleSoft to make it happen. “Within eight hours, my team built a tracking software for all 92 counties to determine who’s in the building, when they check-in and check out to meet social distancing limits, as well as how much hand sanitizer or how many masks we need.” — Kevin Jones, CIO, Indiana Department of Child Services
• Key Travel is an industry leading organization specializing in humanitarian travel exclusively for faith, academic and NGO’s. Their motto is – do good better. Earlier this year they had the challenge of transitioning their global workforce to home working whilst keeping customers (including medical staff) around the world safe and on track to get to reach their destinations. Using Service Cloud and Salesforce partner New Voice Media, Key Travel service agents were able to ensure the highest quality of service was given to customers throughout the transition, ensuring that critical workers got repatriated or to countries impacted by COVID 19 without delay.
• In response to the COVID-19 crisis, local health centers called on Age UK Hythe to make Wellness Check calls to thousands of vulnerable people in their community. The Age UK team only had spreadsheets, pen & paper available to manage their workload, which was slowing them down and causing security issues. Salesforce.org quickly helped launch a lightweight salesforce solution to help Age UK Hythe scale, with centralized contact details from lists provided by local health centers; a flow-based call script for volunteers to make calls and automate follow-up tasks for action; and dashboards for referral management and reporting to local councils & funders.
• Salesforce technology partner Traction on Demand launched a COVID-19 Supply Hub. Built on Salesforce, the hub will coordinate, source, and expedite medical supplies and personal protective equipment for provincial health authorities to support front-line health workers fighting COVID-19 across the Province of British Columbia. More.
• The State of Rhode Island announced their health department has developed a new app for contact tracing of people who test positive for COVID-19 that is built on Salesforce. In a news conference yesterday, Governor Raimondo said, “we are partnering with [Salesforce] to make our contact tracing process more efficient, more scalable and more reliable….it should give you great confidence that our systems are getting so much better and we are that much closer to getting you back to work, because this is essential to get everybody back to work.” Listen to the press conference.
• TreCovid19 is the App developed on Salesforce by PwC for the Public Health Service of the Trento Province in Italy. This app helps the health service to manage assistance at home for people affected by COVID-19, remotely monitoring their symptoms and thus ensuring hospitalization is used only when essential.
• United Way Worldwide, the world’s largest publicly-funded nonprofit organization, have launched a COVID-19 community response and recovery fund, bolstered their 211 information resource line, and given companies free tools to empower employees to volunteer and stay connected to their local communities as the work through the COVID-19 pandemic, in partnership with Salesforce Philanthropy Cloud. More.
• Samu Social International partnered with the association of Les Transmeutteurs to set up a free telephone listening service to promote mental health initiatives. Built on Service Cloud, the platform connects callers with volunteers that listen, inform, soothe, and guide the most vulnerable to depression and anxiety.

Retail and Consumer Goods

• Kiwoko, a pet store chain with 135 retail stores across Spain and Portugal is using Salesforce Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud to meet and exceed customer expectations during COVID-19 and beyond. In early April, Kiwoko quickly set up a “ship from store model”, with in store employees fulfilling online orders (almost 70%) and dispatching them via courier faster than ever, guaranteeing customers have all they need for their pets. With Trailhead too, teams have been able to equip themselves with the necessary skills related to digital transformation.
• With Service Cloud, VIZIO was successfully able to quickly pivot its service operations to a work-from-home model in response to the crisis, while maintaining consistent support and a high CSAT. Since the shift, VIZIO has been successful in maintaining agent productivity by providing the right training via myTrailhead, and Service Analytics are enabling them to keep a pulse on agent capacity and performance.
• As the COVID-19 pandemic impacted global economies and customer behavior, BMW group decided to accelerate their digital transformation and adapt to market conditions with personalized customer content and digital connected touchpoints. BMW Group leveraged Salesforce to streamline business processes and increase collaboration between the headquarters and dealerships, developing a 360° view of each customer. Digital transformation helped BMW Group return to work as global markets and customers start on the path to recovery.
• Like most retailers, luxury linen brand Matouk has faced negative business impact in the face of COVID-19, forcing the company to furlough 30 of its 150 employees. To adapt, Matouk retrofitted its factory to produce face masks, which it donated to hospitals and relief centers and began selling to for-profit organizations like nursing homes. They have already been able been to hire back 20 of their furloughed employees. Using Sales Cloud, Matouk has been able to track, target, and manage new leads of prospective customers, easing the stress of making up lost revenue.
• WatchBox is the world’s leading platform for pre-owned luxury watches. By the end of 2019, WatchBox launched its digital platform on Commerce Cloud across five global locations, a flagship brick and mortar store in Dubai, and enabled an in-store mobile application as well as a blockchain-backed digital voucher application. When COVID-19 started to impact the global economy, the company needed to pivot quickly from having omnichannel experiences to online-only experiences for its customers. Shri Ballal, CTO of WatchBox, says the scalability and the availability of its cloud ecosystem played a significant role in meeting the new needs of its customers. “Our decision to take on digital transformation with a connected cloud architecture under Salesforce as a cloud ecosystem, of which MuleSoft is an integral part, was the best decision we took before the COVID-19 pandemic.” – Shri Ballal, CTO of WatchBox.
• Land O’Lakes is a farmer-owned cooperative; Dairy Foods business unit distributes dozens of dairy products across the U.S. As consumer demands shifted with the COVID-19 pandemic, the demands of Land O’Lakes distributors also fluctuated — creating a potential risk for the organization’s distribution supply chain. However, Land O’Lakes was properly prepared as its infrastructure had the network capacity needed to bring data from its cloud apps into ongoing systems to handle these new integration needs. Sampath Kurra, a Senior IT manager with Land O’Lakes, says that Anypoint Platform enabled Land O’Lakes to deliver a critical supply chain logistic cloud initiative that processes about 50% of overall API transactions; making it possible to scale to meet the needs brought on by COVID-19. “The nature of the platform allows us to scale easily — by adding more replicas as needed — helping us manage the scale and capacity needed to deliver.” – Sampath Kurra, Sr. IT Manager, Enterprise Application Integration, Land O’Lakes
• During the COVID crisis in France, Wartner employees wanted to extend their platform to facilitate a laundry service for those at the heart of this sanitary crisis: medical staff and nurses. Through a customer application for order entry and payment for the Hospital nursing staff built through Customer Communities, and an employee application for trucks and delivery management facilitated by Salesforce Field Service and Community Cloud, Wartner delivered more than 8,000 laundry orders to the 60 overloaded Parisian hospitals to serve 90,000+ hospital staff in just one week, saving precious time and money in a context where each minute counts.
• Custom and banded food company Ventura Foods quickly pivoted to a remote working environment with the help of Salesforce. They’re using Quip to foster remote collaboration, Salesforce Care Social Studio to monitor and analyze customer sentiment, Tableau data hub to stay informed on the food industry’s response to COVID-19, and myTrailhead to train and certify sales people in lieu of their annual in-person sales conference.
• With many physical storefronts closed, SONOS has pivoted and put their full power behind selling direct-to-consumer through their e-commerce platform, built on Commerce Cloud. They’ve been able to quickly adapt to manage fulfillment disruption to keep up with a significant increase in demand, while delivering relevant, personalized engagement at scale with Marketing Cloud campaigns and data insights – all integrated through Salesforce’s centralized platform. In April, SONOS drove a 400% increase in direct-to-consumer revenue year-over-year up from a 32% increase during the March quarter.
• NEW: To solve for long wait lines at supermarkets, Salesforce in partnership with Sopra Steria created a solution with Community Cloud and Service Cloud to enable customers to reserve a window for shopping. By simply showing the notification of their reserved slot time, customers can enter the supermarket, risk and wait free. The first pilot is live at a few stores at Coop Liguria and Coop Lombardia.
• Online sports retailer Fanatics launched the #ALLInChallege – a new initiative to provide food to children, the elderly, and frontline heroes – that has raised more than $23M. Fanatics is using Marketing Cloud to power transactional emails whenever donations are made.
• RG Barry used Salesforce Commerce Cloud to quickly spin up a “Buy one, Give one” initiative, whereby for every customer who bought a pair of their ‘Dearfoams’ slippers, a pair was donated to healthcare workers. Two channels were launched – one for shoppers to enable donations, and another to capture information from healthcare workers in order to connect them to donations. The company has also switched over part of their business to making masks, and have donated 100,000 masks to Healthcare workers. More.
• Roots, a Canadian favourite for comfortable sweats is offering 20% off purchases for a limited time. Alternately, customers are presented with the opportunity to donate 10% of that to support COVID-19 frontline workers, while still enjoying a 10% discount on their purchase. Roots is connecting customers to this opportunity through email campaigns and social content driven by Marketing Cloud, while enabling a promo code on Roots.com and tracking all promotional sales and donations through Commerce Cloud. Learn more about the campaign here.
• As restaurants are forced to make layoffs in response to COVID-19, meal delivery service Sun Basket is opening its doors to these industry experts and growing its warehouse operations organization. Additionally, with an influx in customers and subsequent service volumes, Sun Basket is supercharging its service teams with Service Cloud, enabling new agents to ramp quickly for an immediate business impact. With Einstein Bots, the business is leveraging automation and self-service to provide customers answers quickly, manage rising service volumes, all while ensuring a smooth transition to work from home for agents.
• With Commerce Cloud, Stride Rite has created a slipper assortment for kids, of which all proceeds are donated to COVID-19 Emergency Fund by Alex’s Lemonade, supporting families battling childhood cancer.

Other Industries

• NEW: Acuren, a market leader in industrial asset inspection and integrity management programs, found itself in a unique position when COVID-19 hit. Because Acuren supports the safe and reliable operation of industrial facilities and assets across North America, such as utility and energy companies, the deployment of thousands of technicians to critical customer sites became complex under COVID-19 conditions. Using Tableau Online, Acuren’s Business Intelligence and Development teams examined the relevance of critical internal and external data and built a dashboard to visually depict data that wasn’t previously visible to operational leaders. This provided valuable insights to assist leadership in making strategic real-time decisions that mutually benefitted employees and customers.
• NEW: CallMiner, a company that assists call centers with tools for measuring conversational behaviors to optimize customer experience and customer service performance, took extra steps to help their customers such as financial services and healthcare providers at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shutdowns and social distancing requirements forced nearly all physical call center locations to resume operations remotely with agents answering calls from their homes, a model with which many agents and their managers were unfamiliar—and often uncomfortable. Using Tableau visualizations already embedded in their products, CallMiner developed a pro bono service called COVID CARE (CallMiner Analytics Rapid Evaluation) that call centers could opt into for receiving special, pandemic-era guidance. CallMiner created new dashboards to help call center administrators analyze sentiment in their agents’ interactions with callers, assess caller experience blockers like background noise, and take informed steps to advise on and de-escalate specific interactions as needed.
• NEW: When New Zealanders were instructed to stay home due to COVID-19, the University of Waikato moved its 10,000 students and 2,000 employees online in two weeks. With Salesforce and the help of local partner Datacom, the University implemented a contact tracing solution that tracks visits to 5,000 campus locations. To participate, students, employees, and visitors can scan a QR code at each location or log onto a website and list the places they’ve visited. Data captured will be used strictly to investigate possible points of transmission, allowing the University to take immediate action and minimise spread.” In just ten days we were able to launch a contact tracing solution, making it easy for people to check in and out of spaces and providing us with data to help keep them safe.” – Eion Hall, CIO, The University of Waikato
• With disinfectants in high demand due to COVID-19, De Nora Water Technologies saw an opportunity to provide municipalities and private businesses with self-service, sustainable onsite disinfectant generators to uphold high standards of health safety. De Nora used Sales Cloud to manage the onslaught of interest, scale go-to-market efforts, and pivot the business to support these new markets. With Salesforce Maps, De Nora identifies hot spots where their new product is being sold and gaps where they do not have a local distributor to create new growth opportunities. Einstein Analytics empowers teams across the business to make swift, accurate, and data-driven decisions, with dashboard visualizations to manage processes and AI-driven predictions and insights, ultimately saving time and increasing agility. De Nora continues providing customers on-site disinfection generators for disinfecting workplaces and businesses in the new normal.
• A Team Tuition has had to adapt and find new ways of supporting students in response to COVID-19. The disruption to the education system has been unprecedented with schools across almost all Australian states and territories moving curriculum online and parents encouraged to keep their children at home. Recognising this disruption Hayden McEvoy, Founder and CEO, moved all tutoring online. As a result, A Team Tuition is onboarding new tutors to support more families and digitising more of its resources. Some of these resources, like lesson plans, will be made available to tutors using Salesforce Knowledge within Community Cloud. “Our tutors are more productive and reporting more focused engagement from students, so we know the model is working and we will continue to grow to meet demand,” said McEvoy.
• CreativeCubes.Co is a collaborative coworking community inspired by CoFounder and CEO Tobi Skovron’s experience as an entrepreneur. Even as they navigate the implications of COVID-19 and temporarily work from home, CreativeCubes.Co has retained 97% of members by redirecting their entire team, pulling out all stops to play their role in focusing on supporting members. By leveraging Pardot, the team keeps in frequent contact with members and is sending out communication to help them make sense of all the information and resources available to business owners. Consistent with its culture of creating happiness, CreativeCubes.Co is also sharing tips, guided meditations online and recipes to support members’ health and wellbeing. In addition to supporting members, CreativeCubes.Co are starting to have new discussions with landlords about the future of commercial property and how to fill some of the vacancies resulting from COVID-19 as companies are wanting to move away from traditional lease arrangements and choosing more flexible solutions for office space.
• Industrial safety company Fike Corporation and its employees responded with resilience to the pandemic, which they viewed as a catalyst to implement new and better technology. Using Field Service Lightning and Salesforce partner Sightcall, Fike is remotely training field technicians, increasing the size and scale of their technician workforce, and improving servicing throughput. Fike also led a virtual hackathon to implement Salesforce CPQ, demonstrating how easily they could align on new billing procedures across their global company.
• Telstra Enterprise is the largest corporate communications provider in Australia. Telstra saw the opportunity in the current environment to lead through change and help their customers to rapidly transition the majority of their teams to remote working. At the same time, most of Telstra’s international partners had to close, and their own Australian-based office staff were also moving to full work from home arrangements. Until now, the majority of customer service at Telstra Enterprise was delivered face to face or on the phone. With both those channels largely shut down, Telstra needed to stand up some digital alternatives fast! In under one week they built and branded an unauthenticated community for customers who were not registered to T-Connect (Telstra’s authenticated portal) to capture customer enquiries and issues and route them to the right teams in Telstra Enterprise. Lightning Flow captures the customer enquiry (case) and contact details, then built-in logic matches the customer to an account and contact, routes the case to the right queue, and triggers email notifications to the customer and their account owner. Telstra Enterprise also ensures that when someone like a medical practitioner raises a support case their case is automatically prioritized to ensure that essential services have their cases resolved, fast.
• Robert Half is using the Salesforce platform to provide their teams with total agility in today’s fast-changing environment. Their use of multiple cloud products and other technology investments made it possible to transition their workforce to remote work and continue to service customer needs. Robert Half is also using Salesforce for their new Remote Workforce program. The program rapidly places qualified remote workers in temporary and full-time jobs, meeting the high demand for essential staff and safe, virtual access to customer applications. And Robert Half has used Marketing Cloud to send urgent communications to customers at a global level. Overall, the company hasn’t lost a single step despite completely changing the way their teams work, from in-office to at-home, virtually overnight.
• In response to COVID-19, WBP Group needed to reshape how it operated and minimize contact between employees and customers. WBP Group launched a property Virtual Valuations solution through Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Community Cloud. Sales Cloud provides complete visibility of the business and customers and helps leaders to manage performance. Service Cloud together with SightCall from the AppExchange have enabled the rapid launch of virtual valuations, with an experience which is seamless for customers and employees. Field Service Lightning has increased the efficiency of scheduling appointments and will be used in the future to manage valuations from end-to-end. Community Cloud will enable deeper engagements with customers and provide an opportunity to showcase new services. It took only 2 weeks from concept to production for the virtual property valuations solution to deploy and 90% of business processes are currently running on Salesforce. Due to Salesforce products, their teams are able to handle 100% of booking queries as opposed to before when 50% were handled by valuators.
• Hornblower Cruises have made employee support a priority during this crisis. After the stay at home orders and closure of many businesses, Hornblower used Salesforce Care to set up an Employee Help Desk and utilize Einstein Bots to provide resources and assistance with unemployment, insurance, debt relief, and healthcare. Simultaneously, the team is working to scale and externalize the solution to meet increased customer support needs.
• Samsung Electronics UK & Ireland pivoted their entire B2B contact center from a single office to working remotely in just 10 days. By quickly moving from phone to digital, the customer service team has been able to maintain a seamless customer experience through the COVID-19 pandemic. With Service Cloud, the team now helps customers faster and more efficiently, freeing up time to focus on long term strategic projects.
• Koenig & Bauer, the oldest and most innovative printing press manufacturer in the world, saw the need for extra service and support to better serve their customers through COVID-19. With specialist engineers not able to travel across borders and service staff not onsite, Koenig & Bauer leveraged Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud to remotely enable agency engineers and customers’ staff to carry out even complex repairs or maintenance. With Salesforce Chatter programs, they’re transforming how their people communicate internally as well as with customers.
• Common offers co-living and traditional apartment spaces and has had to pivot its operations, including making all of its apartment tours virtual, as a result of COVID-19. Sales Cloud helps manage its new payment plan offerings for customers displaced by COVID-19 while move in/move out correspondence is managed through customer portals powered by Community Cloud. Common saw a 66% increase in virtual tours (around 50 tours a day) and 1 in 3 people who tour apartments send in a digital application that same day.
• Using a combination of Sales Cloud, CPQ, and a selection of AppExchange apps, TuffShed transitioned 185 US salespeople to work from home in 24 hours, while also using Marketing Cloud to keep customers notified on order status. Now, TuffShed’s sales team has increased weekly sales by 30% year-over-year due to its ability to quickly digitally transformation.
• Everton Football Club in the UK is using Salesforce Marketing Cloud to help the club stay connected to supporters during the pandemic via personalised messages. The club has identified all season ticket holders over the age of seventy, and with that information are calling them directly to offer the support of grocery shopping, prescription pickups and other essential daily necessities. One lifetime fan even received a call from Club Manager, Carlo Ancelotti.
• Arizona tech consulting company MST built a solution on Salesforce to connect its employees with vulnerable community members, enabling them to deliver much-needed groceries and supplies to households in need. More here and here.
• Snap Install, Inc has implemented a COVID-19 pre-arrival checklist for all their technicians using Salesforce Field Service Lightning, and incorporated the checklist into their mobile app. This allows Snap to proactively recognize exposure risks and protect customers. More.
• Wunderman Thompson quickly leveraged Heroku and Marketing Cloud for its Sofa Sets campaign that featured a virtual concert promoting sheltering in place. The data-driven virtual music festival used viewers’ location data to create a real-time visualization map illustrating the number of hospital stays prevented, ventilators freed up and lives saved by staying home.
• Salesforce donated 100 additional Service Cloud licenses to Eurostar so that they could retrain crew and operational staff to support the growing backlog of 70,000 open service cases.

Check back for new stories of how companies are transforming their businesses to contribute to the COVID-19 response.