Proactive, personalized expertise helps KONE deliver innovation faster.
Learn how working with a Technical Account Manager helped KONE deliver innovation faster and streamline its platform operations.
For KONE, keeping people moving is at the heart of its business. A global leader in the elevator and escalator industry, the business provides elevators, escalators, moving walkways, and automatic building doors to more than 550,000 customers worldwide. More than 1 billion people use their products every day.
With the company running many mission-critical business processes on the Salesforce Platform, KONE recognized they needed an application that was stable, fast, and scalable. To Deliver these benefits to end users, customers, and partners using the Salesforce Platform, KONE drew on personalized, proactive expertise provided by Salesforce’s Signature Success Plan team.
Here are five lessons from KONE’s development journey you can use to maximize the value of your next digital investment.
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1. Use a customizable solution to achieve your specific goals.
To achieve their goal of streamlining their field service operations, KONE developed a management application using a customizable field service solution.
The solution weighs criteria including technicians’ skills, distance to travel, and the severity of customer issues to generate optimized schedules for the company’s maintenance technicians, available via a mobile app. Technicians can also use the app to access other information, such as work orders and service history, and to submit paperwork from anywhere.
For additional peace of mind, KONE also built a backup system for dispatching maintenance technicians using Heroku, a Salesforce software development platform. In the unlikely event that the company’s primary field service management solution is unavailable, this system ensures the company’s dispatchers can send a technician to assist in an emergency.
“Field service management is mission-critical for us,” said Christophe Poirier, Salesforce Platform Architect at KONE. “We have to ensure that if someone needs help, they can get through to our call center and that the call center can quickly dispatch a technician.”
2. Choose trusted partners to ensure the stability, performance, and scalability of the Salesforce Platform.
To realize the full potential of their Salesforce Platform, KONE’s project team drew on the proactive, personalized expertise included with the Signature Success Plan.
This included access to a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM). The TAM worked closely with the KONE team to help them realize their vision by providing invaluable technical guidance, unlocking exclusive industry-based insights, and acting as an advocate for KONE at every step.
By leveraging the TAM’s advanced technical knowledge, the business was able to resolve problems faster and accelerate overall time to value.
For example, when a scheduled refresh of two of the company’s systems took 10 days, the TAM was able to explain what the problem was and suggest a solution. This allowed the team to take steps to fix the problem and reduce the time needed for the next refresh.
By sharing his technical and industry expertise with the KONE team, the TAM has also improved the team’s technical maturity.
“Our Technical Account Manager has been super helpful on countless occasions,” said Poirier. “I consider him part of our team. His objectives are very much driven by ours.”
3. Work with specialists to overcome development and implementation issues.
Calling in specialist expertise when needed helps ensure that minor hurdles don’t become significant roadblocks to progress. For example, KONE was able to access specialist knowledge across the Salesforce ecosystem throughout the project.
This was made even easier with the assistance of the TAM, who was able to act as a go-between and quickly connect KONE to the Signature Support Engineers when needed.
“Before we had the Signature Success Plan, the time needed to resolve problems was much longer,” said Jörg Knochenhauer, Head of Maintenance Application Management at KONE. “Now, with the help of our Technical Account Manager, we can go directly to the resources we need. He can explain the problem to the Salesforce experts and get the right people on board immediately for a faster resolution.”
4. Ensure the project stays on track with round-the-clock support.
Access to round-the-clock technical support and expedited case resolution can help minimize downtime and downstream impact during development and implementation phases.
To mitigate disruption from technical issues, KONE’s development team took advantage of 24/7/365 technical support and emergency response support included in the Signature Success Plan. This allowed the team to log a ticket about a business-stopping issue online and receive a response within 15 minutes, with updates every 30 minutes.
The fast response times proved to be invaluable in supporting the development team to move quickly to help teams on the ground. If needed, a Salesforce expert immediately opened a bridge call with the local team, working closely with them to find out what was causing a particular issue. Through support management oversight and participation, KONE was able to experience the fastest, most seamless resolutions.
“The support from our Signature Success Plan is a last line of defense for us,” said Pyyhtiä. “It gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that if there is something that our internal support organizations are unable to solve, then there is another level of support that we can reach out to for specialized help.”
Salesforce developers were also on hand throughout the project to optimize custom code and provide guidance and support pre-production.
5. Preempt problems with proactive services.
Proactive Services such as continuous monitoring, early alerts, remediation, and annual technical health reviews can be helpful for preempting problems.
With the help of their trusted advisor, KONE used proactive capabilities included in their Signature Success Plan to strengthen the stability and performance of their Salesforce Platform.
For example, proactive monitoring enables the application management team to identify early indicators that a threshold is likely to be exceeded and address the problem before it occurs.
Meanwhile, pre- and post-release assessments act as an additional level of security by helping to identify errors that have been accidentally introduced into the code as part of a new development or enhancement.
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