3 weeks’ work in 1 day: How Schneider Electric serves customers faster.

Digital innovation is transforming the world of energy. As businesses around the world embark on their journey to net zero, they turn to intelligent, integrated solutions that enable energy monitoring, optimisation of consumption, and integration of renewables in the electricity mix. But the only way to get these innovations quickly into customers’ hands is to sell them as efficiently as possible.

Schneider Electric’s sales reps can now each generate up to 500 opportunities a day — a task that previously took three weeks.

Using Sales Cloud and CRM Analytics, the company created a Digital Opportunity Factory that uses AI to find sales prospects who have an unmet need, or “white space” opportunities that Schneider specialises in serving.

How it works:

• White space opportunities are identified and classified
• Opportunities are then assigned to the appropriate sales professional
• Einstein Discovery scores opportunities throughout each sales stage
• Sales reps see AI-generated recommendations for progressing each opportunity

“Today, Sales Cloud covers the full opportunity lifecycle,” said Irina Zubova, Vice President, Sales Management and Support. “Every step of this journey is followed within Sales Cloud.”

Since building the Digital Opportunity Factory, Schneider Electric reduced time to close by 30% and earned a 15%–20% success rate from lead to order — up from 2% in past campaigns.

Each year, Schneider Electric fulfils thousands of customer requests for innovative energy management solutions. Some requests, especially those from distributors, contain massive and highly complex orders that resulted in lengthy quoting and fulfilment processes. 

Now, sales and project teams need as little as 15 minutes to complete the quote-to-order process for orders of the same scale.

Used in the company’s North American region, a new automated quoting system, built on the Salesforce Platform, saves sales reps hours of precious time while reducing human error.

How it works:

• A sales rep completes a proposal in Sales Cloud
• AppExchange partner FinancialForce matches the proposal to an existing project
• MuleSoft transfers the proposal data to an open source database
• Heroku processes the data — up to 5,000 records at once — and sends it back to Sales Cloud

Once quoting is complete, Salesforce Flow saves teams even more time by automating order fulfillment. With a more efficient quoting system and faster order fulfillment, Schneider Electric can make customers and distributors happier.

With Schneider Electric’s customer base spanning a wide range of countries and industries, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for customer support. To tailor service to customers’ unique needs, the company empowers Customer Care Centre agents with Service Cloud.

Customer Care Centre agents are ready to respond to customer outreach with a 360-degree view of the customer’s data. If a customer’s shipment of lighting control components gets delayed, the agent can pull up the customer’s account and order information without having to ask for the order or tracking number. With this information, the agent provides an updated ETA or expedites a request through a custom workflow.

“We have around 8 million interactions coming to customer support per year,” said Zubova. “The Customer Care Centre is the first line of support for our customers, however they prefer to contact us — phone, email, or digital channels.”

Customers can book a call or video chat appointment with technical support agents via Scheduler. Or, they can take advantage of self-service resources, such as knowledge articles and tutorials, for quick answers to commonly asked questions. Self-service options like these deflect cases, allowing the Customer Support Centre to distribute its workload more evenly and free up service reps to focus on more complex cases.