Barco International, a global technology company, designs and develops visualisation solutions for a variety of selected professional markets, including medical imaging, media and entertainment, and transport.
Barco was struggling to deliver responsive, reliable, and consistent customer support in the Netherlands and elsewhere, owing to a reliance on disparate, fragmented systems. More specifically, there were problems around complaint handling that was not categorised, which resulted in poor customer support being one of the customers’ most common complaints.
Another problem was the lack of integration with the back-office ERP system, which led to double entries.
The Barco team needed to adhere to rigorous service agreements for customer support, despite the fact web and email-based enquiry functionality was very limited.
Solution
Following a highly successful Salesforce CRM SFA deployment to 75 professionals within its medical sales division, Barco implemented Salesforce CRM Service & Support worldwide to 270 staff to support globally unified service request management.
Barco chose salesforce.com following a competitive evaluation, which included Siebel/Oracle and Microsoft. Salesforce CRM was selected based on functionality, user-friendliness, and straightforward integration with the back-office ERP platform.
The Salesforce Customer Portal is helping Barco turn the ‘web’ into the ‘self-service web’ – allowing the technology company to exploit Web 2.0 as the ideal channel to provide superior self-service.
Customers can manage their own cases via the Salesforce Customer Portal: they can log, view, edit, and close cases entirely online. They can also search through the Barco knowledge base and previously resolved cases, for comprehensive customer self-service.
Results
According to Barco, the implementation time for Salesforce CRM was many times faster’ than it was for traditional on-premise CRM systems, providing significantly improved lead management, opportunity tracking, and reporting.
By using the Salesforce Customer Portal, the Barco team can quickly change the look and feel of the self-service portal with an easy-to-use style editor. Barco can also deliver relevant customer information based on data from any source, share any application built on salesforce.com’s on-demand platform, and get other departments – including sales and operations to engage with customers online.
Barco now has extensive reporting tools at its disposal that provide a comprehensive overview of service quality and Salesforce CRM supports automated upgrades every quarter, helping to ensure business continuity.
