Client background

A global leader, producer and marketer of concentrated phosphate and potash - two of the primary nutrients required to help the world grow the food it needs. The client’s customer base includes wholesalers, retail dealers and individual growers in more than 40 countries.

The business challenge

The company was focused on innovation that further compliments its customer-centric culture. Their incident reporting/management practices were largely email-based and supported by a variety of disconnected, product-specific databases.

Content repositories for crop nutrition product knowledge, literature, thought leadership and guidance were outdated and hosted across multiple product websites, supported by individual third- party Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This created both a disjointed customer experience and an inefficient cost-to-serve model.

The Baker Tilly approach

A strategy to improve their brand personality and enhance the customer experience led the organization to an evaluation of its incident reporting/management and processes for sharing product knowledge, literature, crop nutrition thought leadership and guidance. In conjunction with a global deployment of Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, Baker Tilly recommended:

• Consolidating its incident reporting/management practices to a global CRM deployment, deploying Salesforce’s Service Cloud
• Consolidating the disparate product websites to a single service/product knowledge portal, leveraging Salesforce.com’s Sites solution
• Integrating the process re-design and solution delivery for both the service incident management and product knowledge portals to Salesforce.com to six regions around the globe

The business impact

The comprehensive, customer-centric deployment of Salesforce.com allowed the client to achieve significant growth and cost savings resulting in a five-year Internal Rate of Return (IRR) greater than 100%. Improved visibility of account profile data across the organization enables all functional areas to identify how they can improve the customer experience, improve share of wallet through better customer service, and achieve “crop nutrition advisory” status with the customer base. The consolidation of incident reporting/management practices to a global CRM deployment has led to:

• Common processes and taxonomy for documenting and managing customer-reported incidents throughout the purchase and ownership lifecycle
• A 360-degree view of customer touchpoints, inclusive of service experience

Leveraging Force.com Sites to consolidate the disparate product websites to a single service/ product knowledge portal has resulted in:

• Improved website user experience via a one-stop-shop model, enabling speed and ease for their customers
• One website technology vendor and a more efficient and stable vendor management approach
• Streamlined data and customer relationship management practices
• Ability to capture and analyze individual customer web behavior and proactively improve the customer service

For more information on this topic, or to learn how Baker Tilly specialists can help, contact our team.