QUOTING PROCESS WITH CON DOCUMENT AUTOMATION
When FCR Media started on their digital tra solutions to improve their customer satisfa quoting process. This is when they discover would transform their document managem Salesforce instance.
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Transforming for the customer FCR Media’s Challenges •
Transparency & consistency: FCR Media prize transparency and consistency in communicating with their customers. But sometimes they fell short of consistent communication on solutions and services provided on the road—from quote to invoice to actual output. Achieving greater consistency in the customer experience was critical to higher customer satisfaction and to better overall order accuracy.
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Order speed: The organisation also wanted to speed up the quoting process, another area where customer satisfaction could be improved.
Composer has been on the Salesforce AppExchange for 10 years and is the #1 paid for application for Salesforce.
PROJECT PA R T N E R S 2
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Transforming for the customer Written by Nell Walker Produced by Danielle Harris
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FCR Media Belgium has undergone an epic transformation in recent years in a bid to increase customer satisfaction
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CR Media has enjoyed unprecedented growth for such a young digital media business, but an impressive timeline has seen it develop a presence in 12 countries with 35 offices and over 1,200 staff. One of its most notable moves, in 2016, was the takeover of Truvo – Belgium’s answer to the UK’s Yellow Pages. Formerly CIO of Truvo, Allan Farrell transitioned comfortably into the same role at FCR Belgium, and began working on the business’s digital transformation almost immediately. Birgit Peeters, MD at FCR Media, says: “It was important to ensure the transformation programme was not a technology initiative but a business transformation. The whole driver really was for us to move away from being a product-driven company to a customer-centric company, all about people, process, and technology. Allan Farrell delivered the transformation succesfully.”
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Farrell and other members of the Truvo family were able to bring to FCR Media focused, agile teams to take products to the market; FCR needed that sense of agility, and for it to flow through every layer of the business. Farrell also had experience in driving culture change during his 16 years with Dell, building teams from scratch and delivering significant value through project delivery. At Dell, Truvo, and now FCR Media, Farrell has maintained a focus on customer experience because, ultimately, the customer is at the receiving end of everything he – and his team – does. CUSTOMER FOCUS FCR’s main objective is to grow its customers’ own businesses. It takes great pains to understand the needs of customers and tailor-make a solution in order to deliver the best value. Ingrid Sluis, Marketing Director explains: “FCR’s main objective
“It was important to ensure the transformation programme was not a technology initiative but a business transformation. The whole driver really was for us to move away from being a productdriven company to a customer-centric company� BIRGIT PEETERS MD AT FCR MEDIA
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Speed, agility and building early:
Deloitte Digital’s approach to digital transformation success Business transformation in a digital world is shaking things up like never before. In a good way. And even though digital transformation is difficult to define, it continues to dominate the agenda of many companies. So, what is it really? Deloitte Digital likes to keep it simple. For them, it’s transforming business in a world where there is a lot of digital technology to make it happen.
“The real impact is getting an eco-system of organisations like Salesforce, Hybris and Adobe working with smaller niche players and putting these different partners and offerings together in a unique way.”
Paul Thompson, Deloitte Digital Lead EMEA
With this new age of hyper-change and with things moving faster than ever, digital technology is bringing unparalleled opportunities and breath. The rate at which useful things can reach maturity and be deployed is happening at unprecedented speeds. For example, in the past five to 10 years, the smart phone has become part of our everyday lives, analytics is now able to give us insight into large volumes of data like never before and cloud-based technologies allow organisations to build, scale and deploy solutions globally practically overnight. Think differently The pace of technology has changed the way we think about everything, and consequently, how we behave and collaborate. The question we must ask ourselves is ‘how can I move as fast as the world is moving?’ Deloitte embraces rapid change by being agile and building, testing and prototyping quickly and often. Like any project in the past, they start with a strategy but recognise that progress happens in short bursts with lots of little steps and dotted with change and learning along the way. Long gone are the days where there is a lengthy roadmap or an established and linear process. “We get a different set of people – marketers, creatives, engineers, IT specialists and the like -- with a broad set of skills around the table so we can see what works and what doesn’t early in the process,” explains Paul Thompson, Deloitte Digital Lead EMEA.
Given that it’s hard to keep up with this ever-evolving environment for new technology lovers, non-techies are often left in the dark. Organisations can overcome the fear of being left behind by demystifying disruptive innovation for ‘digital-is-notfor-me’ types. For starters, one should adopt a ‘fall in love with the problem instead of the solution’ approach to any strategy, and this inherently requires a broader set of skills than traditionally needed. Keeping this in mind when any business has a problem, Deloitte looks at possible technologies to drive the solution. How does this play out in the real world? For example, if a company has a supply chain problem, Deloitte will use a blend of sensors, analytics and IoT to get an overview of the conditions and reveal where wastage and oversupply is occurring. But the conversation always starts from the business issue perspective so input from the supply chain expert, who may fear being alienated, is invaluable. Real value lies in efficiency and cost savings “Even though it may not be as sexy, a large part of the value of digital transformation lies in enhancing operations as well as enhancing brand and experiences. In fact, for every euro spent on customer-interfacing, four euros is spent on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of processes,” says Paul Thompson. That’s why the possibilities of technology to innovate and its revolutionary impact on business is
relevant to all industries in the public and private sector. While some sectors such as retail, hospitality and tourism are mature, Deloitte sees the potential to transform manufacturing with IoT, robotics and automation. But today, every organisation wants to reduce cost and increase efficiency so it’s reason enough to welcome this new reality and make the most of digital technology. Wider networks, broader skills, larger perspectives Inspired by the possibilities technology presents to benefit any organisation, Deloitte believes one characteristic of being truly successful is to include a wider network. “Doing it yourself or working with a small number of partners is limiting,” notes Paul Thompson, “The real impact is getting an eco-system of organisations like Salesforce, Hybris and Adobe working with smaller niche players and putting these different partners and offerings together in a unique way..” Here’s where Deloitte steps in. Through software demonstrations, they reveal
experiential aspects of what this ecosystem looks like so people can smell, touch, taste and talk about it. For instance, they built a physical digital store and embedded aspects together like lighting sensors which can tell if an individual is a returning customer and can link it to the changing room so lighting changes depending on what a person is trying on and it also can recommend alternate clothes options to the customer. What’s more, these same sensors can inform the manager on best sellers, as well as reorder when stock is low. “The combination of letting people experience what’s possible and then looking at their business problem with this expanded view is what pushes boundaries to come up with solutions never thought possible,” adds Paul Thompson. Case-in-point, Deloitte recently worked with a shipping company that wanted to run their ships more efficiently. Using digital technology to get an overview of conditions like cargo, timing, customers and processes, they were able to build models quickly to explore efficiency savings and
see where wastages occurred. The best part was that executives and Board members could tangibly see what it would look like which went far in increasing confidence in the strategy. This is just one example of digital transformation success. Digital technology is connecting things that were never connected before. The key to innovating for better business is that all connections are consistent and support everything else. Since the quality of these connections affects the quality of the customer experience, if you get it wrong the brand is at risk. “It’s the overall experience that counts. Digital technology has infinite possibilities and reinforces the brand in new ways but it must be aligned to the physical experience.”
“FCR’s main objective is to grow its customers’ own businesses. It takes great pains to understand the needs of customers and tailor-make a solution in order to deliver the best value” INGRID SLUIS MARKETING DIRECTOR
is to grow its customers’ own businesses. It takes great pains to understand the needs of customers and tailor-make a solution in order to deliver the best value. FCR therefore defined different customer personas and outlined the customer journey with all its touchpoints to ensure a consistent customer experience can be delivered at all times.” Advancements in technology make it more accessible, whereas in the past, delivering customer and user experiences required a lot of IT developers and marketers to deliver great content and create experiences,” Farrell explains. “Now you can almost get it right out of the box.” For example, one ongoing
FCR MEDIA IMPROVES CUSTOMER SATISFACTION 50% AND TRANSFORM QUOTING PROCESS WITH CONGA DOCUMENT AUTOMATION
CASEComposer: STUDY | ABIOMED Conga 10 Years on AppExchange #1 Paid for App
When FCR Media started on their digital transformation project, they wanted solutions to improve their customer satisfaction and increase the efficiency of their quoting process. This is when they discovered Conga, a cloud-based solution that would transform their document management and integrate seamlessly with their Salesforce instance. FCR Media’s Challenges •
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Transparency & consistency: FCR Media prize transparency and consistency in communicating with their customers. But sometimes they fell short of consistent communication on solutions and services provided on the road—from quote to invoice to actual output. Achieving greater consistency in the customer experience was critical to higher customer satisfaction and to better overall order accuracy.
Integrating seamlessly into FCR’s Salesforce, Conga Composer enabled the sales team to create great looking sales documents that clearly show products and services purchased and that keep information consistent from quote to invoice.
Order speed: The organisation also wanted to speed up the quoting process, another area where customer satisfaction could be improved.
1. Satisfaction: There has been a 50% improvement in FCR Media customer satisfaction scores due to improved speed, consistency and transparency.
Composer has been on the Salesforce AppExchange for 10 years and is the #1 paid for application for Salesforce.
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Conga’s Solution
Customer and team satisfaction have skyrocketed since FCR Media adopted Conga Composer:
2. Time saved: Sales reps can now create new quotes in minutes instead of hours and the integration between Salesforce CPQ and Conga mean that sales productivity has soared. 3. Consistent branding & easy updates: The marketing team can now easily ensure that all documents generated abide by brand guidelines. The integration with Salesforce makes it easy to make changes instantly to documents across multiple platforms, as all content lives in one central system of record.
Online: getconga.com | Twitter: @getconga Online: getconga.com | Twitter: @getconga
implementation that launches at the end of this year is that of Adobe Experience Manager, which delivers customer experiences through FCR’s customer portal, and works ‘right out of the box’. In Farrell’s Dell days, working with Adobe meant needing entire development teams in different countries. When technology is simple to use as well as implement, customers feel closer to FCR, and so many more choices are made available to them. “One thing we’re able to do is work with global partners like Google, Facebook, Adobe, Salesforce, Harman, Deloitte Digital and Capgemini and bring them into the local market at a very “We’re a one-stop shop, affordable price. So, whether because 70-80% of our it’s about collating those experiences through our own customers are SMEs with platforms, or delivering less than 10 employees, so them on behalf of our they don’t have their own IT customers for their own or marketing departments” customers, it has a big impact on everyone.” ALLAN FARRELL, CIO “The value is in making sure they can be found by their customers in the digital world,” says Farrell. “Our whole subscription model is based on a flexible approach where if a customer
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says they want to have a marketing campaign for just a few months because their business is seasonal, we can deliver that. We’re a one-stop shop, because 70-80% of our customers are SMEs with less than 10 employees, so they don’t have their own IT or marketing departments. That’s how we engage and maintain that whole customer-centric approach.” SMEs are, in Farrell’s words, “the lifeblood of any economy,” and with FCR’s expertise, world-class digital solutions can be brought to those companies, thus creating an incredible influence on Belgium and beyond. Nobody in the country has the reach that FCR Media does, or the scope to bring new innovations to the market quickly and at scale. PARTNERSHIPS One major achievement for FCR during the past year has been its lightningspeed implementation of Salesforce. Thanks to his previous experiences in digital transformation, Farrell was perfectly placed to know exactly how to successfully approach this change. “One key thing in any transformation
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VIDEO: Digital Transformation is selecting a great partner,” he explains. “We didn’t have all the skills we needed when FCR took over, so we found Deloitte Digital and made sure it fitted in with our culture. We knew that we wanted a partner that could tell us what to do, not do as they were told. We want our partners to bring their experience with other customers to us, and to be honest with us if they think we’re not doing things in the best way.” FCR’s digital strategy has a clear set of principles around cloud-first strategy, and prefers to use partners’
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platforms rather than build its own. This adds to that sense of ‘out of the box’ ease; 98% of the Salesforce implementation could be configured with almost no effort, meaning time to market is exceptionally quick. Again, this feeds into FCR’s desire to put the customer first, something continually complemented by their partner, Deloitte Digital. “Customer experience being everything, we mapped out the customer journey as it existed and as we wanted it to be before we went into designing any software or processes,” says Farrell. “We spent quite some time with Deloitte Digital creating that journey and those customer experiences. Then we designed our processes and our new ways of working, so that we were confident in the end that the system would work and deliver the right customer experience. That goes back to making sure it’s not an IT project, but about starting with your end-point in mind.” The business, still in the infancy of its sure-to-be enormous growth, will continue to bring new innovations
FCR MEDIA FACTS Customer satisfaction has increased by 50% since May 2017 FCR MEDIA’S current footprint • 12 countries • 35 offices • 1,200 staff to the market. Farrell expects that, in following market trends, artificial intelligence will become increasingly important, along with predictive solutions to help the business sell the right products to the right customers. “Robotics and automation will enable us to be more consistent, and analytics will improve the customer experience and allow us and our customers greater insight,” explains Farrell. “We’ll want to leverage our relationships with our customers and do some co-creation too. “We want to bring the best evolutions we can to the market for the benefit
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The FCR Media Customer Personas of our customers. We have a 40,000strong customer base and there are more than 500,000 Belgian businesses in our target market for us to tackle, so the evolution of tech and customer relationships will become very important in the future.”
“With all of our capabilities, I think we have made – and will continue to make – a significant contribution to Belgium” ALLAN FARRELL, CIO
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THE IMPACT OF FCR FCR is preparing to launch a PR campaign drawing attention to its recent changes, and thanks to regular customer satisfaction surveys and feedback, the business has already found that customer satisfaction results have increased by more than 50% since May. This is an incredible result for a business still in the very early stages of its transformation, but it is no surprise – significant improvement has been seen across the board, with both solutions and interactions having increased in quality. FCR’s people-centric focus extends to staff, who need to be well-supported in an environment
which is constantly evolving. With a dynamic industry in constant flux, the FCR team has to work together in a similarly dynamic way, and the company made the decision to ensure it is not a hierarchical place, strengthening the sense of teamwork. “Everybody works with everybody, there are no silos, and we’re in constant contact with our partners,” says Farrell. “Everyone is accessible, whether it’s the CEO, or any management team member, or myself. People who work here get a real sense of the way things are moving, changing, and growing, and they have the opportunity to work with the latest tech and innovations, our great partners, and learn and
grow their own careers. We have a very low attrition rate as a result, and people are attracted to working at FCR because of our journey.” Nobody in Belgium has the reach that FCR Media does, or the scope to bring new innovations to the market so quickly and at scale; it is no wonder that staff, customers, and partners stay with it during this journey. “With all of our capabilities, I think we have made – and will continue to make – a significant contribution to Belgium,” Farrell concludes.
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FCR Media (Belgium) publisher of
Uitbreidingsstraat 82, 2600 Berchem T: +32 7815 1525 E: info@fcrmedia.be www.fcrmedia.be