Unilever is a company operating in the consumer packaged goods industry. Based on the success story, Unilever has had an excellent experience using Salesforce’s CRM. The main reason for choosing Salesforce and making a change was the plan of the company’s CIO to move from project-based to platform-based solutions. After implementing Salesforce, Unilever was able to change its approach to developing new program solutions and improve its processes.
As a result of implementing Salesforce, the solution implementation processes were improved, more specifically, the costs for development and implementation decreased by 40%. Additionally, the sales representatives are able to use the Salesforce services to place and manage customer orders immediately, while visiting clients, which is both convenient and time-efficient. Promotional activities with retailers are also planned through Salesforce, which allows for centralized communication with these companies and enhances the planning process, which is part of the trade promotion solution by Salesforce.
Currently, Unilever uses three services provided by Salesforce – Service Cloud, Community Cloud, and 360 Customer Cloud. According to the success story, the company uses Salesforce capabilities to build its applications based on the needs of a particular department, and the employees can participate in creating these applications. For example, Uniliver developed solutions for managing and answering human resources queries, scheduling volunteering activities, and working on internal marketing.
Another example of how the company’s performance improved is the use of Einstein Analytics to analyze customers’ experience and performance. Tangible improvements include integrating Commerce Cloud that allows direct-to-consumer sales, which is a new model for Uniliver. As was mentioned, the costs of implementing new solutions at Uniliver were reduced by almost half, which is a remarkable change.
Three concepts that were applied by Salesforce are cloud computing, marketing automation, and analytics (BI). Cloud Computing allows storing and accessing a large amount of data using remote servers. It was used by Salesforce and Uniliver in particular to provide access to applications to its sales representatives and branches across the world. Moreover, Uniliver has approximately 22 petabytes of business-specific data, which they store using Salesforce to be able to transfer it within its departments.
Next, Marketing automation is related to any automated solution that marketers can use in their work, such as managing marketing strategies and tracking the performance. Salesforce Pardot is used to manage the business to business sales, which can be used by Uniliver to manage its relationships with retailers. Finally, analytics (BI) is used by Uniliver to improve its performance since the Salesforce solution allows collecting performance data, such as sales, visualizing it, and sharing it across different departments.
From these modules and the success stories, I learned that CRM solutions could be applied in varied settings, not only to manage relationships with customers and improve customer experience but to improve the processes within the company. Moreover, I learned that having a solution such as Salesforce, which offers cloud computing and the ability to build new applications depending on the needs of the business, is useful and can significantly reduce costs.
Some questions about Module 7 and Module 8 I have are related to the personnel training and the skill requirements for the human resources that a manager should consider when choosing a CRM system. As I understand, and implementation of a new CRM, such as Salesforce, would require time and resources in terms of ensuring that the personnel, such as sales representatives or marketing specialists are able to use it.