Fortune 500 Pharma Optimizes Customer Journey with SUMO
CHALLENGE
An onboarding process is the start of a customer’s journey with a business. It can define your company’s reputation with a client. Understanding the importance of this process, a Fortune 500 global pharmaceutical company re-designed their vendor onboarding process from the ground up.
Within Salesforce, their chosen CRM, the Pharma’s global CRM team laid the foundation for a new process starting with building a community portal. They designed a customer journey that allowed for their call center agents to offer an easy and trackable method for vendors interested in the company’s products to set-up an account.
SOLUTION
After a search on Salesforce’s AppExchange, the Pharma company chose SUMO Scheduler. The CRM team were drawn to SUMO as a Salesforce-native app that looked easy to implement and had an attractive front-end for their vendors. Appointment reminder options, also figured into their decision-making process as it would be a key feature.
SUMO also met their security criteria and a discovery call made it clear that there would be no need for customization. These features made the decision to move forward easier.
Before SUMO, vendors trying to schedule their onboarding session were subjected to the back and forth of email and phone tag. These tools were wasting time for both parties. Vendors were not only getting stuck in an ineffective circle of communication, but it also depleted the time agents could spend on actual onboarding activities.
Although appointment scheduling is part of a larger process for welcoming customers, every onboarding session starts with an appointment being scheduled. The Pharma company created a process that allowed a vendor multiple ways to book an appointment for a welcome call via web or phone conference.
After qualifying the vendor, an email is sent to them with a self-scheduling button. From a self-scheduling button embedded in the email, a vendor sets the date and time convenient for them.
RESULTS
When the vendor self-schedules, they are placed in a queue for the welcome team. From this queue, they are distributed to a specific welcome team member to start the onboarding process.
An email confirmation sent to both the vendor and call center agent to whom they are assigned assures both parties are synced. Subsequent reminders leading up to the appointment date assure the vendor is less likely to miss the appointment.
Before SUMO, vendors wanting to do business with this Pharma company were subjected to multiple calls and emails. Timing became a major blocker to completing the onboarding process.
Oftentimes, vendors could not set-up an agreeable date and time on first contact with an agent. Agent productivity was diverted from getting vendors set-up to managing the scheduling and rescheduling of appointments.
THE NUMBERS
By adding self-scheduling into the onboarding process:
- +45% increase of call center agent usage, shifting time spent on email and phone exchanges
- +200 appointments being processed a month.
