Aconex aligns sales and customer service in the cloud

Challenge

•       Establish common platform for sales and customer related activity
•       Achieve stronger cohesion between sales and customer service
•       Improve practices for driving and measuring sales efficiency
•       Improve speed of access to customer information
•       Integrate CRM seamlessly with the Aconex online collaboration platform
•       Effortless scalability a ‘must’ for this fast-growing, global business!

Solution        

•       Velteo engaged for Business Process consulting and CRM scoping and integration      
•       Cloud model identified as best fit with Aconex SaaS model
•       Salesforce CRM EE introduced in place of hosted CRM solution in March 2010
•       100 user deployment across global Sales and Support teams
•       Implementation, systems integration and customization all completed inside 3 months

Results

•       Central hub for managing sales and customer service
•       Greater visibility and transparency of data in the cloud
•       Access to AppExchange tools for extending platform
•       20-30% increase in effectiveness of lead management through workflows and automation
•       Dashboards drive consistently high performance
•       End-to-end lead tracking for faster turnaround times
•       Improved sales forecasting with on-time forecast submission at around 93%
•       Significantly improved data integrity

Overview

Aconex’s innovative online project collaboration platform allows all parties involved in complex engineering and construction projects to easily communicate and share information for time and cost efficiency.

The Australian company has achieved global success across North and South America, Europe, Asia, North Africa and The Middle East with its easy-to-use system for communicating and managing information in the cloud. Today Aconex employs over 350 staff across 38 locations, providing 24x7 support to a network of over 160,000 users managing 6,500 projects.

When Aconex reviewed the CRM marketplace for an up to date solution, speed, customization and multi-language support were all key pre-requisites.  In fact, the solution best able to fulfill these needs was salesforce.com’s cloud CRM, which aligned perfectly with Aconex’s own values, developed over 10 years as a successful SaaS provider.

Aconex found Salesforce CRM intuitive and easy to customize to its specific business needs. With Velteo’s guidance on best practice process integration, Aconex embedded its core sales methodology into Salesforce CRM, leads are now tracked from the source right the way through the sales cycle to close, where they progress to customer service. Customised VisualForce pages reduced the noise for the reps and improved adoption through an easy to use interface whilst enforcing workflows to provide sales compliance.

Granular, easy-to-create reports allow Aconex to identify the most attractive markets and run more targeted campaigns. Desktop dashboards provide critical insights into daily operations to assist with adherence to internal SLAs. Among them are:

-      Lead management

-      Data integrity

-      Regional sales performance

-      Performance by sales rep

-      Support – training requests, case management, etc.

Aconex has witnessed an increase of between 20 -30% in the effectiveness of the end-to-end lead management process and a decline in invalid sales entries and neglected opportunities.

For Aconex, the Force.com platform is a valuable foundation for continually evolving business operations for greater efficiencies. Deeper integration with the finance system on the fulfillment side, as well as integration with a leading marketing automation application, is already on the cards.