28/03/2018 | Hardis Group
Since the end of 2016, the BtoB natural gas supplier has had a customer information system using Salesforce technologies which covers the entire business process, from the generation of new opportunities (marketing automation) to the processing of customer service requests.
Hardis Group, a consulting firm, digital services company and independent software vendor, announces the roll-out of a customer information system designed using Salesforce technologies at Gazprom Energy. Following its roll out, the natural gas supplier for companies has achieved its objectives of improving the efficiency and responsiveness of its teams in charge of attracting new customers and monitoring existing customers. All in a context of strong growth in its business.
Gazprom Energy: significant ambitions on the French market
Gazprom Energy is the French subsidiary of the Russian company Gazprom, the world leader in natural gas. The company has been supplying natural gas to its BtoB customers, artisans and retailers, industries and communities since 2006, following the opening of the energy market in France. It currently has fifty employees.
Since 2012, Gazprom Energy's employees have used Sales Cloud, a customer relation management application from Salesforce. In 2014, the company decided to optimize its use of the tool and to enhance it with new components to meet its growth ambitions. The objective: to bring its teams together, using a single tool to handle the entire business process, from detecting opportunities to monitoring customer requests. On the vendor's recommendation, Gazprom Energy turned to Synefo, a French integrator which specializes in Salesforce applications, which is now part of Hardis Group.
Salesforce: beyond CRM, a resolutely customer-oriented information system
After making improvements to the sales process using the pre-existing CRM (pricing tool, monitoring opportunities from leads to signing, interfacing with Vocalcom, call center software), customer relations were prioritized at the beginning of 2015. An external portal, based on Community Cloud, was rolled out to enable Gazprom Energy customers to access their records. Immediately after, web services were set up with third-party applications: the gas distribution manager (GRDF) application to access accurate information about the customer's usage and insurance company applications to assess customer risks. In 2015, Service Cloud was rolled out within Customer Service to improve the management and processing of requests from Gazprom Energy's customers.
Automating the search for new customers
Subsequently, in 2016, Hardis Group's teams supported Gazprom Energy on a project which focused on automating the process of generating and monitoring business opportunities (lead generation and nurturing), using Pardot and Web-To-Lead marketing automation applications. "The teams at Synefo helped us at every stage, from defining automation scenarios to rolling out these new components", says Ali Fenjiro, Project & Delivery Manager at Gazprom Energy.
A unique tool to manage the entire business value chain
In three years, Gazprom Energy has achieved its objective of having a unified customer information system which covers the entire value chain, from the generation of business opportunities to after-sales service. 80% of the company's employees currently use the platform. "This transformation has truly addressed our significant growth ambitions: for example, we have quadrupled the number of business opportunities, without increasing the size of our sales force", says Ali Fenjiro.
Beyond the centralization of processes within a single platform, other objectives have also been achieved. Gazprom's customers benefit from enhanced monitoring and are able to view their records independently: as a result, a recent survey of customer satisfaction levels found that 93% of customers felt positively. The productivity and responsiveness of Gazprom Energy's teams have also increased.
"We really valued the expertise of the Synefo/Hardis team when it came to Salesforce's particular features", Ali Fenjiro comments. Having rolled out the electronic signature of contracts, interfaced with DocuSign, at the beginning of 2016, Gazprom Energy is now concentrating on improving its customer invoicing process.