Indian multinational adhesives maker Pidilite Industries has teamed up with Salesforce to implement a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software solution to deepen customer bonds and improve productivity across sales and service.
The company, which is a leading player in consumer, construction and specialty chemicals, has a presence in 11 countries around the world with an innovation centre in Singapore which is its Centre of Excellence for Innovative Green Products. The company is a member of the Singapore Chemical Industry Council (SCIC).
Pidilite’s Head of Digital Initiatives, Nishchai Nevrekar, said the company, using Salesforce, is crafting personalised and omnichannel experiences for customers while empowering contractors and employees with tools that help them succeed.
The company is using Salesforce applications like Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and Heroku.
Prior to Salesforce, Pidilite’s Industrial Products Division was managing its sales and customer engagement processes through disparate, complicated project trackers and spreadsheets, making it difficult to handle key accounts, track opportunities, and optimise productivity, Nevrekar said.
The division serves business-to-business (B2B) customers in more than 30 industries.
Using CRM, Pidilite has automated its processes, channelising the daily activities of teams towards seamless customer engagement, said Nevrekar.
Salesforce’s Lightning Platform generates analytics from Pidilite’s data warehouse to automatically generate actions for business development managers and sales representatives, he added.
Strengthening sales team
Pidilite’s pre-sales and post-sales teams use the Service Cloud in contact centres for a unified view of leads and enquiries for faster resolution of customer queries.
Further, the integration of computer telephony allows pre-sales representatives to make more calls and reach more prospects, while post-sales agents can service more customers every day.
Pidilite’s Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives, Manasi Choudhari, said a customer 360 dashboard helps personalise customer conversations and find the right solutions.
“This has boosted our first call resolution (FCR) rates from 75 percent to 93 percent,” she added.
Moreover, automation has improved Pidilite’s first response time (FRT) by almost 90 percent, the company said.
The field sales team is using Salesforce’s mobile CRM software linked to the Sales Cloud for activities like lead qualification, opportunity prioritisation, or key account tracking.
Pidilite Industrial Products Division’s CEO, Rajesh Balakrishnan, said access to quality sales data “enables management to make faster decisions on how to improve sales force effectiveness and productivity”.
Apps for simplification
The Pidilite team has built three apps - Dr Fixit App, the custom field marketing app, and the TEAM app - using Heroku.
Heroku is a container-based cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and part of the Salesforce Platform.
Dr Fixit App is a sales-focused mobile app for Pidilite’s waterproofing contractors. Leads and customer data from Salesforce flow straight into the app to help contractors personalise customer conversations, the company said.
The app also provides a quotation-building tool that helps contractors generate real-time sales quotes from anywhere.
The custom field marketing app receives contractor data from Salesforce, which flows through the app to internal teams, helping them efficiently “manage contractor visits, enrolment, and ongoing engagement”.
Further, the app helps 1,400 field marketing executives across various divisions of Pidilite “manage over two million contractors”, and analytics-driven inputs help internal teams boost contractor engagement.
Pidilite, under its Fevicryl brand, has to engage with influencers like teachers and craft hobbyists who organise workshops to demonstrate products to consumers.
The TEAM app eliminates the manual process of signing up influencers, organising workshops, and managing reimbursements.
The app has reduced the influencer onboarding time from 45 days to just five days while increasing influencer enrolments by 10 percent, the company said.
There’s also been a 50 percent uptake in the number of teachers applying to conduct Pidilite demo camps, it added.
Pidilite is also testing its new products giving them to its important customers to use and provide feedback. They collect this feedback using Service Cloud, helping to see how its products work in different environments and make improvements accordingly.
“We now have instant insights on product performance and value, which can be incorporated into product design,” said Balakrishnan.
“This has helped us amplify the success of our innovation projects, and generate more revenue through them,” he added.
