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Managing high sales volumes and complex opportunity assignment scenarios with Q-assign for Salesforce.
EF Education First is a truly international organization. Their mission is to open the world through education, delivering culturally immersive programs across more than 100 countries and regions. Since their foundation in 1965, they helped millions of people travel and learn, while experiencing new cultures.
With thousands of international programs available, this represents a highly complex customer offering.
Anuj Kapoor is the VP of Salesforce Practice. He leads the platform team, which operates as a Salesforce centre of excellence. He is in charge of the day-to-day smooth running of Salesforce and implementation of best practice. Anuj also steers the ship when it comes to long term strategy.
“We have a huge influx of customers enquiries every day, creating a high number of Opportunities. If we left a manager to do this manually, they would spend 2 to 3 hours a day just assigning records”
EF faces two major challenges when it comes to assignment.
With a widely distributed international sales organization, the teams’ efficient response to inbound leads has a critical impact on the success of customer conversion. To compound the challenge, the inbound pipeline is highly dynamic. For example, EF create regular pop-up customer recruitment opportunities, e.g., stalls at specific events, which generate a large volume of leads at one time.
When EF brought in Salesforce in 2018, efficient management of the inbound lead pipeline was priority no.1 on the roadmap.
Manual assignment was not an option. If this task was to be handed to managers, they would be spending a disproportionate amount of time on this allocation.
“We have a huge influx of customers inquiries every day, generating a large number of opportunities. If we let a manager do this manually, they’re going to potentially spend half of the day just doing this on assigning records.”
EF had taken their requirements to a number of Salesforce vendors, but their solutions were not capable of coping with the complexity and the volumes of sales enquiries that EF were handling.
“There were very few vendors out there who could handle the complexity. When we gave them our numbers, they told us they could not support us.”
EF worked with the Ortoo team to implement a state-of-the-art assignment system – one that could accommodate EF’s unique sales process.
By outlining the existing process, and mapping out each of the complexities, the Q-assign were able to configure an assignment system that ensured every inbound enquiry was routed to the most appropriate Sales team in within minutes.
The initial assignment model took into account: –
Ortoo’s methodology is to develop a fully operational proof of concept before any commitment to the sale. In this way, the prospective customer can be sure that they will have every one of their assignment requirements met by Q-assign.
Once EF had a working prototype that met each of their requirements, the Ortoo team launched the app in their Salesforce org. The Q-assign interface allows for easy adjustment, bypassing the need for code or technical intervention. However, the Ortoo support team remain on hand to help Anuj with any advanced configuration requirements.
“Improved performance is critical. We need to know that Opportunities are assigned as soon as possible to the right person to make the call. Right now, our median time to assignment is 2 minutes”
The key result for the EF team is that they can rely on Q-assign to rapidly and accurately assign Opportunities to the correct sales coordinators. By responding quickly to these enquiries, EF are confident they have made a significant impact on their customer conversion rate.
What’s more, they have created a partnership with the Ortoo Support team that they know will allow them to fully optimize their sales process, now and in the future. When it comes to delivering solutions to new challenges, the Ortoo team has it covered!
“We’ve been with Salesforce for seven years now and there is always a lot of complexity that comes with this platform. To have a vendor who can navigate this complexity and deliver a fast response is amazing. If any company were facing a challenge with their assignment, there is no one in this space who is doing a better job.”
“The whole reason we moved to Salesforce was so we would not need to start building everything”
EF has the philosophy that buying solutions in the form of supported AppExchange products is vastly preferable to going down the route of inhouse development. They want solutions that scale with their business, and are future-proofed to benefit from every new Salesforce release, constantly upgrading in line with the platform itself.
Not only that, but by working with dedicated expert vendors, EF know that they benefit from learnings, gathered across a wide customer portfolio, being rolled right back into each new and improved version of Q-assign.
