Force.com Customization, Salesforce CRM Service Help Cottingham & Butler Unify Business Units, Manage Leads, and Serve Diverse Customer Base

Challenge

• Cottingham & Butler, an insurance broker of employee benefits and risk management services, wanted to overcome the inefficiencies of each rep maintaining his or her own lead lists in Microsoft Excel.
• With no centralized CRM system, duplicated leads sometimes received uncoordinated prospecting from sales representatives.
• The company also wanted to improve on the manual, paper-based customer support processes that made tracking, accountability, and the ability to capture institutional knowledge difficult.
• Flexibility was key: The company required a single solution that could be tailored to manage its multiple, distinct business units.

Solution

• After dismissing many CRM systems as potential solutions, Cottingham & Butler selected Salesforce CRM for its superior opportunity management, ease of use, customization, document collaboration, and out-of-the-box reporting.
• The company started with Salesforce CRM Professional Edition, but migrated to Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition to leverage advanced customization capabilities—particularly for those accounts accessed by service as well as sales.
• To meet the needs of the Employee Benefits group, the company used the Force.com builder to create 22 custom objects for tracking plan coverages, partners, insurance carriers, and policy details, such as renewals and commissions.
• Automated workflows route leads to appropriate individuals and provide preset responses to Web-captured leads.

Results

• With a single, common system, Cottingham & Butler now touches the customer as one company, rather than as separate business units or individual employees.
• Salesforce CRM enabled the company to consolidate customer information previously spread across many databases and drive the business forward with consistent, accurate metrics reporting.
• With Salesforce CRM, Cottingham & Butler is able to systematically track service requests and resolution, not possible with the former paper-based, disconnected support system.
• Sales and support benefit from new visibility into each other's respective activities with customers; sharing one common view of customer issues allows for better customer service and more insight into up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
• The Employee Benefits customizations have proven so successful that the company is considering posting them to AppExchange for use by other salesforce.com insurance customers.