Viwinco Implements Salesforce
Customer relationships are the cornerstone of a successful business. As a company grows and adds complexity, managing customer relationships and continuing to provide an exceptional level of service becomes increasingly challenging. To streamline communications and visibility, companies often rely on robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs to organize information and improve processes across the entire company. CRM programs allow flexibility as companies look to scale their operations and empower employees to focus on impactful work that makes a difference in the customer experience. Recently Viwinco concluded the first phase of its CRM rollout with Salesforce. Here is a look into our decision–making processes, implementation and plans for future development.
Identifying a Need
Implementing a CRM program is a big investment, not only from a cost perspective, but in terms of training and setup as well. This is why it is important to identify a need for a CRM and have a clear vision of what you hope it will achieve. With Viwinco, we knew we needed a platform for our customer-facing departments that would allow easy access to information and reduce the number of back-and-forth communications between departments to resolve an issue. What we didn’t know, was how this would work for our company specifically and what each department hoped to get out of it. One of the things we did early on was inform our customer-facing departments on the plan to roll out a CRM program and for them to list a number of pain points in their daily functions and what they hoped to achieve with a future CRM program. With this information we compiled all the feedback and created a checklist, which we used to determine which program would best fit our needs.
Selecting a CRM
Selecting a CRM software can be overwhelming, especially for teams with little or no previous experience with one. We knew from the start that we needed a program that would work for our Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Marketing departments. With the feedback we compiled in our checklist, a few key marketing stakeholders began to identify and vet a variety of potential CRM programs. Because most CRM programs are custom-made to fit the needs of the company, the research period can be extensive. CRM companies run through a series of discovery calls to understand the needs of your business before putting together a tailored demo on how the CRM can be applied to you.
Choosing Salesforce
We looked at nearly a dozen different programs and ultimately decided that Salesforce would best fit Viwinco’s needs. With Customer Focus being one of our Core Tenets, we needed to identify a program that we felt would enable us to provide our customers the best level of service. Salesforce offered robust platforms across field service, customer service, sales and marketing that incorporated tools to streamline communication and provide visibility across the different departments. Additional features such as intuitive, expansive reporting capabilities and automated workflows would provide us with the accurate information we need and eliminate waste in the customer supporting processes. Another reason we chose Salesforce is we felt there was constant innovation happening on their end. As we continue to scale, we needed to know that our CRM program is actively working on tools that will assist us.
Implementation is Important
Salesforce is a custom application that offers extensive tools to support business needs. That being said, when you first log in to the program, a lot of setup needs to happen to enable the program to function as planned. This is not something exclusive to Salesforce, many CRM programs are designed this way to give you the flexibility to create a tool that does what you need it to. Because of this, it is important—and recommended— to work with an implementation partner to help bring your CRM vision to life.
Salesforce Implementation
For our Salesforce implementation, we partnered with Neuraflash to ensure a seamless and customized roll out. The Neuraflash team took the time to understand our needs and crafted a detailed roadmap with clear deadlines to guide the process. They helped set up the functionality needed by each department, collaborated closely with our Vice President of Technology to integrate our existing systems, and provided ongoing user support to ensure a smooth transition after launch.
For the week of go-live, our Vice President of Sales led a three-day workshop for our internal teams to get them logged on and to provide walkthroughs for their more common processes. The Neuraflash team was also onsite to assist with any issues that came up, provide permission-based changes and work on any features that needed to be tweaked. Since the launch, our users have been submitting issues and feature requests to be categorized and addressed accordingly.
Although we had a relatively short implementation, we were able to accomplish a lot by developing our core functions in the platform. We’re pleased with how smoothly the implementation went and are appreciative of the Neuraflash team’s responsiveness in addressing our questions. We look forward to further developing the platform to allow us to better support our customers.
Viwinco at Dreamforce 2024
A small group of three from Viwinco attended Dreamforce this past September. It was our first time at the event, and though it came right after wrapping up our Salesforce implementation, making it a bit hectic, the experience was well worth it.
Salesforce made everything smooth, from registration to badge pick-up. We quickly joined the flow of thousands of attendees, and the event set a high-tech tone from the start. After a welcome breakfast for newcomers, we headed to the keynote.
Marc Benioff’s keynote focused on the next AI wave with the introduction of Agentforce, a tool designed to help businesses deploy AI agents to handle tasks across departments, reducing human intervention and boosting efficiency. Salesforce heavily promoted Agentforce throughout the event, making it clear they see it as a major step forward.
Another great session was the manufacturing keynote, “Building a Connected Industry 5.0,” which highlighted how Salesforce’s AI tools are transforming manufacturing through improved asset management, predictive analytics, and customer service.
We split up to attend sessions that fit our individual needs, which was especially helpful since Salesforce is still new to us. We’ll be ready for more advanced workshops and better understand the Salesforce lingo if we attend next year.
Networking was a big highlight—we connected with professionals from all industries. A standout was visiting the Salesforce Tower’s 61st-floor lookout, which gave us an incredible 360-degree view of San Francisco. It wasn’t all business. The Dreamfest concert and exploring the city’s iconic spots between sessions made this a special experience.
Looking Ahead
All of our customer-facing teams are working in Salesforce at this point, with overwhelmingly positive feedback. As we continue to iron out the bugs and identify areas for improvement, we will start working on the next phase of Salesforce development, where we can further optimize our processes and look to roll out additional features. We are grateful for the help and support from the Neuraflash and Salesforce teams through our implementation and training. We look forward to seeing how Salesforce will support our goal of being the best window and door manufacturer.
