See How A Telecommunications Company Streamlines Their Onboarding Process and Improves Customer Care

The Challenges

Our client in the Communications Industry needed assistance with managing their sales agents and providing better customer support. Before working with Kelley Austin, our client was using an out-of-the-box version of Sales Cloud with very little customizations. Only three people at the company were using the product, but they didn’t have a Salesforce Administrator to help them make changes or updates to the system. Our client had also set up Service Cloud and Experience Cloud, but they were not using either product.

As a large-scale smartphone and wireless internet provider, our client was struggling to manage their sales agents and onboard new hires. They didn’t have the infrastructure to seamlessly onboard or transfer new hires between store locations. All onboarding was done through email and the process involved lots of follow-up between staff and new hires for different steps in the onboarding process such as background checks, training, and ID verification. Sales agents would reach out with questions, leading to lengthy email threads. There was no automation involved or online portal where sales agents could login and see what step they were at in the onboarding process. 

Our client also needed assistance with providing better customer care for both agents and resellers as well as actual customers. They didn’t have the systems in place for customers to get the help they needed if they had broken products or questions about their phone and data plans. Agents also lacked an efficient system for reaching out about questions related to their monthly sales or for supporting their customers.

Another issue the client struggled with related to customer support was tracking data and tying it to support cases. Customer and agent data was not being efficiently tracked from a single system. For example, customers would call the client’s service center and if that individual was not already a customer in their system, there was no automated tracking in place to reach out to them in the future as a potential customer. Our client was also using separate systems for managing customer support, which was highly inefficient.

The Solution

Our client has thousands of sales agents who are contracted to sell their products and services and they wanted to automate the onboarding process to make it easier for managers, potential hires, and company staff. For the onboarding process, there are seven steps that sales agents are required to complete before becoming a new hire. Five external systems are needed during this process, including various systems to assist with training, background checks, data tracking, and record keeping.

Because the company is constantly hiring new sales agents or transferring agents to new store locations, their onboarding process is complex and required a large degree of customization in Salesforce. Our client wanted to eliminate a lot of the back and forth happening in their email communications between staff and agents. To automate a majority of the onboarding process, our team built a custom community in Experience Cloud using lightning web components and multiple flows. Sales agents can now login to the community to access the onboarding steps from a single platform versus emailing the company for links to complete each step.

This custom community guides new hires through the entire onboarding process and immediately tracks contacts. Each step is automated so that when a new hire completes a step, the system marks it as complete and they’re prompted to move on to the next action. Our client also has access to data about where agents are in the onboarding process as well as information about their store locations or any transfers that occur. We also built a custom community for managers in Experience Cloud. This separate community allows managers to view additional data and analytics, including information about transfer requests, compliance records, distributor reports, cases, as well as access to a Tableau dashboard.  

Another unique aspect of the sales side of the project involved setting up an API to run with Amazon Web Services. This customization allows managers to pull inventory reports and activity reports from within their community. Managers can download excel documents that contain sales data for different branches.

In addition to improving our client’s onboarding process, we also helped our client provide better customer care with Salesforce. Our team setup Service Console with features such as chat, communities, knowledge base, milestones, and queue-based channel routing. Our team built custom infrastructure to support various case channels such as web, email, phone, social, and related integrations. We also created a customer-facing community with self-service support and chat features using knowledge articles. This allows customers to submit cases if they’re having issues with a particular product or service. Service reps can then send over the related knowledge article to help the agent or customer quickly find a solution to their problem.

With Salesforce now the client’s home base for everything customer care related, our team has been able to simplify how our client provides support and reduce the workload for customer care agents. For example, with every phone call a customer care agent receives, a case is automatically created. This allows our client to track customer and prospect data. Support agents can easily pick a case from the case queue while also supporting live channels such as chat or the phone channel.

Customer Impact

Our team made several improvements to our client’s internal systems in order to streamline the onboarding process and track sales agent data. Instead of a team member having to manually verify that an ID or background check has been submitted, managers can easily check within their community dashboard where sales agents are in the onboarding process.

Our client also has access to reports and dashboards so they can keep track of sales agent data, including information about different branch locations, agent transfers, and off-boarding information. Automating our client’s onboarding process and building a custom community for both sales agents and managers has improved operational efficiency and provides our client with valuable insights on areas that need improvement. 

By implementing Service Console, we also helped our client improve how they provide customer support. Before working with Kelley Austin, customer support took place in multiple systems with little ability to troubleshoot gaps in customer care or track areas of improvement based on patterns over time.

With the customer and sales agent communities built by our team, customers can quickly submit cases. This has cut down response times compared to relying on email and separate systems. Customers can also reach out for assistance through multiple channels, including social media where data is immediately pushed over to and tracked in Salesforce. With customers and sales agents now being able to reach out for assistance through multiple mediums, our client can ensure both customers and agents are getting the support they need in a timely manner.