An airline was in a position where the information needed by the Sales and BI departments in daily operation was distributed across various data silos and was therefore difficult to access. Information needed to conclude contracts with external agencies and corporate clients in particular should be available centrally. The objective: More transparency and control over the process of concluding contracts. Ideally the system to be introduced should also be in a position to generate the necessary documents, to minimise effort. Sending contracts throughout Europe has also been rendered obsolete with the use of an E-signature function.
The collaboration with new agencies in the area of flight bookings was to be centralised and controllable by 2nd level support, in order to achieve greater quality assurance. Key data about the business partners – such as sales or booking statistics, cancellations and gestures of goodwill – were also to be available in a central location, in order to give the Executive Board a 360° view of the partners.
The client opted to introduce Salesforce as the leading provider of cloud-based CRM solutions, and to use the support of Arlanis Reply as an experienced Salesforce Consulting Partner. Arlanis Reply adapted Salesforce.com to the requirements of the customer, so that the Sales department can directly create contractual content using a flow / wizard.
With the implementation of a PDF generator, business documents can now be created dynamically in the correct form. The system also forms the entire, multi-stage approval process so that the release of contracts is also executed and documented by the relevant stakeholders in Salesforce. Expansion of the website ensures that agencies that register for cooperation are automatically incorporated into SFDC and data can be added and managed by support staff.
Arlanis Reply and the airline also used SFDC for the project management of these system adaptations. As a result, the changing project teams could always access the information relevant to them in a central location. By means of agile project management employing user stories, during development it was also possible to respond dynamically to the working methods and requirements of the department and thereby achieve the best possible result for the customer.
On the technical side, the project was implemented using Visualforce, Force.com and Heroku in order to adequately depict the flows for initial offer generation, web-to-lead and approval processes. In addition, with Salesforce Chatter a platform for internal communication was introduced making protracted e-mail exchanges unnecessary.
Since the implementation of Salesforce, contract preparation has become considerably more transparent and has met with broad approval from users. The Sales department is therefore able to achieve significant time savings when creating and concluding contracts with agencies.
The conversion largely eliminates the need to manually record partner agencies for the Partner Management, as agencies add themselves to Salesforce; overall, by the use of Salesforce, the process has been radically simplified and accelerated. Internal communication and communication with partners have become more transparent and much quicker with the introduction of Salesforce Chatter. Reports based on the latest data can be generated ad hoc by the relevant stakeholders themselves whenever needed, at no cost.
Cancellations, changes of bookings, gestures of goodwill etc. are now made transparent by the system, revealing formerly hidden cost drivers and offering an opportunity to counter them with an optimization approach. By integrating external market data such as price information in real-time, sales can be managed more efficiently. Salesforce now provides an integrated platform which serves as a veritable sales cockpit.