Critical Support for Large Pharmaceuticals Distributor

Business Challenge

This multi-billion dollar medical supplies firm provides services and products to health care providers and payors. From pharmaceuticals and supplies to sophisticated medical workflow solutions, their offerings help customers reduce costs, streamline processes and, most importantly, improve patient care and medication safety. When the firm was awarded a highly visible contract to distribute medical supplies to medical, government and non-profit organizations across America under a tight timeframe, they instantly knew what support system they would leverage for their contact center.

Earlier in the year the Client had won a similar contract. Their contact center that handles all returns, damaged or lost package processing and generally keeps track of quality control during the widespread distribution, was using an Oracle™i based call center application they had built called STORM. STORM was not flexible enough to handle the new contract reporting deadlines that they would need to meet for their customer. The Client’s corporate sponsor had selected Salesforce.com Service Cloud software as a service based upon their experience in using this product in another role. The Client chose Acumen Solutions to assist them with systems integration and the data and operational process challenge of migrating the 46,000 accounts and 22,000 related cases from their previous system into Salesforce.com Service Cloud without interruption of service to the contact center representatives (handling calls and emails) and under a tight deadline of three weeks. 

The Solution

  • Our experts provided the following services to this client:
  • Installed and configured the Salesforce.com Service Cloud offering for the client
  • Architected the data and system migration so there was no disruption in service
  • Customized the application to deliver 
    • Case escalation rules
    • Automated workflows
    • Reporting complexity
    • Track progress against new contractual service level agreements
  • Migrated 46,000 accounts and 22,000 case records. Data included call histories, accounts and case or issues history
  • Trained the contact center representatives on the new system
  • Negotiated with the vendor for increased support window in order to cover the urgency level required by this program and the associated contract

Return on Investment

Primary benefit to the client was

  • The ability of the system to deliver the critical reporting and performance tracking requirements to meet their contractual obligations all within a rapid launch time of 3 weeks.

Ancillary benefits to the client included:

  • New ability to collect data that allows the client to proactively identify process improvements and avoid bottlenecks or potential problems;
  • New visibility into 1st call resolution, trend of average time to resolution, order and issue status;
  • Improved application response times;
  • Significantly lower implementation costs vs. developing the system with the available on-premise software options;
  • Trend analysis;
  • Visibility into top 3 call types which allows management to collaborate on resolution much quicker across the organization;
  • Ability to deliver a proactive order status to the client’s customers via a shipping log and auto-email that sends customers a shipping status which prevents hundreds of in-bound calls;
  • Performance metrics which lead to better business decisions – e.g. Cost Benefit of Box Return – Initially there was a program requirement for the package recipients to return the boxes to the Client. With better call and cost tracking, the client was able to calculate a cost v. benefit analysis of this effort and determine that due to the call volumes it generated, it was not worth the recovered costs of the boxes.  Due to the success of the initial system launch in support of this program Acumen Solutions and the Salesforce.com platform were selected again to support a more complex and more visible program with 5 times more users of the system.

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