A Three-Year Transformation
Three years ago, Elsevier agreed that their customer-facing teams needed digital transformation. They wanted every customer to be able to say:
"Elsevier knows my business, anticipates our needs and demonstrates commitment to our success"
When they reviewed the state of the business at the time, Elsevier uncovered several technology issues. Namely:
They had tooling that wasn’t fit for purpose
They were using a complex and clunky Siebel system
Account managers were working from a series of offline spreadsheets
Account managers did not have enough time to reflect and engage with the customer because of manual processes.
Without changing their process soon, Elsevier recognised the potential problems to grow.
Organisational change needed to happen in order for Elsevier to become truly customer-centric.
Elsevier mobilised a change programme, which they named the Salesforce modernisation programme. They intended this to take them into the modern world, both in terms of technological and organisational change. This would be the way they could truly invest in their customers’ success.
Today, Elsevier has an ecosystem based on the Salesforce platform and integrations, allowing them to continue building a one-stop shop. There are no spreadsheets or anything offline. Everything happens on the platform. The benefits are numerous:
Better customer experience
Employees saving time
Move more rapidly, with the facility to add more integrations to continuously evolve
1. Build the right team
Building the right team (including internal and external partners) enables you to optimise dashboards and data warehouse solutions to drive the insights you'll need.
Elsevier used a consulting partner to drive programme management and their change management work stream. They used BrightGen as the best-in-class partners for delivery.
2. Get ahead of the change
Elsevier used their partners’ support to map out the key activities that would get their stakeholders up the change curve.
This would move them from anticipating change to being committed to it.
3. Focus on the insights
Do this from day one. Instead of leading with reports, Elsevier started to lead with insights from their data.
They built new Tableau dashboards and used prototyping to understand what would be valuable to different people. They could then use that to challenge the need for the inputs.
Elsevier became a spreadsheet-free zone.
With reporting solely on the platform, visualisations became so sophisticated, users were blown away.
4. Push for early adopters
When you are rolling out to 1500 users, there is value in setting up a small group (Elsevier’s was 180 users) to test this out first.
Create champions.
To roll this out, Elsevier hired temps to test the key data points to ensure the systems were kept in sync.
5. Enable self-serve support
On the day they went live, Elsevier's local champions throughout the customer-facing teams responded to questions. They needed them to support the experience in general.
They used Salesforce Chatter, which made the support experience stronger. It also helped the technology team to focus on the problems where they could really add value.