CHALLENGES

• Old-school ticketing systems
• Lack of customer happiness
• Lack of multi-channel support

The Company Founded in 1931, Bridgestone is the world’s largest tire production and distribution company. Implementation and monitoring of their operational and financial strategies happen at the back office solution business unit situated in France and Benelux. Innovative tire technology led their company to become the primary supplier of native equipment to all major car manufacturers. The problem With over 150,000 employees, Bridgestone operates 180 production plants in 26 countries. Bridgestone’s tires cater to a wide market ranging from passenger cars, trucks and buses to agricultural trucks, motor sports and aircrafts. The company’s customer support team for solution business unit is managed by 15 agents who are based in France. Technology at Bridgestone is driven to make life safer for people across various demographics. On an average day, the customer support agents at Bridgestone receive around 95-100 tickets. The topics of the questions range from financial and administrative functions to commercial and information systems. The customer support agents handled their incoming tickets through Outlook and phone channels. The outdated system made it very difficult for them to integrate these channels under one domain. Testing out other SaaS tools failed to work to their benefit considering the limited resources the tools offered. They faced constant dissatisfaction of the customers who waited forever for a follow up. "We adopted Freshdesk because it is a highly adaptable solution with a lot of metrics that allows us to track and follow up on our customers and agents efficiently." - Christophe Tomborski, Back Office Manager, Bridgestone The Solution The company wanted to turn things around and have a solid customer support system that not only provided spectacular multiple channel support but was also simple and effective. They were introduced to Freshdesk by the French authorized reseller, Cirruseo, while they were trying out another product. During their evaluation phase, they tested the full functionality of Freshdesk by testing a web portal. The fully customizable portal arrested their attention immediately. Multiple channel support, ease of use and the SLAs helped them escalate their decision to finalize Freshdesk as their customer support helpdesk. The Benefits For Bridgestone’s agents, the shift to Freshdesk helped them realize their goal of having a single point tool to handle support across all channels. The multiple channel support assists the agents to get back to their customers across all departments with timely responses, which was not feasible previously. Service level agreements (SLAs) deployed using Freshdesk eased their work and increased the productivity. They were 95% successful in scaling up their customer support ladder by responding to tickets faster with the aid of these SLAs. Freshdesk helps Bridgestone’s agents integrate satisfaction surveys into their customer support conversation, allowing them to measure the happiness of their customers. Gamification is another feature which is very popular with the team and motivates everyone to work efficiently. Crisp reports and gamification features of Freshdesk helps the agents keep track of their helpdesk activity and also monitor the efficiency of the entire system.

About TeleResult TeleResult is a telecoms consulting agency which assists large corporate and government organisations in achieving value through the appropriate use of telecommunications technology. The company specialises in independent technology and telecommunications consulting, including data, voice, mobiles, image, and video services. Formerly known as Housley Consulting, TeleResult has been working with Australian businesses for over 44 years, and continues to grow its 2000+ client base by providing excellent customer service. Exploration of Their Journey to Purchase Freshdesk Exceptional customer service is a key contributor to the success of TeleResult. Providing services to over 2000 clients on a daily basis, TeleResult has a constant influx of enquiries which need to be dealt with efficiently, whilst ensuring standards are kept high and customers are kept happy. With clients including the NSW Government, TeleResult service representatives are often required to deal with numerous executives from one entity, and so the company needed a solution that could capture and track all the service data, on one platform. Although TeleResult had an inhouse solution which strived to capture the journey of its customers, it didn’t collate information the way the company needed it to. Speaking to industry executives about service management software, TeleResult discovered Freshdesk. Before committing to a new solution, Alex Nadeau, a Senior Client Manager at TeleResult, tested a range of solutions to distinguish which service would work best for TeleResult’s needs. Alex says Freshdesk stood out head and shoulders above the other solutions as it met and exceeded all of the company’s requirements for customer support management, and also offered a competitive pricing plan. How Freshdesk is Used TeleResult relies on Freshdesk’s software for its customer relationship management. With thousands of emails coming through on a monthly basis, the TeleResult team use Freshdesk to process requests from clients, ensuring no ball is dropped and all queries are responded to in a timely manner. Raising service tickets on the Freshdesk platform, the team at TeleResult can log each client issue and capture the full service spectrum through to resolution. Whether the client wishes to request a new phone, or is having issues with their current one, TeleResult staff ensure each and every request is managed through Freshdesk. Providing an intermediary service, TeleResult also needs to account for issues raised between its clients and large telecommunications carriers. TeleResult also uses Freshdesk to capture the journey with each telecoms carrier, when undertaking dispute management. "Freshdesk makes it easier for us to manage customer information and service requests. It also presents customer data in an appealing manner, helping us distinguish improvements in service time, and any pain points in performance", - Alex Nadeau, Senior Client Manager Challenges Freshdesk Solved Providing monthly service reports for clients has historically been a time consuming exercise for the TeleResult service team. Capturing the journey of each customer, Freshdesk’s solution removes the burden of manual report building, integrating with TeleResult’s own software product, Telecontrol, which manages expenses. For Alex Nadeau, TeleResult’s Senior Client Manager, this integration is a lifesaver when it comes to team productivity. “Freshdesk makes it easier for us to manage customer information and service requests. It also presents customer data in an appealing manner, helping us distinguish improvements in service time, and any pain points in performance”, Alex says. Customer satisfaction is a key success factor for TeleResult, and response time plays a big part in meeting this goal. Using Freshdesk to gain a complete overview of customer requests, and the response time to such requests, their management is able to set performance improvement benchmarks for their teams, on a regular basis. “Follow throughs on customer requests have been much easier since bringing on board Freshdesk. We’ve added a customised “rule” feature to our Freshdesk service, which actively monitors ticket time response. If a customer or third party doesn’t come back to us in five days, the ticket automatically re-opens and prompts our service team to follow up, instead of waiting what can sometimes be a few months to receive an answer”, Alex says. Having previously used an inhouse solution to manage customer support requests, Alex found that another benefit of using Freshdesk software is the constant updates and additional features being added to the platform, “just today I received an email from Freshdesk Australia’s country manager, Sree Pillai, who let us know of an upcoming new feature, which we’ve volunteered to trial. Freshdesk is always proactively growing its offering. When we come to Freshdesk with a business requirement, the team will do their best to meet and satisfy it.” TeleResult’s Support Strategy TeleResult’s support strategy works on response time. Each client has a service level agreement with TeleResult, which is integrated into the Freshdesk system using the priority feature. This ensures each request is responded to within an agreed timeframe. Meeting the service level agreement is essentially the key performance indicator for the TeleResult team. TeleResult also uses Freshdesk’s customer satisfaction system to give clients the opportunity to provide feedback on services, and ultimately ensure that the service is always improving. As a service provider, customer happiness and experience is vital to the success of TeleResult.

“For the past several years, it's been difficult to get our sales team to use our clumsy, difficult to understand CRM (myself included). In less than an hour, I had all of our leads imported and the system figured out. It actually makes sales fun again.” Julie Brant Simbro Managing Partner ACE Mystery Shopping

CovalentCareers, a California startup is eye care’s first online job-matching platform. It needed a small business CRM for its website and Segment integration to streamline customer activity. Its short span with SalesforceIQ wasn’t powerful enough to meet needs, and the search for a better CRM led to Freshsales. Since joining six months ago, it’s increased revenue, and improved productivity of a growing team. CovalentCareers – A better way to apply for healthcare jobs Founded in 2014, CovalentCareers was created to bridge the gap between healthcare practices and job seekers, particularly eye care professionals through an online platform. It uses a proprietary matchmaking algorithm to analyze data from employers and prospects for more targeted matches based on location, position, experience, and more. Daniel Goodrich, Esq. Head of Candidate Success | Founding Team Danny (Daniel) shares how CovalentCareers increased revenue by 100% as a result of improved efficiency and productivity since signing up on Freshsales. The Transition – SalesforceIQ to Freshsales   CovalentCareers use Segment to collect website events in order to make customer follow-up decisions. For this reason, a sales CRM that offers simple API integration, and works seamlessly with Segment was a key requirement in their selection process. Our initial choice SalesforceIQ did not offer easy API integration, and came with too many customizations which were bells and whistles for our sales team. We were paying over $300 per month for a tool we weren’t fully utilising, so we started to explore other CRMs. We evaluated Hubspot and Freshsales, and the latter won hands down. During the move from SalesforceIQ to Freshsales, Danny says he was clearly able to draw differences between the two in intuitiveness, functionality and pricing. Freshsales’ refreshingly clean UI was an immediate catch, and there was no difficulty with integrations. We can see all activities, and perform multiple actions in one place at an affordable price. Four Freshsales features CovalentCareers love We asked Danny which Freshsales features benefits their team, and we learnt of the compelling ways they’re being used to their advantage. 1. Lead Scoring CovalentCareers’ website sign-ups are automatically created as new leads through Freshsales for Web integration. Danny affirms that having all users in Freshsales has surely helped the sales team identify active and inactive users with Lead Scoring. Through Segment integration, we track activities, and use the data to configure Lead Scoring in Freshsales. Based on new knowledge and events, we’re systematically revising score distribution to distinguish sales leads from leads that need nurturing. 2. Phone From managing phone numbers and calls logs in different ways to using Freshsales’ built-in Phone feature, Danny says they’ve increased daily call volume by 25%. With Freshsales Phone, we can make calls in one-click, automatically log calls, and view phone analytics without any inconvenience. 3. Email The sales team improves productivity and saves time with email integration, and templates for regular emails to users. Fifty percent of emails we send out daily are email templates. We share our templates with other users, and it’s replaced a task of recreating standard messages. 4. Freshsales & Zapier CovalentCareers use SumoMe for web forms on their blog for inbound lead generation. To pursue these leads in Freshsales, they integrated Freshsales with SumoMe through Zapier. Capturing our inbound leads in Freshsales enables us to take immediate action on hot leads, and close sales faster with far less hoops to jump through. Freshsales – The needle mover for CovalentCareers Since using Freshsales, CovalentCareers has seen an all-around development in sales practices which attributes to the revenue growth. It gives the team a holistic business approach for continued progress resulting in a 20% reduction in sales cycle length, and 100% increase in revenue. Danny concludes:
Having all the information in one place – sign-ups, activities, calls, emails, is the real needle mover for sales. This is helping us drive revenue because we’ve got access to customers at our fingertips in Freshsales.