Mumbai: For over six decades, Pidilite Industries Limited has been a pioneer in consumer and specialty chemicals. Its products range from adhesives, waterproofing solutions, and construction chemicals, to arts and crafts material, industrial resins, and polymers. One of its most trusted brands, Fevicol, is known for its quality adhesives and iconic advertising.
Today, Pidilite is using Salesforce to deepen customer bonds, and improve productivity across sales and service.
“With Salesforce, we’re crafting personalised and omni-channel experiences for our customers, while empowering our contractors and employees with tools that help them succeed,” says NishchaiNevrekar, Head, Digital Initiatives, Pidilite.
Automating routine processes to focus on customers
Pidilite’s Industrial Products Division serves B2B customers in more than 30 industries. Historically, its sales and customer engagement processes were managed through disparate, complicated project trackers and spreadsheets. This made it hard for teams to handle key accounts, track opportunities, and optimise productivity.
“As our teams grew, we needed a robust CRM tool that would help us spend more time on customer experiences, and less time on routine tasks,” recalls Nevrekar. “Salesforce enabled us to automate our processes, and channelise the daily activities of our teams towards deeper and more seamless customer engagement.”
Strengthening pre- and post-sales efficiency through automation
Today, Pidilite’s pre-sales and post-sales teams use Salesforce Service Cloud in their contact centres for a unified view of leads and enquiries, and for faster resolution of customer queries.
With computer telephony integration, pre-sales reps can make more calls and reach more prospects, while post-sales agents can service more customers every day.
Even digital engagement channels are integrated with the platform, enabling teams to provide connected experiences across touchpoints.
“We’ve completely transformed pre-sales and post-sales journeys into seamless omni-channel experiences,” says Manasi Choudhari – Senior Manager Digital Initiatives, Pidilite. “Already, over 15 helplines have been onboarded on Salesforce through which nearly a lakh calls are processed every month.”
Through such automation, Pidilite’s first response time (FRT) has improved by almost 90%.
“We’ve also enabled our teams with a customer 360 dashboard that helps them personalise customer conversations, and find the right solutions for customers quickly,” says Choudhari. “This has boosted our first call resolution (FCR) rates from 75% to 93%.”
Selling faster and better with powerful productivity tools
The field sales team has also transformed the way they work. Using the Salesforce mobile app, they can conduct all their activities on the go – be it lead qualification, opportunity prioritisation, or key account tracking. Each sales rep logs an average of three activities per day, thereby providing more transparency around what’s happening in the field.
Sales review processes are streamlined for optimal productivity. “Access to quality sales data enables management to make faster decisions on how to improve sales force effectiveness and productivity,” says Rajesh B, CEO, Pidilite Industrial Products Division.
Pidilite has also empowered its water-proofing contractors with a sales mobile app – the Dr. Fixit app – built on Heroku. Leads and customer data from Salesforce flow straight into the app to help contractors personalise customer conversations.
The app comes with an in-built product recommender that makes it easy for contractors to suggest the right water-proofing solutions to customers. Similarly, a quotation building tool helps contractors generate real-time sales quotes from anywhere
There’s even a learning module in the app that trains contractors on how to use Dr. Fixit products to enable leak-free and damp-free homes.
“With over 50,000 downloads, the Dr. Fixit app has been a huge help to our contractors,” says Pankaj Israni, Manager – Digital Initiatives, Pidilite. “It gives them all the tools and data they need to do their jobs well, and delight customers.”
To deepen contractor engagement, Pidilite has built another app on Heroku – the custom field marketing app, integrated with Salesforce. Contractor data from Salesforce flows seamlessly through the app to internal teams, helping them efficiently manage contractor visits, enrolment, and ongoing engagement.
Over just a 1,000 field marketing executives across various divisions of Pidilite manage millions of contractors through the app.
Even contractor meetings and events can be created on-the-fly through the app. Automated SMS reminders and QR code aids make it easy for contractors to participate in these events.
Meanwhile, analytics-driven inputs help internal teams boost contractor engagement.
“Contractors are an essential part of our ecosystem,” says Monika Sahu, Manager – Digital Initiatives, Pidilite. “Through the app, we can support them in multiple ways – whether it’s by sharing best practices, training them on our products, or organising social upliftment programs. These initiatives have tripled our contractor engagement levels.”
Growing influencer networks faster with an intelligent app
Influencers are equally vital to the Pidilite ecosystem. Under its Fevicryl brand, the company engages with a wide range of influencers like teachers and craft hobbyists who, in turn, organise workshops to demonstrate Pidilite products to consumers.
Initially, the process of signing up influencers, organising workshops, and managing reimbursements was manual and time-consuming. To grow its network of influencers, the company needed to streamline influencer onboarding, and accelerate the workshop booking process. Using Heroku, it’s built an app that does both.
The ‘TEAM’ app – a workshop management solution for teachers – was built in just two 2.5 months. The app has reduced the influencer onboarding time from 45 days to just five, while increasing influencer enrolments by 10%.
There’s also been a 50% uptake in the number of teachers applying to conduct Pidilite demo camps.
“The TEAM app has helped us make huge strides in influencer engagement,” says Riddhi Bakhru, Category Manager for Arts, Stationery and Fabrics, Retail Division, Pidilite. “Through it, we’ve seamlessly integrated touchpoints across our influencer connect program, while solving real business problems around reach and impact. Even the time taken to reimburse teachers has reduced from a few months to just one week.”
Improving innovation with better visibility into product trials
Pidilite is constantly pushing the envelope when it comes to innovation. To test the performance of new products, Pidilite conducts customer trials among its anchor accounts. Data from these trials is captured on Service Cloud, allowing stakeholders to better understand how Pidilite products perform in various environments. imp
“We now have instant insights on product performance and value, which can be incorporated into product design,” says Rajesh. “This has helped us amplify the success of our innovation projects, and generate more revenue through them.”
Onwards and upwards
Pidilite is now building a new collaborative working solution on the Salesforce Lightning Platform.The portal will use analytics from Pidilite’s data warehouse to automatically generate actions for business development managers and sales reps. These teams can collaborate on solving problems, and addressing key business gaps.
“All the initiatives we’ve enabled through Salesforce have made our teams more productive and happy,” says Nevrekar. “They have more time to focus on delivering the incredible experiences our customers deserve.”
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