Sustainable Energy, Efficient Service: Transforming Order Management with Salesforce

MRE Consulting was tasked to help an Energy organization that specializes in sustainability transformations. This organization provides data-driven insights, strategic guidance and innovative solutions to optimize energy usage, reduce carbon emissions and achieve sustainability goals for businesses, cities and governments. Their Service Order Management division oversees the end-to-end lifecycle of service orders, ensuring seamless delivery of energy, water, and waste management solutions for clients. This team coordinates with internal departments, vendors, and clients to process, track, and resolve service requests. Recently they have been facing several challenges in handling their Open and Close process for clients and wanted to use Salesforce Service Cloud as a solution to streamlining their customer service requests and provide more transparency and increase efficiency to their overall customer experience. MRE reviewed their overall process and identified several pain points and areas of inefficiencies which included the following:

• Disjointed Processes: The Open and Close process was complex with multiple manual steps that made users prone to delays and errors.
• Multiple Systems: Assigning and scheduling required using multiple systems and different sources of truth that resulted in inefficiencies and bottlenecks because of a lack of integration.
• Internal Resource Assignment: Managing and assigning service requests to internal teams lacked visibility and resource allocation was inefficient.
• Customer Response Times: Service requests from customers often experienced delays due to the manual handling of inquiries and having to use different systems.
• Limited Visibility: Lack of clear metrics and KPIs made it difficult to track the team’s performance, measure customer satisfaction and identify bottlenecks in the process.

To address these challenges, MRE worked with the client to design a comprehensive solution roadmap that included in-depth workshops and stakeholder interviews that mapped out their overall process and identified pain points and a solution that aligned with their business goals. The team put together a three phased approach in implementing Salesforce Service Cloud, with the first phase focusing on the following:

• Automating the Open and Close Process: Streamlining the entire service order lifecycle, from request to completion, allowing the team to manage the utility open and close process more efficiently.
• Bulk Process Optimization: Introducing automation to handle large volumes of requests, reducing manual effort and the chance of human error in handling multiple requests at once.
• Enhanced Case Management: Implementing streamlined case management workflows to reduce response times for customer requests and ensure consistent communication across the internal teams.
• Resource Management and Visibility: Utilizing Service Cloud’s internal resource management tools to assign tasks to the right teams and improve visibility over assignments.
• KPI Tracking and Reporting: Building custom dashboards and reports to track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as service order completion time, resource availability, and customer metrics.
• Outlook Integration: Integrating Microsoft Outlook with Salesforce to enable users to sync e-mails, contacts and events directly between the two platforms for Case Management.