A recorded discussion (Ferguson and Salesforce) about how the COVID-19 pandemic changed operations for a home-focused business. Speakers describe rapidly moving ~11–12,000 employees to remote work in ~48 hours, emphasize the growing importance of the home and virtual customer interactions, and highlight Salesforce Customer 360 as a tool to centralize project/customer data and improve project-based (not single-transaction) customer experiences.
Chapters
I remember the moment the pandemic really started to infiltrate the United States and we realized pretty quickly that, oh my gosh, the world has changed. And the way we as an organization go to market may change for the long haul as well.
I think this pandemic has showed us how important home is. We are a people business and how to do that in a virtual environment was something we had to figure out quickly.
We were able to take about 11, almost 12,000 people to virtual work in about 48 hours. So having Salesforce certainly helped because we had all of our customer information moved to our associates homes. We use a slogan, we make projects better. We operate in four different industries, nine different business verticals. We provide products and solutions for many of the buildings that you live and work in.
I love home design. I think about all of the families that are in their homes and enjoying their space and that we had a part to play in that. And I think that's pretty cool.
A huge benefit with customer360 is you basically understand exactly what's going on with that project, which ultimately delivers delighted customers.
We are not retail, where it's a single transaction and you're done. It's really a project. There's different things that you need at different times throughout that project.
How do you keep track of all of that customer data so you can properly serve the customers?
We're really using Customer 360 to unite our teams as the glue so that we can make sure that we are working together and communicating as one.
