Fireclay Tile, a 27-person ceramic-tile company founded in San Jose in 1986, used Salesforce to cut IT costs and track production in real time. The platform automated customer follow-ups through Chatter and templated emails, integrated UPS tracking, and helped the company decide when to hire and scale.
1986.
Paul Burns and three partners.
San Jose, California.
27-person company.
March 28, 2011.
What I love about Salesforce is that As a small 27 person company, I truly believe I can be or appear to be as phenomenal a company as the Amazons, the Zappos of the world. Fire Clay Tile was started in San Jose, California in 1986 by Paul Burns and three partners. And he really wanted to start a company where he could create specific patterns and colors and shapes for the individual customer. Homeowner, contractor, designer. And the product always spoke for itself. Customers who had used it, loved it, reused it, but really kind of getting that word out there, attracting new customers and really solidifying those existing relationships was something that the company didn't really focus on. We had a limited sense of who necessarily our customers were, where our money was coming from, how to communicate with those customers. A cloud based solution made sense for us. We needed a new system, we needed something that was going to scale, something that would help at that time reduce costs because we were in a significant cash crunch. By not having any kind of IT costs or any kind of server overhead maintenance, no dealing with kind of new updates or anything like that, I mean, it was an instantaneous cash flow improvement for us. Our customers are our lifeblood. When I think about customers and how to create a fundamentally amazing experience for them, I rely on Salesforce for that. We use Salesforce for pretty much every aspect of our business. Our factory relies on Salesforce to make sure that they have a really instant knowledge of what the customer has ordered. Our people in production are pretty much every single day, every hour updating Salesforce and that information is instantly available to our salespeople so that when customers call, we can provide them almost an instant answer of where their order is, whether their order is on time. For me as a manager, it's been great because I can follow through chatter our most important opportunities really instantly. I can understand what's going on with all those opportunities in real time. And it's the same for each of my salespeople. From getting people off of our website into our database. We use Salesforce to make sure our salespeople are following up with customers, but also provide very easy templated emails to communicate with those customers in a very consistent way. We have an integrated UPS solution that allows us to very easily and quickly send customer shipments out, that has their UPS tracking information. Almost immediately they're getting a touchpoint from Fireclay. That's very nice. That's very similar to Your experience with Amazon.com I think without Salesforce, life would have been a lot more challenging. At Fire Clay, we've been able to make really big decisions about investing in our business. We've been able to hire people over the last year, and it's a really meaningful part of something that we use every day. I can't think of one reason why you as a business owner would not have salesforce.com running your system. It will transform your business. It will transform your business opportunities. It will make business a lot more fun than it was before.
