A short interview-style case study describing how Crossmark—an established retail services firm—uses Salesforce (particularly AppCloud) to digitize and automate field operations. Speakers describe replacing clipboards with mobile apps, achieving real-time data collection and faster prototyping, improving efficiency and innovation, and treating Salesforce as both an integration and application platform that accelerates app delivery and device-agnostic mobile deployment.
Chapters
Crossmark is invisible to most people. You know, people don't realize that when they see a lot of the consumer goods companies out in retail. You know, a lot of times it's not really the consumer goods companies, it's companies like Crossmark that are out there representing them. And Crossmark's been doing that for over a hundred years.
If you think about our business, we're all about creating connections. Consumer packaged goods companies are scrambling for growth. Retailers are scrambling for survival in some ways, and it creates great opportunity for us. The smart, smarter way is all about technology. It's all about using information to drive the right outcomes. Look, it would be easy to focus on Salesforce in the CRM sense, and we use it for all of those capabilities. But quite honestly, Salesforce has become the integration platform and the application platform that we use to drive a lot of the innovation we have in the business.
We are in the midst of an app revolution. The speed and agility you gain with Salesforce AppCloud, it's unprecedented and it's really transforming not only our company, but the industry at large.
Crossmark has always had a reputation of leading in technology, right down to the precision execution. With handhelds in the stores, with 35,000.
Employees trying to maintain mobile applications that run on whatever device flavor the person's using, that's an impossible feat. With Salesforce, I don't have to worry about that anymore.
Salesforce has allowed Crossmark to take manual processes and change those to an automated workflow. And that has created a huge benefit for us and made us much more efficient.
In yesteryear, people used to use a clipboard and a pencil to collect information, and data came back in days or weeks after the information was collected. But today, with mobile applications, we're able to collect that information in real time and use that to make real time decisions around how to operate our business.
I'd been a CIO in my past. I remember the way it used to work. And I can tell you, the way we do it today at Crossmark is quite different.
The way we built applications previously, it took weeks to come back with prototypes. With Salesforce, we're now able to come back the next day or sometimes the same day and say, is this what you were thinking? And get immediate feedback.
It allows the configuration of so many different features and functions. I have never seen the business in it as close as they have been today.
What we do, by definition, requires technology, and that technology will in fact lead the business in many ways, as opposed to this tradition of the other way around.
When you really look under the covers at AppCloud and the Power of what it brings, the opportunities are limitless. You can work at a speed and agility that will make you a hero with your business partners.
