West Coast Consulting Group (WCG)
Broadening the Scope of CRMs

It’s no secret that many businesses have restricted their budgets and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future until the pandemic’s progression is better controlled and the extent of the economic impacts are genuinely understood. But businesses of all sizes who have started down the digital transformation path can now reap the benefits of digitizing their interactions with customers, supply chain partners, and their own business units and employees. They are evaluating how to keep that transformation momentum going, and thus looking for quick wins. That’s where West Coast Consulting Group (WCG) can help. “We have responded to the quick wins approach by taking best practices from our past CRM deployments and creating Accelerators,” says Benafsha Irani, partner at WCG. For several years now, and particularly over the past six months, companies have engaged with WCG to bring the benefits of their CRM deployments to other areas of their business.

Although CRM deployments provide many benefits, optimizing customer interactions for sales, service, and beyond has been their main leverage. However, in the present context, clients seek to derive even more value out of the data, the processes, and the automated workflows from CRMs in other parts of their business. To this end, WCG helps businesses expand their CRM footprint into other teams that depend on or provide services to customer-facing teams: Finance, accounting, supply chain management, and beyond. “Our projects are increasingly about extending automation, data flows and workflows into end-to-end processes, enabling easy exchange of information, reducing data duplication, accelerating communications, increasing efficiencies, and eliminating errors,” mentions Irani. The result is greater adoption of CRM platforms by the core users, greater productivity, and better customer interactions overall. The company has established partnerships with leading cloud application providers, primarily with Salesforce, Google, and IBM Watson.

On the Salesforce side, WCG’s Accelerators package discrete business processes with the associated data and workflow configuration, APIs, and dashboards to illustrate focussed functions that they can deploy to increase the value of their Salesforce platform. Some of the company’s most widely deployed Accelerators include CloudCollect, Commercial Approvals, Mapping Data Visualization, and ERP Integration Accelerator. Firstly, CloudCollect is a module that brings automation to the processes for monitoring and collecting on bad debt, with integration between Salesforce Sales Cloud and a client’s financial systems to monitor invoice data, receivable aging, workflows for collections users to communicate with customers through numerous channels, and adjust, collect and write-off bad debt.

WCG’s Commercial Approvals Accelerators extends workflows from the CRM, where the sales pipeline is managed, to other parts of the business that require insight and approve critical elements of contracts under development.

Further, through Mapping Data Visualization, the company provides a module that brings location information into the CRM interface, enabling service representatives to provide location guidance to customers. Lastly, WCG’s ERP Integration Accelerator speeds the process of connecting a Salesforce Sales Cloud environment into the ERP system to integrate invoice data, order information, RMA information.

We have responded to the quick wins approach by taking best practices from our past CRM deployments and creating Accelerators

In an instance, WCG helped a client, Leading US Bank bring down its data entry error rate by 50 percent, which reduced credit card cancellations by 27 percent. WCG’s consulting team prepared and deployed test scenarios to analyze and test various use case scenarios verifying bot actions on the database screens. They proceeded to take the system live into production. Since the implementation, Leading US Bank has been able to process onboarding of their corporate One Card clients at a faster pace and wider scale. WCG ensured that the launch went without any issues. One Card’s business unit was able to increase the number of corporate clients it processed during the week while freeing up four full-time resources to focus on other business areas.

Having carved a unique niche, WCG plans to expand further in the Boston area to better serve clients on the East Coast. The company is also working on AI development, which includes using IBM Watson with Cloud-based CRM and other back-end systems and integrating customer solutions with Google Apps. Their efforts are focused on incorporating AI to increase the efficiency of their Work Order related Accelerator. “Our expansion is primarily focused on the technological side, building accelerators that integrate AI, data mining, and integration capabilities to enhance our ability to aid our clients with their implementation, CRM, and other cloud computing needs,” says Irani. WCG has also developed an accelerator to map Salesforce data onto the web and display it on a Google Map. In addition, they have developed an accelerator to connect Salesforce with Microsoft Business Central ERP. With these builds, the company’s mission is to help companies get more value from their Salesforce investment and to build systems that are accepted and used by their employees. “In order to achieve this, we are continually innovating to develop unique functionalities and prepare our customers for the future needs of the specific markets they serve,” concludes Irani.