Wolters Kluwer transforms its sales and service organization

In a fast-changing market Wolters Kluwer, a global provider of professional information, software and services, recognized the need to transform its business to a digital enterprise. The company faced increasing competition from software vendors, manual work in customer service, and limitations from legacy CRM systems. Wolters Kluwer concluded that a distinctive customer experience, faster time to market, and a unified platform for sales and service are key enablers for future growth.

Wolters Kluwer had many CRM solutions and decided to move its sales and service organization to one standard Salesforce CRM platform. With limited Salesforce knowledge in-house, Wolters Kluwer needed an implementation partner that could not only implement the various Salesforce clouds but also help with change management and integrations. As a global strategic partner with the right set of skills to provide not only Salesforce expertise but also deep industry knowledge, Capgemini was selected as the Salesforce implementation partner.

Together, Wolters Kluwer and Capgemini followed crucial steps to digitally transform the sales and service organization and accelerate Wolters Kluwer’s success in the digital world.

Step one: Envisioning the dream

Like for its customers, Wolters Kluwer aims to provide the right information at the right time to the right sales and service representatives so that it can provide the best service to its customers. The dream for this transformation was to create a user-friendly solution for sales and service teams to work together, minimize the time spent on administration, ultimately resulting in better sales and service results. This provides a 360 view of the customer for sales and service teams while also adding value to their way of working with no additional administrative tasks. On a group level, this also lowers the support costs by centralizing reports and benchmark productivity across business units.

Step 2: Establishing a Center of Excellence

To realize this vision, the partners established a Center of Excellence (CoE). This brought together several business and IT capabilities to support the implementation of Salesforce and continuous improvements after the go live. The CoE structure was built around 6 pillars: people and organization, processes, governance, culture, key performance indicators, tools, and technologies. As Wolters Kluwer’s internal IT team served multiple divisions, this now created a holistic view of the solutions built across divisions. This enabled the organization to share knowledge and best practices. New technologies could be introduced in one division and the learnings enabled other divisions to reduce time to market.

Together, the partners delivered:

• A set of design and development standards and guidelines to follow for design consistency
• A direction regarding Salesforce’s position within the wider Enterprise Architecture
• Development accelerators for project teams
• Control and governance around the platform as applications co-exist
• Platform level view of demand and delivery roadmap.

Throughout the subsequent Salesforce implementation, the CoE consistently followed 5 guiding principles. These simple principles ensure success in single-org, multi-country implementations:

1. Stick to the template
2. Fixed format, free choice
3. Avoid Custom Coding
4. Agile co-creation
5. Strict Change Control.

Step 3: Transforming ways of working

Following the introduction of the CoE, Wolters Kluwer and Capgemini implemented a European template for Salesforce across different businesses, which led to a big change in their ways of working. By utilizing an omnichannel approach, sales teams can now use their mobile devices to get direct insights about key KPI’s and constantly engage with the business. Moreover, a self-service portal enabled customers to obtain the information without additional support from the service team, thereby allowing service representatives to focus on more complex tasks. Wolters Kluwer and its divisions can now provide data to managers at the highest level to manage processes better and obtain insights into developments across the organization. This brings value not only for the company but also its end customers.

Step 4: Utilizing the power of the platform

In order to transform its sales and service organization at scale, Wolters Kluwer worked with Capgemini to implement the basics of Salesforce Sales Cloud in one business: only lead and opportunity management with minimal configuration and no coding. Initially, it was important for the organization to be able to start using the platform quickly. Later, when the partners deployed Salesforce Sales Cloud for multiple teams, Wolters Kluwer and Capgemini added more functionalities and integrations. The business team that was first on-boarded immediately benefited from these newly added features. During the implementation, the partners focused on the following areas to maximize platform benefits:

• Salesforce Mobile
• Salesforce AppExchange functionality
• Single or Multi Org
• Prepare for a new release
• Design with the end state in mind.

Step 5: Driving adoption and change

As the transformation took place on an organizational level, coordinated change management efforts were inevitable. By implementing Salesforce, Wolters Kluwer introduced a set of best practices for sales and service processes into the organization to unlock greater value as the team was open to change and adapted to the new ways of working. The success factors that enabled the partners to ensure adoption and change were:

• Management buy in from all markets
• Understanding of local market circumstances
• Deployment of a strong communication strategy
• Shared success stories as soon as possible.

The partners also developed a continuous improvement process and a periodical health check that tracks successful change, functional experience, and technical performance to ensure improvement of the existing Salesforce implementation. Going forward, Wolters Kluwer and Capgemini will continue rolling out Salesforce-powered sales and service clouds across Europe and will add the platform’s quoting solution to the roadmap.

For more information about how Salesforce and transformation, follow the link.