Tony Sorenson had a mission: to build an IT department that could give employees the same level of customer service as their paying customers. His rationale? “Employees who have the tools and resources they need can get customers the tools and resources they need, which means they get better service.”

Tony, the Senior Director of IT at Five9, says the biggest challenge he faced in achieving that mission was a lack of integration. “We had four people who were manually updating the three systems to keep information current,” he reveals. “It was time-consuming, prone to errors, and the information was not timely.”

He turned to Samir Kumar, President and Co-Founder of Cloudaction, a Remedyforce service provider, for help in implementing a solution.

On the latest edition of App Talks, Tony and Samir talk about improving efficiency and getting the information they need to solve problems proactively. This ultimately skyrocketed the level of service customers received. Here’s a deeper dive into Five9’s learnings and results.

1. Increase visibility between the customer success and operations teams. Says Tony, “Issues escalated to the operations team are being completed faster. There was no metric prior to Remedyforce and now 70% of issues are being completed within the required timeframe. Now we can have conversations about how to improve our response time. It’s a tremendous improvement.”

2. Stop employees from doing manual data entry so they can focus on doing their jobs. With great technology, the four full-time people doing manual data entry into the three disparate systems went back to their regular jobs. Says Tony, “It was an instant time and resource savings, plus there were no more human errors.”

3. Ensure one single source of data truth. “We used to have two reports we looked at every morning, and we had to correlate that data,” Tony tells us.” Now, we have dashboards and one authoritative report out of Remedyforce that the team can refer to.”

4. Reduce the number of escalations. “Employees need more visibility into what’s taking place along the process,” Tony says. “That way they can do the right things and solve problems before they boil up and become an escalation.”

Watch the video below to learn more.

App Talks is a series of conversations with Salesforce customers who have transformed their business using AppExchange business apps.