“Overall we are using more of Salesforce now since adopting Lightning. We are getting more out of our investment.” Sarah Grove, Manager of Salesforce at CommScope

CommScope is a Trailblazer for telecom. CommScope helps design, build and manage the world’s most advanced wired and wireless networks. As a communications infrastructure leader, the company shapes the always-on networks of tomorrow. For more than 40 years, CommScope’s global team of greater than 20,000 employees, innovators and technologists have empowered customers in all regions of the world to anticipate what’s next and push the boundaries of what’s possible.

In late Summer 2016, Sarah Grove and Danelle Lockwood of CommScope were anticipating few key projects coming down the pipeline. They had just acquired a company and needed to absorb their systems and integrate with Salesforce. The choice they had to make was either to build them in Salesforce Classic, knowing they would eventually have to transition them to Lightning ,or build them in Lightning Experience, knowing they would have to move all of their users to it. As Danelle Lockwood, in Sales Operations noted: “If we didn’t transition to Lightning soon, we ran a risk of spending time and effort building in Salesforce Classic that we would have to later switch to Lightning. It made much more sense to make the move to Lightning in advance to avoid rework.” Their most important goal was to give their salespeople a new user experience to make every day productive.

The first thing Sarah and Danelle had to do was determine who could transition first, based on their current customizations. They surveyed their entire user base and asked them several questions:

“What do you like about Salesforce?
“What would you change?”
“What do you want to have access to immediately when you login to Salesforce?”

What they discovered was that their users wanted to have all of the vital information on their opportunities or teams right when they logged in. Since most of their users are sellers they didn't want to have to hunt for things, they wanted to sell. They used this feedback, together with focus groups, to customize new home pages based on the user's profile.

For Sarah Grove, Manager of Salesforce at CommScope, customizing Lightning wasn't too complex. There were a total of 16 javascript buttons they had to redo, but the bulk of their time was spent customizing pages and setting up profiles. They took advantage of the Trailhead module “Make the Move to Lightning Experience,” which helped them to understand the lingo and what they had to do from a setup perspective. Then, the project team put a strong game plan together to customize and roll out Lightning Experience.

As part of their game plan, the team put together a solid communications plan in which they included weekly videos highlighting some of the key features and benefits. Some of the items that they highlighted were the new home page with Utility Bar and Favorites, Path for opportunities, which showcased their sales process and next steps, list views, and the Salesforce1 mobile app.

“Having this thorough review of our functionality allowed us to tackle the development process quickly and systematically. In fact, we cannot think of an implementation of this scale that was deployed as smoothly as Lightning Experience.”
-Danelle Lockwood, Sales Operations Analyst

After doing extensive testing, they turned Lightning on. Sarah told her team that they needed to be all hands on deck, and to expect a lot of questions. But to their surprise it rolled out without a hitch, thanks to their well put-together communications plan. When they finally did start to receive questions it was from users who hadn't been in the system for over six months. They were asking basic questions about their new sales process, which had been updated with the rollout, not just asking about Lightning. What was most notable was they immediately saw a 20% increase in daily logins and a huge uplift in Salesforce1 adoption. Being able to create opportunities and contacts on the go was huge!

They are also taking full advantage of the AppExchange to get added functionality on the home pages, such as the Lightning Carousel by Salesforce Labs, which displays announcements about new features and known issues and rotates around on their homepage and the Activity Component by Webider, which does task and events. Now they are finding that people are using task and activities a lot more because it is so easy and right there on the homepage.

Overall, Salesforce users at CommScope have been very pleased with the new look and feel and easy customization of Salesforce. “We have received enthusiastic praise regarding the switch to Lightning Experience from our users. They feel the changes were made with their experience and productivity in mind.” says Danelle. Check out the Lightning overview demo to learn more about the future of CRM. Check out these Feature shorts to see some of the newest functionality only available in Lightning.