ZENCONNECT lives up to its name. The service allows customers to log in and get to work with zen-like ease.

This 30-person startup supplies restaurant chains with a secure, firewalled WiFi network that powers servers' tablets, provides diners with fast Internet access, and much more – all managed remotely from the startup’s offices in Paris.

Now, with over 200 clients and an incredible burst of rapid growth, the team's had to ask itself an important question: how can we continue to manage teams and processes smoothly – all at scale – without ever risking productivity?

“We used to work on an open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform. We could have created a platform of our own, but that would have required investing in a team of developers – which requires both money and time,” explains ZENCONNECT CTO, Yohann Lecornet. “For us, time management is one of the most important resources. Being able to better manage our team's time by automating certain tasks – even if each automated tasks saves only seconds at a time – has been a key factor in driving our company's long-term success. Working with Salesforce to optimize our workflow and make the most out of every second of every day has truly paid off.”

In just four months after onboarding Salesforce, Lecornet transferred all of the company’s activity – including 25,000 technical support tickets – to the platform, helping to propel ZENCONNECT's business growth to all-time highs.

Since November 2016, Salesforce has been the de facto tool for CRM (Sales), technical support, marketing strategy, and reporting (Senior Leadership) – supported even further through AppExchange integrations. Having a single, integrated platform was the only way Lecornet knew ZENCONNECT could increase business volume while still being able to service all customers with unparalleled speed and efficiency.

A great example of this efficiency is in technical queries now getting resolved in an average of six minutes. “Thanks to connected routers uploading data to Service Cloud, it's now possible for an issue to be resolved remotely before the client even notices it,” said Lecornet. “Service Cloud can also automatically allocate tickets and avoid long support queues.”

The Salesforce platform has also helped speed up communication between ZENCONNECT's teams. Now, for example, a sales rep can set up a project in just a few minutes and make that information directly and immediately accessible to all other teams that need access to it. “Before Salesforce, it would take the Sales team at least an hour to transfer all project-related information to the technical team. Now, it's all instantaneous.”

This has also helped the ZENCONNECT team detect and seize new business opportunities – across all channels – faster than ever, thanks in big part to Salesforce Lightning and the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of Salesforce Einstein. Now, for example, the Sales team has access to a 360-degree view of customers, technicians get a complete history of customer activity, and senior management can access data pertaining to all business activities.

Plus, with the help of Salesforce Einstein, the company is now able to extract maximum value from all available data to accelerate and optimize sales cycles. This includes more efficiently managing new business opportunities, flagging important emails that might otherwise get overlooked, staying up-to-date on relevant news, keeping tabs on competitive intelligence, and a lot more. By ingesting and analyzing all these different sources of information, Salesforce Einstein can provide real-time recommendations that drive tangible and immediate results, such as accurately detecting which prospects are most likely to respond positively to a sales pitch. (This has been a hit with the Sales team!)

“Einstein once reminded me to update a client record following the departure of a Sales rep who had served as the lead on a project,” said Lecornet. “Saving even something as small as ten seconds per task adds up quickly to huge productivity gains. Salesforce Einstein is really helping our team make the most of our day-to-day work.”

Additionally, with the help of Einstein Discovery, ZENCONNECT can apply AI to all data related to business activity. “We now have predictive analytics built into our dashboards,” said Lecornet. “Einstein aggregates data from customer service and predicts key metrics – like client satisfaction or request resolution time. Salesforce's AI capabilities can tell me, with a high degree of accuracy, how much time will be required to process and resolve open tickets.” This alone has helped ZENCONNECT's senior management team refine customer service processes to drive greater efficiency in a big way.

Now, don’t be mistaken – none of this is a replacement for humans. Instead, it actually frees up the team's time to stay on top of more important work by automating and streamlining once time-consuming tasks. The end result: ZENCONNECT's team of 30 can now essentially tackle the workload of an army!

“Our clients are always surprised to learn about the relatively modest size of our company,” said Lecornet with pride. “With an average client rating of 4.76 out of 5, we have undoubtedly succeeded in achieving client satisfaction while being a pioneer in the use of AI technology.”