Whether he’s plotting how to transform his family home or the Addison Lee customer experience, Matt Baker, Head of CRM Services at Addison Lee, loves to seize the technology advantage. We talked to Matt about how he turns great ideas into great solutions.

Tell us about your work at Addison Lee

Addison Lee is on a mission to put the customer at the heart of its business while expanding into new markets. We already operate in 350 cities around the world and help more than 10 million people reach their destination every year in London alone. My role is to exploit technology to bring new ideas to life and to enrich the customer experience.

I’m passionate about turning challenges into opportunities. I’m even applying the same logic to my house renovation – I want to use technology to create a smart house that runs as efficiently and sustainably as possible.

What’s important for driving a successful transformation – at home or at work?

It all comes down to the team: you need people around you who understand your goal and have the skills to take you there.

For my renovation project, I need builders and plumbers to put the foundations in place to accommodate the technology that will transform it from a pile of bricks into a self-sufficient home for my family years to come.

At Addison Lee, we need all-round technologists as well as Salesforce specialists who can drive our customer experience ambitions forward. From AI and apps to automation and integration, we’re using technology to ensure we focus on managing relationships, not just allocating cars.

What motivates you when you log on every morning?

I love coming up with solutions to help people do their jobs better.

At Addison Lee, almost everyone interacts with our customers, so a new solution will normally have a measurable impact at the front line. For example, a partner community founded on Community Cloud helped to double our growth rate within SME sector by increasing visibility and consistency around lead generation and conversion.

How do you go from an idea to a solution?

I have my best ideas when I am relaxing – the last one came to me while I was watching Peppa Pig with my three-year-old!

When one of the team has an idea, we normally ask if Salesforce can deliver it – and the answer is invariably yes. It has been fundamental to driving change within our sales, service, and marketing functions.

For example, it enabled us to introduce live chat as a new support channel. It proved so popular that customers were waiting in a queue for the service to start every morning! We can test out new ideas like this really easily with Salesforce. And if they don’t work first time, we can keep trying.

Don’t be tempted to give up too soon – I keep telling myself this when trying to work out how to make our home a zero-cost building!

What are you currently excited about?

We’re a really progressive company, always trying to move forwards, and I’m proud to say that we recently became carbon-neutral.

It’s fantastic knowing that we’re working to improve the health and well-being of cities, and that’s really important to our customers. To do that we’ve set up The Greener Future Programme to help us invest in new technology, so we’ll soon be able to operate an electric vehicle fleet. 

What advice do you have for other Trailblazers?

It’s important to have a vision and to aim high. But you still need to get the foundations right.

It took us time to hone our data model, which is fundamental if you want to understand your customers and enrich their experience. Taking the time to get this right at the outset will simplify and accelerate future CRM initiatives.

New solutions and ideas need to link back to the business and improving performance. As a Trailblazer, you need to understand what will add competitive advantage – whether it’s sharper sales, better service, or richer marketing content. Delivering quick wins will help to secure support from the business for bolder transformations.

And there’s been plenty of these quick wins for Addison Lee, which are helping to drive growth and unlock new insights. You can read more about its customer-centric transformation in the full story: Addison Lee goes the extra mile for its customers with Salesforce.