On the Digital Path

Gemini Power Hydraulics builds repeatable processes and strengthens customer connect with Salesforce.

For over 30 years, Gemini Power Hydraulics Pvt Ltd has been introducing the finest international brands in industrial and construction equipment in India. The company believes in delighting customers not just with products and services, but also holistic solutions.

The company strives to offer the customer a maximum value at every step of the experience from recognizing the problem area to proposing a solution that fully addresses the customer need and ensuring that the solution continues to deliver over the years.

For a smooth sales process

As an engineer passionate about customer service, Rajiv Sethi, Founder, Gemini Power Hydraulics, understood early on the role of repeatable processes in building this problem-solving approach. In 1990, he set up a desktop computer and wrote a code to standardize the sales quotation process so his Sales team could serve customers independently and consistently.

As Gemini has grown, so has the use of technology. Since it operates in a capital-intensive industry, Rajiv sought to reinvent Gemini’s processes for greater efficiency. He started with sales processes.

The Sales teams used to record customer interactions on various home-grown and branded CRMs (Customer Relationship Management). But these solutions fell short in what they could offer. “The CRMs we built internally were limited by what we knew and how much we could program into them,” shares Sethi.

In 2019, Gemini decided to deploy Salesforce to ramp up its digital journey.

Building a process-driven cycle

Gemini’s existing CRM solution was static and only partly on the Cloud. This meant two things – the Sales teams did not have access to the latest product information such as price, version, and availability when at the customer site. There was also no way for them to record details of customer interactions on the go. So, a complete information needed to make decisions during customer interactions was not always at hand.

With Salesforce CRM software, salespersons now have information updated in real-time at their fingertips. “Salesforce has opened a completely new perspective for us in terms of what a CRM can do,” notes Rajiv.

Besides product details, every customer interaction is now available on the Sales Cloud. This includes details such as how likely a lead is to convert, or how urgent a customer need is. A mapping of customer profiles and the solutions they may need has also been set up.

All this data provides the Sales teams with the intelligence to get the best out of every customer interaction. Automated task creation also ensures timely follow-ups, and has boosted productivity by around 60 percent, while shortening the sales cycle by 10 percent.

The focus on processes has also meant the company’s salespeople are able to consistently offer customers comprehensive solutions rather than merely selling products. No longer person-dependent, the Sales teams work off the data and streamlined processes for decision-making. “We have said goodbye to subjectivity in our sales cycle. Salesforce has made sales processes and decision-making entirely data-based,” he adds.

Improving service processes with Salesforce

Gemini Power Hydraulics has also automated service processes on the Service Cloud, and is now focusing on optimizing them.

Service agents record customer service calls on the Service Cloud. Each call request is assigned as a case to the asset which needs repair, and a ticket is raised. The final goal is to see, at the click of a button, the complete schedule of repairs that have been performed on one or many assets owned by a customer.

The streamlining of the service process has boosted the Service team productivity by 10 percent. Going forward, a single customer view will help Gemini promptly offer options to customers whose assets fall outside the warranty period. The system will also collect customer feedback to help improve the next generation of products.

Driving adoption of Salesforce across the company

The Management team at Gemini is highly focused on boosting the adoption of Salesforce across the company as a path to digitization.

“We have always been a technology-first company. The customers are increasingly expecting to interact with us digitally. So, making Salesforce the single source of truth for all our employees is a step in that direction,” states Aahan Sethi, Director, Gemini Power Hydraulics.

To achieve this, Rajiv and Aahan have hired an Adoption Executive who is charged with evangelizing Salesforce across the company. Teams are strongly discouraged from having conversations on any other digital platform; all customer and project conversations must be captured on Salesforce. Internal communications like memes with pop culture figures are used to drive home the message that every business activity needs to be captured on Salesforce.

The Management team also requires all offline conversations to be supported by dashboards and reports on Salesforce. Whenever a report is discovered to be on Excel, internal developers are immediately asked to migrate it to Salesforce.

Gemini will soon move to cloud telephony for sales calls, so these are recorded on Salesforce as well. All employees are also being trained on Trailhead to boost the adoption.

As adoption increases, more employees are updating important data and fields. With this, Gemini can generate richer reports and dashboards to make better decisions.

Building a customer 360 on Salesforce

Thus far, the company is happy with Finesse as an implementation partner. “They have great process understanding and know how it can be translated into a technology solution,” says Rajiv.

Gemini is now pursuing company-wide digitization to achieve even stronger business process orientation. “All our processes are being baked into Salesforce. As Aahan rightly said, it is our single source of truth,” he adds.

The company is implementing Pardot for personalized and targeted communication with current, dormant, and prospective customers. Pardot will also be used for product launch campaigns and drip marketing. The team plans to use Tableau for deeper data-driven insights and Einstein for predictive sales and preventive maintenance. Eventually, the entire customer journey will be on Salesforce.

Inspired by gamification, Aahan is also looking at building a customer community on Salesforce. Here customers will be able to find everything they need about Gemini’s products and solutions at the click of a button. Two-way discussions on the community around new and innovative products and applications will keep customers involved and help to cross-sell and up-sell.

“We want to start moving beyond brick and mortar selling to complete digitization and automation. A Gemini employee should be able to just open their laptop anywhere and access anything they need to connect with the customer,” concludes Aahan.

Poonam Pednekar
Chief Copy Editor
Magic Wand Media Inc
poonam.pednekar@magicwandmedia.in 

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