Gamma
Overview
Gamma is a leading supplier of voice, data and mobile products and services in the UK. The company provides communications solutions to small, medium and large-sized business customers, the public sector and not-for-profit organisations, both directly and through a network of more than 1,000 channel partners.
The challenge
With more than 1,000 employees across the UK and Europe, Gamma is a major provider of fixed telephony, IP telephony, hosted phone systems, broadband and data connections, mobile services, security and unified communications solutions.
Approximately three quarters of Gamma’s revenues are generated by an extensive network of 1,150 channel partners, with the remaining quarter stemming from direct sales.
Connectivity services are effectively a commodity today, so Gamma must differentiate its offerings through exceptional service.
David Doherty, Product Director Access and Digital Strategy at Gamma, explains: “It’s all about the level of service we can provide, and specifically the way we reduce friction in sales and servicing. A key focus for us is to maintain our strong Net Promoter Scores and our reputation of being easy to do business with. Ultimately, those qualities depend on really strong and flexible internal processes that enable us to manage business efficiently.”
Formed out of the merger of several business units, including external acquisitions, the direct sales arm of Gamma was using a mixture of systems and processes. Senior managers wanted to achieve significant growth from this part of the business, but recognised that the existing solution architecture and business processes would not scale to meet their ambitions.
“We reviewed the entire bid-to-cash cycle to look at how we could optimise processes,” says David Doherty. “We asked: ‘How can we get a platform to help us do a better job for our customers?’ – the majority of which are SME businesses with an appetite for more online and self-service capabilities. To be able to deliver those capabilities, we first had to standardise our processes and approaches on a flexible new platform.”
“makepositive offered a high degree of flexibility to meet our changing needs”
The makepositive solution
Gamma was already using Salesforce technology for some sales enablement in parts of its direct business, and decided to build on the implementation of Salesforce to make it a core platform.
“We knew what we wanted to do from a business perspective but not how that would translate into processes and systems,” recalls David Doherty.
“As we didn’t have all of the answers, we ran a rigorous selection process to find a Salesforce partner that would genuinely work with us in a flexible way to reach the right final outcome.
“Based on initial workshops with makepositive we felt they would be a good fit for our company, and we also got an excellent impression from speaking with some of their reference customers.”
makepositive invested significant time and effort into the pre-sales process to understand how Gamma wanted the solution to look and feel.
A team of makepositive consultants worked closely with the core project team at Gamma to build a collaborative plan from design to implementation, including new processes and workflows. makepositive’s on and offshore dev and test team worked in an agile way to deliver and refine prototypes over the course of the build.
“Throughout the planning and development phases, makepositive offered a high degree of flexibility to meet our changing needs,” says David Doherty. “The makepositive consultants have also coached us on how to give them the information they need to build the solution, and are helping ensure their resources are available even when project dates slip on our side.”
“We’ve taken a major step towards proactive support”
The benefits
Gamma recently went live with the first release of its new Salesforce environment – based on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, and Pardot marketing automation. This initial solution covers sales and support for the direct business; the environment will later grow to encompass field service and fulfilment, and Gamma ultimately expects to replicate it to serve its larger channel sales business.
The new solution covers the whole bid-to-cash cycle and provides a single point of control and source of consolidated data. Sales processes and related reporting for the direct business are now standardised and more intuitive for users, helping drive higher adherence to internal standards. At the same time, improved data quality translates into higher-quality reporting and lower effort in preparing management information.
“We brought together and cleansed data from several systems to create detailed and consistent information on customers,” says David Doherty. “Having this single lens on customers will help us to better understand and serve their needs. Internal feedback is good and we’re already in a much stronger position to grow the business and develop new capabilities.”
Gamma now has a single ticket management system for fault monitoring and resolution, backed by consistent SLAs. This saves time and effort for support staff, as does using Salesforce Chatter instead of email for collaboration. James Hilton, Head of Business Change & Customer Deployment, Gamma, comments: “We’ve taken a major step towards proactive support rather than being on the back foot, and we expect to achieve faster resolution for our customers as a result. We’ve also started to drive digital engagement with customers, adding the ability to raise and track incidents through our web portal, which will help us offer better service at lower cost.”
He concludes: “We now have the foundations in place to really start leveraging Salesforce capabilities and bolt-on applications. We’re actively looking at ten or so apps to add, and continuing to draw on makepositive’s expert view of the market to help us decide what to implement.”
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