South Africa Turns To Salesforce CRM to Handle World Cup 2010 Traffic
Even South Africa, where only 10.8% of the population uses internet, needs to be operating in the cloud. With the influx of 300,000 soccer fans for the 2010 World Cup, South African Tourism, the lone customer service company catering to the masses, has turned to Salesforce.com for a CRM solution.
The government-licensed office had in place an aged, legacy CRM system built on Microsoft technology. The call center was clearly unprepared to handle the estimated increase from 1,000 – 2,000 calls per week to 15,000 per week during the World Cup, with customer requests ranging between travel logistics, accommodations and ticket availability. William Price, global manager of e-marketing at South African Tourism, thought to turn to cloud computing, and the agency chose Salesforce.com. The company’s CRM application was one of seven considered.
“When the world comes here for the games, we want to create amazing, life-changing experiences,” says Price. “With travel being a social experience unlike anything else, we want to provide amazing customer service with relevant, real-time, and easy-to-access information that helps people find the best there is to see and do in South Africa. Service Cloud 2 lets us not only leverage social media platforms to engage visitors in a way that is familiar to them, but also quickly reorients our organization and operations to meet that opportunity without the cost and complexity of software.”
Salesforce.com’s CRM solution is expected to improve the company’s customer service visibility and analysis. Calls can be more easily categorized so that they are directed to the right representatives. Trends in repeated requests can be picked out and resolved.
A particular point of interest was using the CRM application for social networking analysis. South African Tourism wanted to monitor online buzz generated from World Cup tourists on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Salesforce.com was able to set this up for the agency and provide integrated management for their Twitter and Facebook profiles.
And though the World Cup is fleeting, South African Tourism plans to retire its old CRM system (still in operation for calls from outside of South Africa) in favor of Salesforce’s cloud CRM. The company will take this opportunity to modernize its systems.
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