In terms of manufacturer offerings, there is more competition today than ever before. This brings significant purpose for manufacturers to be more customer-centric and understand more intently what their customers actually want. That is undoubtedly a key objective for Armacell, the global manufacturer of flexible foams and insulation materials.

Although the company was a user of Salesforce, Armacell wanted to make the most of the opportunities found within the data it held in its CRM system. That’s why it turned to the Squirro for Salesforce application: to enhance its Salesforce data so the company could be even more customer-focused and more aware of day-to-day global operations and industry trends.

Becoming Customer-Centric

Every organization needs to be customer-centric to thrive in modern business. For Ciro Ahumada, VP of Americas, Armacell, focusing on customer requirements requires tapping into the insight found in data:

“There’s a real opportunity to become a manufacturing game-changer, to implement digitization, and tap into data that would ordinarily take ages to analyze. We needed to transform that data into valuable insights that change the way we make decisions and allow us to adopt a more customer-orientated approach.”

The way for organizations to achieve this is via their data, and deploying the augmented intelligence applications that extract actionable insight from that data. However, for many organizations, their data is siloed and/or unstructured, making it harder to manage and analyze. This is true even for a CRM system as powerful as Salesforce. For an organization to become truly customer-centric, it needs to look at the unstructured data – the emails, call records, external news reports, and more – that hold the real insight. This customer-centricity is what Armacell wanted to achieve. This required connecting multiple data sources to Salesforce and the subsequent unlocking of highly valuable insights related to customers, competitors, and the market.

Squirro for Salesforce

Squirro for Salesforce is a powerful augmented intelligence application that connects an organization’s data sources to Salesforce and delivers to users actionable insights and recommendations. Squirro deployed its own AI Studio to develop custom alerts and triggers for Armacell, empowering staff with real-time insight on market developments and emerging opportunities. It is highly suited to specific manufacturing requirements and made a tangible difference to how Armacell was able to engage and interact with its customers.

Instead of Armacell’s account managers spending hours and hours pouring over data in an attempt to gain insight, Squirro for Salesforce presents this insight directly to them. Because it works with so many different data sources, Squirro can offer a 360-degree view of a particular customer, outlining every interaction that has taken place. This includes quality of relationship analysis and sentiment analysis, which results in deeper and more intimate customer insights.

There is also a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis so that account managers can have current and meaningful conversations with those customers. Information is presented visually, in a graph or map, so it is easy to spot trends and patterns, and opportunities are not missed.

A Significant Increase in Customer Satisfaction

Using Squirro for Salesforce had a substantial impact on Armacell, delivering a significant increase in customer satisfaction and providing faster learning from across the globe. Senior managers have more visibility of sales activity and can coach their sales teams more efficiently. It has helped make Armacell a smarter and more effective organization.

It’s also a tool that features sentiment analysis, so account managers could look at all instances of positive or negative customer touchpoints – presented in simple graphs and visualizations – and use that insight to address issues or maximize opportunities.

Squirro for Salesforce was a true enabler for Armacell, enhancing its Salesforce data and allowing Armacell to be more customer-centric.