Informatica Perspectives

Our fourth stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was ‘the windy city’ of Chicago (and yes it was very windy that week). Situated in the middle of the country the Greater Chicago Area is headquarters for a diverse set of companies from large manufacturing and financial services firms to mid-sized business services organizations. The common thread seems to be that regardless of size or industry everyone is looking to reduce costs, streamline operations and improve overall operational efficiencies. SaaS applications and Cloud Computing are ideally suited to meet those objectives.

Our fourth CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast was held in conjunction with the Cloudforce conference. Attendees were treated to a case study presentation by our local customer, TransUnion who described their efforts to improve Call Center efficiencies by integrating various ‘systems of record’ to provide a true 360 degree view of the customer to their call center reps. Initially integrating five separate data sources from IBM and Oracle-based applications, enabled the call center group to increase ‘first call’ resolution rates by over 200 percent while significantly reducing incoming call times.

TransUnion is a global leader in credit and information management. For more than 30 years, TransUnion has worked with businesses and consumers to gather, analyze and deliver the critical, timely financial information businesses need to effectively manage their customer relationships. The TransUnion Call Center operations group has over 550 agents using Salesforce. The Salesforce CRM system is integrated with their telephone and call routing system enabling reps to see contact records automatically as calls are automatically routed to them. Or at least that’s the case if all the necessary data for the caller exists in Salesforce…. and if the data is current and accurate. If the data isn’t available in Salesforce the rep would either need to hunt through various systems to try and find it or be forced to research and call back the customer, further delaying resolution and providing less than ideal customer satisfaction.

TransUnion, was familiar with Informatica as they’re an existing customer using the Informatica PowerCenter Data Integration Platform in their data center. They were particularly interested in leveraging the investment TransUnion had already made, while at the same time taking advantage of new cloud-based tools that matched up with the company’s efforts to move to a Cloud Computing model as they had done with Salesforce CRM. After learning of the new On Demand Data Integration Services while researching Data Integration solutions on AppExchange, they registered for a free trial and quickly began using the service.

The TransUnion team came up with a strategy to bring billing and subscriber data into Salesforce using the PowerExchange for Salesforce connector and utilizing the On Demand Data Synchronization Service to publish User, Product and related custom objects. Together the on premise and on demand data integration solutions enabled SFA/CRM team to incorporate data from the various ‘systems of record’ into Salesforce to provide the reps with the critical 360 degree view of customer for customer contact calls. Additionally email correspondence with subscribers was integrated with the account and contact records enabling both telephone and electronic correspondence to be maintained in one location.

Based on their success the team has established a Sales Automation Center of Excellence to provide On Demand thought leadership to other business units in the US and other countries. And they have plans to add 10 additional data integrations in the coming months to further expand the scope of information available to the reps. Overall the program has been a major success and as one of the team said, “Informatica On Demand empowered our team to rapidly integrate our systems in order to meet our business needs.”

You’ll find a brief overview of the TransUnion case study on the InformaticaOnDemand.com website.

If you’d like to read more about leveraging both on premise and on demand data integration services you’ll find an informative white paper on the topic on the Informatica On Demand website.

Next stop on the tour is Minneapolis. Please check back to learn how a major home building supply manufacturer is using data integration to provide a master data management solution for their organization.