Apparel company deploys salesforce.com to integrate and manage customer data across six business units
San Francisco — March 22, 2004 — Apparel company VF Imagewear has deployed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution from salesforce.com in a bid to unify more than 26,000 accounts across six different business units.
VF Imagewear, a unit of VF Corp., the world's largest apparel company, supplies a variety of distributors, corporate and government organizations with uniforms and other apparel. It also operates a licensed sportswear business.
The company has standardized on salesforce.com's Winter '04 service. The 60-day implementation of the solution included Lotus Notes integration and the replacement of an e-mail management system with customized online case capture and workflow automation functionality.
One goal of the effort was to integrate and manage customer data across the company's six business units. Additional integration is planned upon completion of a new order management system currently in production.
According to salesforce.com, VF Imagewear has realized cost savings from the replacement of its existing e-mail management system with salesforce.com and has increased efficiency of its customer service operations.
Online case capture from custom VF Imagewear Web sites, in tandem with customized workflow automation, now enables customer inquiries and feedback to be directly populated into salesforce.com. Inquiries are routed to the appropriate customer service professionals who can respond with HTML e-mail templates housed in salesforce.com. VF Imagewear is then able to analyze inquiries to improve customer service.
"The high level of functionality and integration provided by salesforce.com has helped us create new efficiencies and gain broader insight into operations spanning all business units," said Kevin Walsh, vice president of sales for VF Imagewear. "We've even been able to get rid of an expensive e-mail management system — an unexpected but substantial improvement to our bottom line. We're a true CRM success story, no doubt about it."
