The Organization

GreatAmerica Financial Services provides commercial equipment and technology financing and consulting services to manufacturers, vendors, and dealers nationwide.

The Situation

GA’s goal is to be the best and easiest company for customers to work with in order to gain preference over competitors. To do so, GA recognized that they needed to provide unmatchable customer service and offer the most accessible and easy-to-use portals for dealers to use.

A hallmark of the GA customer-service oriented culture is its “no voicemail” directive. Employees work together to answer every call within 3 rings. Frustrations arose from inaccuracies amongst customer information because of a lack of communication between GA’s four independent proprietary systems.

Technology was also needed to simplify the credit application submission process for dealers. Dealers had to enter data twice because GA’s original processes did not communicate with dealers’ CRMs.

The Solution

Ascend Technologies used Salesforce Sales Cloud as the foundation for a simplified and predictable contact management system and integrated client contact information between Salesforce, accounting applications, etc. When employees make edits in Salesforce, updates are automatic in the other applications. Utilizing API calls previously developed by GA, Ascend designed a Salesforce-friendly application to create a managed package specific that dealers install within their own CRM that communicates with standing financial systems. Dealers use the app to calculate potential credit payments, submit credit applications, and check the status of applications.

The Outcome
Adopting Salesforce as a database for customer files and synchronizing it with preceding systems has ceased inaccuracies amongst customer records and increased employee confidence in the data.

The unique Salesforce-friendly application for the dealer portal bridges the gap between GA and its dealers’ CRMs to decrease dealers’ screen time and allow for more time spent selling in the field.

“We continue to rely on [Ascend Technologies] as our go-to when things are too complicated for our System Administrator and fall out of the realm of Salesforce Premier Support. In addition to their technical knowledge, they have a firm grasp on business concepts and lead us on a path to make Salesforce fit our needs versus us adapting to Salesforce configuration.

[Ascend] was skilled at reviewing a very complex contact management tangle and finding a way to make everyone’s job simpler. Their attention to detail and knowledge about not only Salesforce configuration, but integrations with Apex Triggers and APIs, helped us successfully roll out a solution the first time!”

-Donna Heyvaert, System Administrator