Medical Alert

The Challenge

• As Connect America was transitioning to Salesforce.com, the company was also growing at a rate of over 100% year over year. Connect America were using FedEx Ship Manager to generate shipments.
• Connect America hired temporary employees to help with the outbound logistics process to meet the rising demand for their products and services.
• Before Zenkraft, many different people from several departments were involved in the process of address validation, data entry, printing of labels and collation of paperwork for the packages. At the time of implementation (June 2012) Connect America was shipping out 8,000 packages per month. Their volume has since grown to over 15,000 packages per month.
• Connect America’s customer shipping data was in their legacy system, which was not connected to Ship Manager. (The support staff were required to retype information from including a customer name, address, phone number) This often resulted in errors occurring and long processing times.
• Connect America needed a solution to prevent this double entry, eliminate mistakes, streamline the process and ultimately position them for scalability.

The Solution

• Scott Blau, Connect America’s CIO was certain a solution would be available on the AppExchange.
• Scott found the FedEx App and it took him less than 30 minutes to install and configure.
• The FedEx app was so easy to use that training time was significantly reduced compared to all of the other apps installed in their environment.
• Scott’s team integrated Zenkraft custom address source functionality with the opportunity object which automatically populates address and shipment information needed to create the label and associated paperwork.
• Connect America rolled Zenkraft out to 35 people in their Data Entry department to create and process shipments and to generate return shipping labels. They also made the app available to over 80 employees in Customer Service for tracking packages and answering questions about delivery time and location.
• In the past 9 months, Connect America has created close to 140,000 shipments through Zenkraft without error and with ease of use.

The Results

• The time it takes the data Entry team to create a label has been reduced by 33% to under a minute.
• There has been a 10% customer support call reduction. This is currently 90,000 calls per month.
• Connect America’s customer service team can now track packages instantly – it used to take them over 5 minutes.
• There has been an overall measurable improvement in customer support.

What’s Next?

• Connect America plans to enable Zenkraft through their Partner and Customer Portals, allowing partners and customers to track the shipments themselves.
• Connect America also plans to dramatically increase international sales and will leverage Zenkraft to get packages to customers in countries around the world.