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Conagra’s Salesforce journey
Client: Conagra Brands
Our Role: PwC worked with Conagra Brands to implement Salesforce Cloud services, giving it newfound clarity into its customer base
Industry: Consumer Products
Services: Data & Analytics, Operations Strategy, Sales & Marketing, Digital, Salesforce, Customer Experience
How do you transform sales, service and marketing in a fragmented, $11 billion behemoth?
A titan in the food industry, Conagra Brands (“Conagra”) has dozens of iconic brands in its portfolio, ranging from Act II Popcorn to Wolf Brand Chili. With $11 billion in revenue, 18,000 employees and nearly 100 years of history, it’s understandable that certain aspects of the business had become fragmented over time. By 2018, Conagra’s Retail and Food Service businesses were operating completely separately, although they handled many of the same products. Furthermore, the company’s various sales, service and marketing channels were also separate; for example, website management, email marketing and social media management groups were all disconnected. The result: Duplicated effort, poor communications and lost sales opportunities. For a company that continues to grow, leadership knew that big changes needed to be made.
Conagra challenged PwC to align all of these operations by undertaking a broad transformation of its front office operations. The idea: Integrate sales, service and marketing under a single umbrella and reimagine how Conagra engages with its customers, using Salesforce Service Cloud, which it had already selected, as the backbone for all of this.
“With 100 percent of our sales operation now on Salesforce Cloud, our team is vastly more efficient and able to collaborate like never before.”
A Salesforce Cloud implementation that is designed and built for scalability
Conagra’s implementation of Salesforce Cloud technologies would be a very large one, and it had to continue to scale: The company frequently acquires and divests itself of brands in its portfolio, which means employees and responsibilities can frequently change. Conagra’s new system had to be robust enough to handle this kind of disruption.
Connecting directly, and more deeply, to customers in real time
The company leveraged Salesforce Cloud services to address its three use cases directly, the goal being to unify the disconnected organizations through a proper Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that would give salespeople much-needed insight into their customers in advance of their sales calls. This system then became the base platform for Conagra’s marketing and service groups, giving them a system which would allow for better collaboration and give them a fuller, deeper understanding of each customer. For example, the service group had traditionally been reactionary, tasked with jobs like monitoring calls to the 800 number printed on the back of a can of Reddi-Wip to determine if there was a problem with a product. Under the new system, the service team would be able to monitor customer sentiment in real time, tracking social media comments to learn whether or not a new product is being received well. This type of analysis could naturally feed into the marketing organization, informing how, where and to whom Conagra promoted its products – ultimately leading to a more targeted advertising strategy and a more personal connection to its customer base.
Building a CRM system that is simple and accessible
Throughout the implementation process, the company knew simplicity, consistency and ease of management was key. We worked to guide Conagra toward straightforward solutions for its challenges so that its customer base would not be disrupted – and that its sales, service and marketing teams would experience less short-term impact to their productivity.
“Conagra is successfully managing the Salesforce system on its own, following a seamless handoff by PwC that has allowed it to manage its unified CRM system without the need for additional oversight or training.”
Salesforce Cloud quickly gives Conagra newfound clarity into customers
Conagra was successful at integrating all three departments on Salesforce Cloud systems in the span of nine months. The Retail and Food Service groups both use the same technologies and the same set of customer data, eliminating duplicate and conflicting data problems and helping to ensure the sales, service and marketing staff are all unified and on the same page.
While the engagement was completed in May 2019, as of August the company already had significant results to show from its efforts. Within two weeks of going live, the company had onboarded 100 percent of its sales organization -- nearly 500 users -- and created over 1,100 customer accounts within the system. In a matter of weeks, the sales team reported efficiency gains of at least 50 percent when accessing daily reports and KPIs.
Conagra’s service team used Salesforce Cloud to create roughly 55,000 cases based on customer inquiries. 87 percent of these have been successfully closed. As well, the marketing team has migrated over 8.5 million consumer records to Salesforce, with 20 percent of these records being imported from social media. As part of this effort, Conagra has been able to gain deeper and more personal insights into its customer base -- allowing the company to reach those consumers in a more meaningful way.
Greg Adams
Partner
Ian Kahn
Partner