One of the common drawbacks of working in the tech industry is that, unlike when Ronaldo or Messi score a goal, the countless improvements and benefits of applying the technology go unnoticed by the man on the street. But in the digital transformation project that sees us partner up with Cafés Candelas, we are thrilled to know that, every time one of the 25 cups of Candelas coffee sold somewhere in the world every second is served, when the customer is asked whether they want it black, white or with sugar, our work and Salesforce technology are present.
Focus on quality and efficiency
One thing that hasn’t changed since two brothers from Lugo set up Cafés Candelas more than 45 years ago is its focus on quality, efficiency and customer experience. Values very much in line with S4G and our commitment to drilling down on what is unique about each project we embark on and being able to add value.
This mutual understanding proved essential when taking on this digital transformation project, leveraging Salesforce to address the growth challenges faced by the Galician firm.
Since it began in 1973, Cafés Candelas has been committed to innovation, training and customer service to propel the sustainable growth of the business, brand image, employee skillsets, communication and quality.
The tech leap forward
Just as there are baristas who specialise in wowing customers with fly coffee designs and master roasters who take care to bring out all the aromas and flavours in the coffee, at S4G we are experts in detecting customer needs and pivoting Salesforce tools and technologies to their requirements.
In the case of Cafés Candelas we understood it was critical to put the customer at the heart of the business and allow it to merge its sales and operations information to settle a myriad of incidents without needing to send out for a technician, and let them fulfil an order and invoice it in the same visit. In this way we could generate additional cost and time savings to ensure that a cup of coffee is always at the ready.
One of the pluses of the challenge was that the Galician firm was aware of the changes in markets and consumer demands. And it knew that only by becoming a go-getting and innovative enterprise could it step up to the new challenges and uphold its leadership position on the market, addressing customer needs and delivering on the coffee industry’s concerns.
Posting revenue of €63 million in 2018 and with 20,000-plus customers and over 30,000 coffee machines across the Peninsula, Cafés Candelas invests in technology to enhance service management and maintain a direct contact channel. In line with its vision of offering the best blends and a first-rate experience to an increasingly demanding public, over the past year Candelas has strengthened the training and technical service and customer consulting departments.
The proposed Salesforce solution
“We needed to continue creating inspiring experiences and that means having a good product, serving our customers well and raising their level of satisfaction, efficiently managing our assets and improving service management, where we have up to six customer impacts”, Cafés Candelas CFO, Alejandro Alvarez, said at the private event organised by S4G to explain the Salesforce solution for the HORECA channel.
With the aim of optimising all product lifecycle processes, we suggested Cafés Candelas adopt Salesforce Field Service to add value to customer interactions, manage contacts convincingly and, above all, power insights into the status of each of its assets (the coffee machines), since a malfunction or inadequate maintenance means a customer is unable to enjoy a cup of coffee.
The firm served up more than 800 million cups of coffee last year, meaning that more than 25 cups of Cafés Candelas coffee were served somewhere in the world every second.
This first project phase featured around thirty technicians from Cafés Candelas using the dispatcher console and the optimiser to manage service provision efficiency. In addition to harnessing the Maintenance Plans, Service Appointments and Work Orders functionalities, today they are also using Resource Preferences to define at Account level which technicians customers prefer to receive.
In this way, the implemented solution also covers the entire sales cycle in Candelas, from commercial management to generation of framework agreements with customers and integrated order management. This last point has been developed especially to allow the self-sales staff to take orders at the bar or in the coffee shop, deliver the merchandise carried in the vans on a daily basis and invoice, all on-site from the mobile.
The next steps
Alejandro Álvarez said that one of the things he likes most about this project is that it has allowed the firm to get more done with fewer resources and, above all, without having caused too many headaches in the implementation process. The key to this lies in what we said at the start, i.e., of investing initial time in properly understanding the customer’s concerns, proposing solutions that harness existing elements and introducing others that bring additional benefits.
And to continue to bring more benefits, we must now address new challenges and define the next steps to take the project forwards. One thing definitely on the horizon is predictive maintenance through integration with the Internet of Things (IoT) via a series of sensors to control all coffee parameters in real time: grinding point, weight, pressure, etc. to prevent incidents.
The new Salesforce developments featured in the Salesforce Spring Release 2020 and which we have already spoken about in this blog post will help us be able to continue to fill you in on new projects we are working on together with Cafés Candelas and the way it is benefiting from the uptake of these technologies.
