Case Study: Shavlik Technologies

Solution: Salesforce Service Cloud

How to listen to the wisdom of the crowd with a Service Cloud online customer community.

Shavlik Technologies, LLC is the market leader in the simplification of complex enterprise network configuration, compliance and security issues. Over 10,000 customers worldwide trust Shavlik to help keep their networks secure and operational.

As enterprise networks grow more complex, they become increasingly vulnerable to outages created by application conflicts and code patches. All of which is good news for Shavlik, which has grown fast in recent years by providing innovative solutions to what the company calls Active Vulnerability Management the automated and continual process for preventing, detecting, and removing critical security threats from corporate networks while maintaining policy-driven security configurations.

Growth has been so good, in fact, that Shavlik realized that it needed to replace its aging CRM system with an on-demand solution from Salesforce. Shavlik was thinking big, too. It not only hired Demand Chain to help implement a series of customizations that allow it to manage as many as 20 different marketing campaigns, it also wanted to use Sales Cloud to power an integrated worldwide partner portal. This would allow the company to work closely with partners in sharing real-time sales, marketing, product and technical information, as well as harvesting partner feedback and ideas. After all, Shavlik figured, smart companies today recognize the value of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd to capture the best answers and the most innovative ideas. Why not get customers in on the act with a Force.com community portal designed just for them?

Demand Chain helped by building a full-fledged community forum integrated into Shavlik’s Salesforce system for what could eventually be over 150,000 users. At the site, customers can seek help from others in the community, ask questions of Shavlik technical experts, follow message threads, see video tutorials, and much more. In fact, the potential of the site is virtually unlimited. And with Salesforce CRM’s easy-to-use analytics engine, the company can identify at a glance top customer issues and slice and dice the data any number of ways. Best of all, because the community is integrated with the rest of Salesforce.com, Shavlik sales and marketing reps can update customer profiles, manage cases, manage trial license keys and convert users into qualified leads based on their questions and actions in the forum.

“With this new online community, we’re able to create a unique experience for our customers and leverage partner and customer information in ways we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago,” says Rob Juncker, vice president of technology. “Demand Chain really delivered for us, with both a strong understanding of the business considerations and their deep Salesforce expertise.”