Merkle partners with Canon Production Printing Australia Pty Ltd to build a future-proofed technology stack using Salesforce.

Canon Production Printing Australia creates innovative technologies, products and services for printing and workflow management. Their purpose is to empower customers to manage their documents effectively and efficiently.

Challenge

As a subsidiary of globally recognised technology giant Canon Inc, Canon Production Printing Australia has been at the forefront of the printing industry for decades. While the business has remained one of the top innovators in the industry for over 50 years, their technology stack was no longer fit for purpose. 

Canon Production Printing Australia had been using a number of different legacy systems to manage sales, service, customer support and billing. While the legacy systems did cover many bases, they lacked the ability to integrate and communicate with one another, forcing information to sit within isolated silos, creating many manual processes. This made it difficult for Canon Production Printing Australia to gain a complete 360 degree view of its customer and provide a highly personalised customer experience.

“Essentially we had a lot of systems that were heading towards obsolescence, and had been highly customised to keep them functioning for many years. We knew that this was not an effective long-term solution and that we needed a complete system overhaul. We wanted a system that would put the customer at the heart of everything that we do, and continue to act as a growth partner well into the future.” - Joshua Konrad, General Manager – Customer Support Services at Canon Production Printing Australia

Solution

Canon Production Printing Australia placed the customer experience at the centre of their transformation. After a detailed analysis of the marketplace, they chose Salesforce and Merkle as digital transformation partners. 

It was key for Canon Production Printing Australia that their future technology strategy would: 

• Connect customer data in a single source of truth
• Connect device data
• Streamline field service
• Integrate into backend (finance and logistics) systems
• Scale as the business grows

Canon Production Printing Australia had an ambitious timeline to deliver the project - over a period of just 12 months. To meet this deadline and deliver the project to the highest possible standard, the team at Merkle worked closely and quickly with Canon Production Printing Australia using an Agile Delivery method. Aspects of the project were delivered regularly, in two week sprints, allowing the project to be completed in rapid blocks, all within the timeframe. 

“Salesforce is the obvious choice if you need to create a connected customer experience and share data across your organisation. We chose Merkle as our implementation partner as they had experience in similar projects and were able to work to our timelines.  

Merkle worked extremely closely with Canon Production Printing Australia throughout the entire transition. Utilising Salesforce as a CRM was new to our business, so it was a learning curve for us. But Merkle stepped up and supported us through the internal change management process from beginning to end.” - Joshua Konrad, General Manager – Customer Support Services at Canon Production Printing Australia

The system is delivering instant value to the business as it has increased transparency and broken-down silo's by making customer data easily visible across our business. Whilst delivering immediate benefits, we continue to work closely with Merkle on our transformation journey and leverage the power of SFDC to support future growth in our business

The Sales team now has access to all customer data in the Salesforce mobile app. As well as massively increasing productivity and streamlining the visit reporting process, this is empowering the team to respond to customer queries in the field - reducing the need for time consuming follow up post visit. 

The Field Service team have benefited from having a single view of the customer - as they can now view customer data and device data in one place. This has streamlined their work flows and allowed them to provide a more cohesive customer experience. 

The Customer Service team are finding that the simplified ordering process is giving them more time to focus on the customer. There have been additional time savings with the use of Email to Case as the majority of case creation is automated. 

Canon Production Printing Australia’s clients have also been empowered to take more control over their chosen products and services, with self-service functionality now enabled by the new system. 

Results

Since implementing the new cloud-based system, Canon Production Printing Australia has seen a number of benefits:

• The end-to-end process from order to cash has been completely streamlined. What previously required several different tools now only requires one user-friendly system.
• Self-serve functionality has led to a decrease in data requests from clients and Canon Production Printing Australia team members.
• The business has reduced their technological risk and overhead costs

“Partnering with Merkle for this digital transformation has allowed us to become far more customer centric and efficient in all that we do. Our teams out in the field now have a more detailed understanding of our clients needs which enables us to provide a more comprehensive service. We are now looking forward to the future possibilities that the new platform has made possible.” - Joshua Konrad, General Manager – Customer Support Services at Canon Production Printing Australia