eWay brings disjointed business together with Salesforce

Australian-based online payment gateway eWay processes close to five and a half billion payments per year for more than 17,000 merchants across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Asia.

However, operating a global business has not always been a frictionless process. The company previously relied on Excel spreadsheets, and ran its own internal CRM, which meant that any changes required code to be written every time.

Matt Bullock, eWay CEO, described the company's previously disjointed systems as being "horrible", because they made it difficult for internal teams within the business, such as customer care and sales, to share customer data.

The company reached out to Salesforce for help to lift support for its sales, service, and marketing teams.

However, introducing Salesforce into the company was not necessarily a simple task, Bullock said. Rather, eWay came across an unaccountable amount of challenges. He said that the company had to redo its implementation of Salesforce three times to figure out what was going to work, by "re-jigging" the company model and "working with opportunities".

"Salesforce is ginormous, and it's about trying to pick the bit you want to do and what you don't do. The biggest lesson is because you can do everything for Salesforce, don't do everything, just do a few things and get that to work.

"There were lots of problems, but you just get through them, and you get through them and you try to simplify the model. What we're doing with the platform and what we've done with the company, we could not run without it," he said.

Nearly eight years down the track since eWay's partnership started with Salesforce, the company has been able to record a customer experience churn rate of 0.5 percent.

To date, eWay's sign-up process runs on a Salesforce.com app, which is a platform that exists within Salesforce1; its customer care is running on Community; the sales team is using Sales cloud; and marketing is running on Pardot.

"There's such a gap between having nothing to what we have now," Bullock said.

"Previously, it was all different systems talking to each other from bits of paper to Excel to whatever else, but now it's all on one system that is also global. It means all the teams are able to work together."

Bullock added that partnering with Salesforce has taken the pressure off eWay to build its own platforms.

"The exciting thing with Salesforce is that it's constantly coming out with new stuff, and we couldn't possibly build that stuff ourselves. There's nothing to install; we just tick a box, and suddenly there's a new feature and we've got it, and that's happening every quarter," he said.

In turn, leveraging Salesforce has since enabled the company to expand most recently into Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, supporting companies such as Webjet and Crust Pizza.

"There's next to minimal work for us on Salesforce; it's just another region for us, and all we have to do is make a small configuration," Bullock said.

The company has also turned its work process into a gamification-like environment.

"One of the ways we do that is now is we have 50 TVs in our office, I just bought another 22, and all of that is running a product call Hoopla, which runs all the data in real time about what's happening in Salesforce from tickets created to leads created, and to times we call those leads," Bullock said.

"The TVs all flash up when a case is closed; its got a judge's hammer and it says, 'Case closed'. When the sales guys sell something, a football comes across the screen, and the picture of the rep will go everywhere."