Coca-Cola Enterprises dispatches technicians faster with SMS

When restaurants, cafes, supermarkets, and newsstands in Western Europe need service on their Coca-Cola coolers or vending machines, they call Coca-Cola Enterprises. And when Coca-Cola Enterprises needs to send a technician to its most valued customers, it dispatches them the fastest way possible—using Twilio SMS and Salesforce.

Dispatching technicians faster

Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) is one of the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottlers. In 2012, CCE manufactured, sold, and distributed about 12 billion bottles and cans to more than 170 million consumers in Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Monaco. All those beverages are kept ice-cold in more than 600,000 coolers and vending machines. Keeping those machines up and running—and providing top-notch service to its customers—is a top priority for CCE.

To better service high-volume locations, CCE’s IT leadership team decided to integrate communications into its field service management application, so agents could communicate with technicians wherever they were.

CCE used a field management solution built on Salesforce to schedule routine service calls. However, the experience left room for improvement. When a high-volume customer needed immediate assistance, agents sometimes had difficulty getting in touch with technicians in the field quickly. The team identified an opportunity to make the system more efficient by building out a new feature, rather than using separate pieces of software to contact.
 

Integrating Twilio into Salesforce

Carl Kennedy, associate director of IT development, and George Abboud, manager of IT development at CCE, decided to streamline the agents’ experience and improve their efficiency by integrating Twilio SMS into Salesforce. Twilio offered an easy-to-use API, global SMS coverage, and comprehensive documentation geared toward rapid development. “The speed with which we could do this plus the ease of implementation were two of the driving factors for this,” Kennedy said. Abboud said it took about a day to add Twilio.

Now, as soon as a call comes in, an agent opens a case in Salesforce, creates a work order, assigns a technician, and determines if the call is urgent or routine. If a call is urgent, an agent clicks the “Send SMS” button, which opens an SMS template for the agent to edit and review. A record of the sent SMS is then attached to the existing case. If the problem isn’t quickly resolved, or if a new problem arises at the same location, agents can see the SMS correspondence history at a glance.

Abboud used Salesforce’s Apex programming language to add Twilio to Salesforce, creating a new custom object to build the SMS templates for service calls. Visualforce was used to create the user interface.

Expanding across Europe

After initially testing the system with 250 technicians in Great Britain, CCE rolled it out to 650 technicians throughout Western Europe. Kennedy said the end result from using Twilio SMS is faster resolution of urgent cases, along with enhanced record keeping and better visibility into the handling of repairs.