Hawaiian Telcom's Sales and Order Management Transformation

The background 

As Hawaii’s technology leader, Hawaiian Telcom provides integrated communications, broadband, data centers and entertainment solutions to business and residential customers throughout the Hawaiian Islands. Many of Hawaii’s most important institutions, including banks, hospitals, military and civil defense agencies, rely on the critical infrastructure and advanced services enabled by Hawaiian Telcom’s next-generation fiber network.

Hawaiian Telcom sought to transform its business users’ customer journey by leveraging technology and automation to streamline its processes, increase efficiency and deliver a superior customer experience.  

To achieve these goals, Hawaiian Telcom selected CloudSense’s Salesforce-native platform to make the most of its investment in the Salesforce Sales Cloud and provide its business customers a seamless sales experience. 

Barriers to delivering a seamless sales experience

Prior to implementing CloudSense, Hawaiian Telcom didn’t have a single integrated platform at the heart of its B2B sales process.

While the technology leaders had made great strides forward with the implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud, the lack of coherence between existing systems and a reliance on manual processes meant Hawaiian Telcom couldn’t make the most of its Salesforce capabilities. 

The absence of a single joined-up sales platform, incorporating automated order management, undermined Hawaiian Telcom’s ability to deliver quickly and accurately to its business customers. With key functionality missing, Hawaiian Telcom had a set of challenges they needed to address:

Slow, inaccurate manual processes

With no fully digitized or automated solution, Hawaiian Telcom was left to rely on manual order entry processes. This meant key personnel were forced to use manual order entry, leading to a great deal of swivel chair processes and a slower sales cycle. Naturally, using manual processes sometimes resulted in inaccuracies and these errors showed up in customer billing.

“We didn’t have an automated business order entry system. This meant we were forced to use manual order entry, leading to a great deal of swivel chair processes and a slower sales cycle. Naturally, using manual processes sometimes resulted in inaccuracies and these errors showed up in our billing.”

Lack of visibility

Hawaiian Telcom’s systems weren’t proficient at sharing data with one another. Information being stored in multiple siloed systems resulted in a lack of visibility across business units. This meant Hawaiian Telcom didn’t have a single view of its customers, making it hard to deliver accurate, personalized customer services.

Inflexible systems

Along with restricting the speed and accuracy of the business sales, Hawaiian Telcom’s combination of homegrown systems and incompatible solutions left the technology leaders with limited flexibility. The rigidity of Hawaiian Telcom’s systems made it difficult to make changes to individual products and product sets, while bundling up different products and services was also a challenge. 

To overcome these barriers and provide an exceptional experience for its business customers, Hawaiian Telcom wanted a solution that would simplify order management processes alongside Salesforce and, in doing so, establish a more cohesive, integrated platform to sell to our business customers.

Extending Hawaiian Telcom's Salesforce capabilities

To extend its Salesforce capabilities beyond quoting and deliver an integrated platform for its business sales cycle, Hawaiian Telcom chose CloudSense’s Salesforce-native platform to seamlessly extend its Salesforce Sales Cloud with Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Order Management, Product Catalog and Pricing Management functionality.

“CloudSense links together our product management, our sales and order entry to provide one cohesive platform.”

The CloudSense platform delivers the automated order management processes Hawaiian Telcom desired. In doing so, CloudSense accelerates the delivery of Hawaiian Telcom’s orders, while also increasing accuracy and joining-up the sales journey by delivering insights into individual orders.

Configure Price Quote capabilities ensure a smooth, accurate sales process and CloudSense’s unified product catalog and pricing management handles the inherent complexity of Hawaiian Telcom’s business packages and pricing. This has enabled Hawaiian Telcom to launch new products or bundles faster and make product or pricing changes and deletions easily.

Streamlining processes, selling faster and delivering a better customer experience

With CloudSense, Hawaiian Telcom has the single platform it needs to automate manual order management processes, provide visibility and streamline its systems.

One cohesive platform

As well as providing short-term tangible benefits, Hawaiian Telcom’s new flexible cloud-based solution allows new functionality to be easily and cost-effectively integrated in the future.

With CloudSense, Hawaiian Telcom now has one core system that in the short term has reduced swivel chair processes and established more automation to reduce costs. In the long term, Hawaiian Telcom can continue to extend its capabilities – for example with improved billing and the introduction of online self-service.

Transformed customer experience

The enhanced visibility of customer accounts for all relevant business units speeds up the sales cycle and provides more accurate sales forecasting. Automated order management processes have saved significant time and improved delivery and billing accuracy.

"CloudSense has enabled us to streamline our processes, go to market faster and deliver a better customer experience.” 

The improved view of customer accounts and orders also ensures customer service agents can quickly address customer problems, ensuring a better customer service. 

Faster and more flexible go-to-market

With a flexible unified product catalog, Hawaiian Telcom’s product team can launch new products fast, create promotions and make changes to existing products. Any changes are quickly reflected in the Salesforce Sales Cloud, offering Hawaiian Telcom increased agility and the ability to go-to-market quicker.

"The CloudSense platform has optimized our Salesforce capabilities and enabled us to continue the modernization of our infrastructure, enhancing automation to simplify and eliminate rework, while driving more operational efficiencies and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction."