Background
Comvita was founded to improve people’s health and well-being through the healing power of nature. Founder Claude Stratford began making and selling bee products from the basement of his home in New Zealand. The company believes that business has the potential to make the world a better place across all dimensions of our lives – economically, socially, environmentally and culturally.
Comvita uses Salesforce for customer relationship management and sends out monthly one-page deal sheets by fax. When a customer wants to place an order, he/she fills out the deal sheet and faxes it back.
Many mom and pop nutrition shops still rely on faxes to send orders and receive communications. So when the Australian business unit of Comvita sought a better way to communicate with this core audience, it chose zPaper to automate the process.
Faster order process
‘The new process not only saves time in fax creation and transmittal, it also speeds the order process by associating the incoming fax with an existing record.’
~John Smith, Comvita President
“Many of our B2B customers still use fax as their preferred means of communication, and we want 100% of our customers to get our marketing communication,” says Barlow. “However, we want this communication to be more integrated than just a simple mass fax out via eFax.”
Challenges
Comvita uses Salesforce for customer relationship management and sends out monthly one-page deal sheets by fax. When a customer wants to place an order, he/she fills out the deal sheet and faxes it back.
Lacking an integrated method to manage marketing lists, create deal sheets and automate the fax and order receipt processes, employees were spending a lot of time creating and managing the fax process.
Excellent Customer Service
“They’re always just an email away.”
~Mark Barlow, Comvita VP Sales
Solution and Results
When Comvita began searching for a new solution, it knew that integration with Salesforce was a must. zPaper was recommended to the company by Salesforce consulting partner, Sales Fix, with the general manager and national sales manager making the final decision to bring zPaper in.
Because zPaper is fully integrated with Salesforce, a company’s existing records of leads, contacts, accounts and other standard or custom object types can be used to create communications that contain merged data and are bar-coded, making it easy to associate returned communications with existing records.
Each outgoing marketing sheet or credit application is barcoded for downstream process automation upon return. Credit applications are routed to the appropriate client record, while returned deal sheets automatically create new records for order processing. In both cases an email alert or Salesforce activity can be sent so staff can respond. Copies of all sent faxes are recorded in the customer records, so staff can review exactly what offers a customer has received.
The forms tool in zPaper can be used to easily create templates. Once a new template has been made and saved, it can be used in subsequent campaigns. Pick lists make choosing and generating personalized communications easy. As part of the transmittal process, duplicate phone numbers are removed after the first transmittal, increasing efficiency while decreasing the chance a customer will receive duplicate communications. New functionality in zPaper allows a job to be assigned a unique title and scheduled for transmittal.
Comvita has been using zPaper’s solution since 2012 with good results. Barlow says
that despite the geographic distance, zPaper has been very responsive. “They’re always just an email away.”
zPaper provides a solution that not only makes the process more efficient and decreases the response time for new orders, but by keeping it 100% digital supports Comvita’s environmental and sustainability initiatives.
