Customer case

Designing Better Business with Boels Rental: Putting the customer first to drive top- and bottom-line growth across Europe with Salesforce and MuleSoft

It all began in 1977, when Pierre Boels Sr. founded Boels as a small, local equipment rental company. There were four garage boxes, where they lent tools to their friends and acquaintances. 

Today, the company is a force to be reckoned with within the rental industry, with over 725 locations and 7,000 employees operating in 18 countries and offering over 800,000 rental items. Boels is known for its innovative approach, excellent customer service, and cutting-edge technology, but despite its growth, the company's entrepreneurial spirit and dedication to success have remained the same.

The challenge of creating a centralized customer view

Boels aims at becoming the customers’ number one rental partner of choice in Europe by offering the best quality equipment and highest levels of service. This requires a centralized customer view to enable personalized sales, service and marketing. In addition, Boels wants to be more data driven to improve and streamline internal operations. 

Getting this centralized customer view can be challenging, considering the many different expertises that Boels offers in the different business units and countries. From the local entrepreneur to the manager of an industrial site, all customers are in contact with Boels colleagues across the company. Excellent customer service is only possible if everyone has the same centralized view on the customer. 

This centralized customer view becomes even more challenging combined with the growth of Boels. Boels is continuously looking for ways to expand the services offered to their customers. This often happens through acquisitions. To be able to keep the growth pace, a scalable platform for customer relations was required. 
 

A Boels wide strategic Customer Excellence program

To address these challenges, Boels prioritized Customer Excellence as an organization wide key initiative with a focus on business, process, technology integration and organizational change with the goal to deliver a seamless customer experience.  Only when this goal is realized customers can truly experience Boels as a single entity, with a consistent and seamless experience across all interactions.

The key goals of the Customer Excellence program are:

• Establish a unified approach to customer service.
• Improve communication and collaboration across departments and regions.
• Provide a centralized view of the customer to ensure a consistent experience.

Designing Better Business together

For the Customer Excellence program, Boels found a partner in Nextview. With the help of Nextview, Boels colleagues from different roles across different countries mapped every step in the customer journey: from initial contact to the post-rental support. To ensure Boels can deliver a seamless and positive customer experience at every stage, the Boels-Nextview team identified pain points and areas for improvement.

The team identified several challenges which can be summarized in: 

1. Customers experienced multiple redirects when connecting with Boels whilst attempting to resolve issues, causing unnecessary inconvenience and having a negative impact on the customer experience.
2. Employees experienced scattered formation across various departments and countries, resulting in the need to explain issues multiple times, leading to inefficiencies and potential delays in problem resolution.

Based on these challenges, Nextview and Boels worked on a solution design. When working on these kinds of designs, it is essential to take the company strategy into account to make sure that the customer experience matches the direction the company is going.

To achieve that, the design is based on three core enablers from the Boels strategy: 

1. Empowering people to perform at their best, ensuring that they have the necessary tools and resources to provide excellent service and support.
2. Maintaining a strong focus on customer centricity, putting the needs and preferences of the customer at the forefront of our design decisions.
3. Cultivating a reliable partnership with our customers, building trust and fostering long-term relationships that benefit both parties.

The need for a scalable platform that puts the customer at its center was clear; leading Boels towards Salesforce, being the number one trusted CRM platform available. 

Whilst implementing Salesforce to achieve a fully centralized customer view, different departments were brought together. Silos between departments, such as marketing, sales, and service were broken down during this implementation. 

To be able to give Boels employees the full picture of what is happening at the customer, information from all sorts of sources needed to be combined into Salesforce. Having the complete overview of orders and invoices from ERP, opportunities from sales combined with an overview of current and past service calls, the Boels employees really feel empowered to execute on the Boels strategy of providing Customer Excellence.

Integration as strategic asset leading towards MuleSoft

To deliver the integrated customer view, Salesforce was utilized as the central platform and seamlessly integrated various systems using MuleSoft technology. This approach allowed Boels to bring together customer data from various sources and present it in a centralized and easy-to-use manner, providing a holistic view of the Boels customers and their needs. Through this approach, they were able to improve the customer service and support, delivering a positive and consistent experience for customers at every touchpoint.

Benefits of Choosing Nextview

Initiating a complex digital transformation program across the full Boels organization requires the right partner to deliver to the promise. With Nextview's advisory practice, the ability to collaborate with stakeholders across the hierarchy enabled the transformation of corporate strategy into a concrete digital capabilities roadmap.

Through close collaboration with both IT and Business teams, Nextview successfully delivered this roadmap of Salesforce capabilities within the complex IT landscape. According to Boels, their expertise and dedication to customer excellence ensured that the implementation was seamless, providing a unified and comprehensive approach to customer service and support.

With Nextview being one of the leading Salesforce partners of North Europe, they had the one-stop-shop full Salesforce Platform capability the Customer Excellence program required, being a multi-cloud program. The international scale of the Nextview organization enabled them to deliver the resources required, whilst still being able to provide local support in countries where needed. With a near-shore capability the whole program could be delivered in a cost effective manner. 

One of the key criteria for Boels for choosing Nextview was the need that they could match the hands-on culture of the Boels organization. The ability to be strategic in the Customer Excellence program design phase, but pragmatic when implementing and rolling out to the rental stores has really proven to be a recipe for success. This has really worked out well, laying the foundation for a long term partnership between Boels and Nextview.

The business value of having the customer in Pole Position

The development of the Customer Excellence program was crucial in the journey towards becoming the number one rental partner in Europe. 

Concrete results that showcase the business value:

• Improved overall customer satisfaction due to faster resolution times, improved communication and more modern support channels
• Increased marketing lead conversion due to more personalized and more relevant marketing offerings and content
• Increased cross- and up-sell across Boels divisions due to centralized and harmonized key account planning
• Lower cost per contract due to a decrease of administrative tasks and less inefficiencies across disconnected systems
• A lower TCO for the integration platform, due to the accelerated development time and increased reusability of integrations leveraging the MuleSoft platform