5 Ways We're Leading a Customer-Centric Digital Transformation at Fiber Optic Center

I wrote this article for three reasons. First, I hope other business leaders will relate to our journey and find reassurance in their own quest. Elsewhere, I hope to inspire new digital transformations. Lastly, I want to acknowledge an incredible year in Fiber Optic Center's (FOC) history and my career.

Last year, I met with FOC CEO Ben Waite at Salesforce Boston World Tour. Our meeting served as an informal interview. Ben had a clear vision for improving the company’s technology and operations. I was impressed and excited by his goals and knew it was the perfect place to work upon completing my MBA. Now, roughly a year after my start, it’s surreal to look back at the transformation that we made together. I'm so thankful to everyone on FOC’s team for their continued efforts and positive attitudes.

Goodbye Silos and Imports, Hello Integration

When I joined FOC, many core pieces of software were in planning or implementation. The change in scenery allowed us to modernize our processes and develop integrated systems. As with many small/mid-sized businesses, FOC did not begin with enterprise software. Early innovation was focused on the company's products and services, a strategy that has brought success for nearly 30 years. As FOC continued to seek improvement, we examined our internal operations.

Our team has to access sales and financial data about our customers. This need fueled a bi-directional integration between our ERP and CRM platforms. Before this project, our sales, customer service and technical departments had to access two separate systems and manually align a customer’s data. Now, our team sees a customer’s past interactions, payments and our inventory levels, automatically aligned inside one system.

The obvious benefit is a productivity spike for our customer-facing staff. Further, we were able to eliminate the time our IT department dedicated to importing data between systems. Lastly, it’s much easier to manage our employee’s data permissions and keep our ERP system safe.

To define this integration, we partnered with Commercient. Their team are experts with our ERP and CRM providers and they delivered a robust and customizable solution. If you’d like to learn more about our integration or their services, please see our customer story here.

Emphasis and Investment in Data Quality

FOC has accrued a lot of data in their 30 years of operations. Keeping this data clean and useful is no easy challenge. This past year we invested in many tools to ensure that our data is clean and complete. Integrating data can be messy, the actual connection is a small piece of the full project. First, data preparation and cleansing was required. Our team acquired a duplicate management tool, called Plauti, which provides an outstanding interface for spotting potential duplicate records. In our case, it wasn’t as much duplicate information as it was combining different data segments. If you’re interested in this project, please read about our full project here.

Next arose the challenge of keeping our data relevant. With tens of thousands of customers, it’s not possible to maintain the freshness and completeness of data without an enrichment tool. My team researched a lot of providers before eventually selecting Clearbit. Their team was patient with our timeline and provided excellent data test results. FOC is in the very early stages of leveraging Clearbit data, but it’s already exciting to see enriched data one click away.

Improving Security Features & Access

If security was not already a concern of every consumer, B2C and B2B already, the past few years of major data breaches and successful phishing campaigns have certainly put people on their toes when it comes to their privacy and information. At FOC, we understand that it’s our responsibility to keep our customer’s data safe. Our core software programs, namely Salesforce and Sage, offer robust security features.

Earlier this year, we implemented two-factor authentication (2FA) for our employees. While it takes employees a little longer to login, a 2019 Microsoft study showed that 2FA blocked 99.9% of automated attacks. In addition to 2FA, our team also chose to delay a digital partner community’s launch to revisit data points and sharing scenarios before going live. 

Automating the Automatable

Using a variety of integration tools and in-platform automation capabilities, we continue to update and create new automated processes on a weekly basis. The days of our employees having to copy and paste or perform repetitive updates again and again are over. I especially want to thank everyone at FOC for being patient and helpful in the configuration processes for each automation. The pre and post-launch feedback that I receive from our power users allow me to have eyes and ears in every department.

Salesforce must be acknowledged as having excellent and diverse automation solutions for administrators of their software. Our org relies on workflows, process builder, flows, custom metadata and validation rules for daily operations.

Personalization and Continuous Improvement Mindset

In the past few months, I’ve assisted our Marketing department with the migration and implementation of a new automation system. We collectively decided to make this shift to be able to improve our personalization abilities. By integrating our system (Pardot), with Salesforce, we subsequently can connect to our ERP, website and PIM platforms. 

Often in a B2B setting such as FOC, the focus is geared toward Account Based Marketing (ABM). Our team is thrilled with the idea of individual customer segmentation, but want to bring it one step further by connecting with individuals at our (customers) companies on a personal level. This is a difficult task, but we certainly have the tools and talented team to experiment and personalize. The concept of speaking to someone who has (1) bought a specific product, (2) visited a certain section of our website and (3) is in a selected sub-industry is very exciting. While this may seem standard for large corporations, this is a meaningful step for a small/mid-sized business. 

What’s Next?

In less than a year, we now have integrations, clean data and automated processes. Now we can relax and let the software work for us, right? Not quite. My team is embarking on projects that will use our recent accomplishments to create diverse and personal experiences for our customers. If you’re an FOC customer, your interactions with our company will only be exponentially better from here onward.