When you need to achieve a critical mission, be sure you have the right tools for the job.
Martijn van Kelegom, a Salesforce Digital Consultant with Dutch ethical chocolate company Tony’s Chocolonely, knows how the right tools can make or break that mission. His role is to understand what his team needs, and communicate this to Salesforce. Then Salesforce developers can translate those needs with the right configuration and coding.
He also trains his team to maximize the Salesforce system’s value, which means using data efficiently.
In fact, data analysis should drive most business decisions, says Salesforce’s Director of Data Strategy William Dressler.
But Salesforce data storage isn’t cheap, nor is Salesforce a data lake.
“The additional costs of that storage drive up and impact that bottom line,” William explains. Faced with mounting data, exponentially growing businesses need a solution—and quickly.
William readily admits that Salesforce doesn’t have a “super strong mature data backup and archiving strategy,” primarily because it prioritizes ensuring customers have access to as much data as possible. And this is exactly where a solution like Own Archive comes into play. It protects your business and customers, empowering you to make the right decisions.
How Tony’s Chocolonely uses the Salesforce platform and data
Tony’s Chocolonely has been making unrivaled chocolate for over a decade and a half. But more than just being known for quality and taste, it has a mission to improve the industry worldwide.
In an age where people are more socially conscious, the company has experienced impressive growth. With rapid growth comes data—lots of it.
“We mainly use Salesforce for Service Cloud,” Martijn says. The customer service team processes inquiries by assigning cases. Five years ago, the team realized that Microsoft Outlook was no longer the right tool for the job. “We got too many emails,” Martijn explains. “We couldn’t keep track of what was going on.”
Customer relationships are critical to impact-based companies like Tony’s. “We try to build up a 360 view of the customer so that the team knows what’s going on when they’re talking on the phone or sending emails,” Martin says. “We want to use those conversations as moments to turn consumers into ambassadors.”
Related: Why Salesforce Archiving and Backup Are Essential
Growing pains: data storage limits
As a result of the company expanding beyond its Dutch home into the U.K., the U.S., and Hong Kong, Tony’s has found that naturally inquisitive customers in each business growth area have created “an exponential growth of data that we’re storing.”
With more functionality for sales teams and new business partnerships budding, there was a higher volume of conversations stored in Salesforce that other employees could use. Tony Chocolonely saw their storage costs mounting with a 10–15% year-over-year growth in the number of cases the customer service team handled. It hasn’t stopped growing.
“I knew there was a data storage [limit] but wasn’t ever aware of it until the day that we hit it,” Martijn says. Salesforce alerted the team, but they didn’t have the time to categorize and delete unnecessary data. Martijn would have to create a policy to eliminate what they didn’t need, but Salesforce also stores and connects emails and important milestones to the data.
Martijn decided to buy extra storage, which only put off the problem. “Within about two months, we were back at the limit and going over it again,” he says. While they could keep buying storage every time they hit their limit, it wasn’t cost-efficient and needed a more structural solution.
The evaluation criteria for a solution
Any solution that Tony’s Chocolonely used to fix its data storage issue once and for all would need to hit specific criteria. It would have to:
- Keep costs under control with a flat fee for the budget and reassurance that costs wouldn’t rise over the year
- Be easy to use, with accessible rule and policy changes in case certain people were out of the office
- Be regulatory compliant, particularly concerning General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), because Tony’s Chocolonely is an international company and GDPR is the strictest, covering all their current markets by default
- Maintain a 360° customer view, offering people access to the customer data they need, which for Martijn and his team included old orders and the ability to recover archived data
Having been a customer for a few years, Tony’s Chocolonely regularly checked in with Own’s customer success manager. When Martijn explained the team’s data storage problem, Own introduced him to Own Archive. Martijn decided to run with it.
Why Tony’s Chocolonely archives
The payoff for Tony’s Chocolonely archiving its data is threefold:
- They now have peace of mind that rules and policies will run smoothly and can be tweaked on the fly as needed. “No matter what our marketing teams do—especially in the newer countries—if we do get close to hitting the storage limit again, I can look at where the data’s growing and change the policy or make a new one,” Martijn says.
- They’re always under the storage threshold, meaning it’s easy to explain the expected costs to upper management. Then, as William explains, “you start to look a little bit like a hero because you’re making the right decisions and you’re making them in a cost-effective manner.”
- Tony’s leaders are confident they can handle growth, without needing to take the foot off the pedal for sales and marketing. They can focus “on getting more customers into the system,” Martin says.
Quickly reduce storage capacity
If you’re looking to develop an archiving strategy from scratch, Martijn suggests you “try to start small.”
Once Tony’s decided to go with Own Archive, Own representatives onboarded the company’s team. They experimented with changing a few policies and quickly got the hang of it.
Own Archive analyzes data to help you create an archiving policy based on the objects taking up the most space. In addition, you can visualize how much the policy will reduce storage before creating it.
For Tony’s, ethical-business innovation is an ongoing project. Now, Martijn is building a community portal in Salesforce for potential mission allies to follow the process of their negotiations.
But opening up Salesforce data to outside parties comes with its own challenges.
“I have to be even more aware about securing everything [and] making sure those data are protected,” Martijn says. “With Own Archive, I feel confident we have the tools in place to do that well.”
This blog post is based on a webinar featuring Tony’s Chocolonely Digital Consultant Salesforce Martijn van Kelegom. Watch the full webinar below or Schedule a demo today.
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