Serving customers across the country, and beyond with Salesforce as source of truth

While phs is based in Britain with a workforce of 3,500, both Ireland and Spain host additional offices. “If you've ever been into any toilet in the UK, you would have seen a phs sign somewhere,” Steve says. 

phs stands for, unsurprisingly, personnel hygiene services. 

Most phs employees are service technicians who deliver services at our Customers premises. “The logistics of that are huge, so it's really important that we have an efficient system that helps us manage sales, “Steve says. “It must be web-based, and able to be done anywhere by anyone at any time. We need to be able to see everything in real time.”

In charge of sales and marketing at phs for six years and counting, Steve’s job is to look after the company’s Salesforce roadmap and manage new and ongoing projects associated with the platform. phs is approaching its first decade using Salesforce.

“We started around September 2016 with Salesforce,” 16-year phs veteran Tim says. His background is in programming, data analysis, and database design, so Salesforce is the sweet spot—and phs’ single source of truth (SSoT).

How phs uses Salesforce

phs deploy multiple Salesforce clouds including sales, CPQ and service.  The solutions change regularly to enable efficiencies and improve the service to our customer.  This means we need sandboxes to manage the continuous change safely. 

“One of the main benefits of Salesforce is that it’s capable of tracking every single customer requirement,” Tim explains. Each item phs sells has variations, meaning just a single order of a few items can be linguistically complex. A system with accurate data recording is paramount for this task. 

“It's not like buying a loaf of bread off a shelf,” Tim says. “If we’re going into a washroom to do a service, we need to know how often they want to do it, the times we're allowed to go in and do it, and what air freshener scent they want.” Customer service is everything for phs. 

Given phs’ operations, business efficiency is all the more important—but so is protecting data in the right way. A loss of immediate access to information isn’t such a big deal because archives are easily retrievable when necessary.

Finding and deciding on Own

The starting point for considering Own came when phs exceeded its Salesforce data limits for its production org. The company wanted to avoid the costs associated with extra storage. “We already had backup with Own at the time,” Steve explains, but still had to buy additional storage each quarter, which was not an effective use of our IT budget. 

“But it wasn't just that,” Steve continues. “It was also that we had Salesforce for about six years, and there was a lot of clutter and deadwood clouding our reporting, opportunities, and leads pools.” Introducing Data Archiving for Salesforce provided a twofold solution: save money and declutter. A leaner system means tighter operations.

phs manages a lot of Salesforce users and data—but just a few managers. “We're actually a very small team,” Tim says, “so building something ourselves was just a complete non-starter.”

phs conducted a procurement exercise, scanning the market for different products to test during their internal investigation. The initial tender for a solution involved three options, and phs set out its requirements against each offering. Once Own demoed with phs, the company was swayed. “Given that we already had the backup tool in place, it made sense to bring in the archiver,” Tim says. One single organization managing two different functions was the logical choice.

“Own was a clear winner,” Steve highlights. While going through the tender, “Own came out very favorably on a customer support basis,” he says. Own answered all phs’ questions, helping with the right guidance at the right time. “We were confident that we were dealing with a good company.”

Given phs’ own emphasis on strong customer service, it was no surprise that a solution matching their philosophy made the perfect partner.

Evaluating the archivable and the purgeable for peace of mind

The phs Group have operated for over 60 years and have accumulated a lot of data.

phs priority was to stop storage costs and the decision about what to archive was in line with that. “We looked at our biggest data storage issues,” Steve says, and they found that “it was because of all the attachments that come through cases.” 

A typical case involves an email-based back-and-forth between phs and the customer, with data storage shrinking as unarchived email attachments mount. “It almost wasn't worth looking at other causes,” Tim says, “as that was so far out in front” as being the biggest reason for hitting data storage limits. Phs quickly refined their case management process with specific archiving policies before moving on to other minor causes.

“We started with quite a conservative, tame backup, which became more ruthless,” Steve says. Some historical data amounts to hundreds of thousands. But “once we clear this backlog, it won’t contribute” to storage consumption. 

Growing confidence in archiving

“No one’s ever been willing to try a cleanup exercise, which is why the Own data archiving tool is such a good match for us,” Tim says. While other departments in phs were initially nervous to give Own a spin, they’ve quickly realized its helpfulness.

In the two-year timeframe that phs began using archiving with Own, “we’ve not had a single request to unarchive,” Tim says. At first, people felt the need to remain as cautious as possible—keeping data for three years “just in case,” but they’re now “more confident” in deciding what to archive. 

Doing it all over again

phs is now in the enviable position of having remained under its data storage limit since implementing Own tools. While Steve admits that they’re nearing the limit, he also recognizes that if they were to analyze data storage again phs could buy itself more time.  

This exercise “would be easier now” than it initially was, he says. “We wouldn't be so cautious about archiving.” 

IT departments in companies worldwide know what they need to cull to solve data storage pressure, “but you have to be very aware of the knock-on effects that has on the business,” Steve emphasizes. Conversations with key business stakeholders yielded a lot of “just in case” responses for what data should be archived. 

Own-based improvements roadmap

“We've seen big improvements since we brought in the Own archiving tool,” Tim highlights. “It's enabled us to build really good homepages for people, where all of the critical information they need is there—on that one page. It has enabled a lot of other stuff.”

What stuff? 

“We used to regularly increase our Salesforce operating costs by having to buy more storage” Steve says. “We haven't done that once since we've had Own archiver.”

phs now has been able to quickly implement a solution to archive in line with our data policies which helps the business run smoother. “We're in a position where Own has paid for itself,” Steve says. “We built that into the business case: if we were going to invest in it, it would need to pay for itself.” Decluttering is the cherry on top. “We have a much tidier and leaner environment, where people can focus on the most important things rather than go through years of clutter.”

Great archiving provision makes for a great team

phs is in good hands with its organized IT department. In focusing on its cases, they recently “brought down the storage limit from 105% to 88% in a couple of weeks,” Steve explains.

“What I like about Own the most is that it archives at night when I'm asleep, so I don't have to worry about it at all,” Steve says. “It automatically does it in the background—we don't need to think about it.” 

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