Enriching the world of work for employees around the globe

Top Employers Institute is the global authority on recognising excellence in people practices. They accelerate the impact of people strategies to enrich the world of work, and are on track to improve the lives of over 10 million people and increase their global presence. 

Established more than 30 years ago, with more than 1850 certified organisations in 123 countries/regions to date, the Top Employers Institute has 11 offices around the world and is growing on a global scale across key industries. Their renowned Certification Programme enables organisations to assess and improve their workplace environment, comparing their practices to others in similar industries. 

As part of a wider digital transformation strategy, Top Employers Institute embarked on a programme to consolidate siloed technologies and complex data systems and to significantly improve their customer experience.

As they looked to integrate disparate technologies, power their sales and delivery teams, provide a community for participants globally, and develop an analytics engine for their complex survey, Salesforce was the natural choice.

The early stages of the programme demanded a return to basics, setting the best possible Salesforce foundations from which to work. This started with a move from Classic to Lightning which let users unlock impactful new features and enabled sales to work smarter and faster with the intuitive Lightning UI, requiring fewer clicks to get the information they needed and allowed the admins to easily design custom pages for records.

The Kanban view for Opportunities provided a visual representation and drag and drop functionality for deal stage organization. The move also set the foundation for developers to create future-proof components and functionality as Salesforce extended the abilities of the Lightning platform. 

Unleashing the best of Sales Cloud to accommodate and optimize sales operations, we streamlined opportunity configuration and optimized territory management and forecasting. We leveraged Sales Cloud to enable sales to use standard product and price books to configure and build their opportunities. They can now use custom bundled products that allow configuration of a standard offering of multiple products with just a few clicks. We also introduced custom objects for the Delivery process so there is a clear hand-off, and each user can access only the records that are relevant to them.

We wanted to enhance the participant journey and flagship Certification Programme by leveraging the power of Salesforce Community Cloud and transform the customer experience with a newly developed Portal and Online Store.

Historically users of the platform would have to input data into multiple platforms, checking notifications and communicating with the Top Employers Institute across different channels. By moving from multiple disconnected systems to a single consolidated portal, companies can now interact with the Top Employers Institute in a single space, updating their survey, responding to notifications and communicating with the teams on a single platform.

The visual design and experience guides participants every step of the way during their Certification journey. This includes giving them access to resources, products, and feedback tailored to each participant.

By building in a series of automated checks to verify company submissions, internal teams can raise flags when they notice anomalies in company responses, easily contacting the firms for clarification. Once final answers have been compiled, they get an automated calculation of the weighted score to let them define Certification levels.

Participants now have self-service access to their Certification Programme details, events, files, and can even order Top Employers products directly through the new Top Employers Online Store. With some additional Lightning Platform objects and components, we can manage the complete Online Store catalogue and user experience using native Salesforce functionality. As orders are placed in the Online Store, standard sales reports are instantly updated to reflect new revenue.

Salesforce is now the single source of truth for all product, pricing, ordering, revenue, and invoicing information, eliminating the need to maintain external data and systems. All orders placed in the Online Store are instantly accessible under accounts and opportunities are automatically created once orders are placed. Finance can then create the necessary invoices and mark orders as paid.

The transformation has increased speed and efficiency, reduced time spent on manual processes and provided more transparency to everyone using the platform.