The challenge
Kerry is a world leader in taste and nutrition for the food and beverage industry and required an innovative solution to enhance their service offerings and improve their partner’s experience.
Kerry’s partners frequently request samples to test their application into recipes and formulas. In the past, these requests were manually placed via e-mail which was a time-consuming and inefficient process for all parties.
The requirement was to expand the existing Salesforce infrastructure and create a branded, partner-facing Community Portal to allow Kerry’s partners to request samples in an intuitive and easy-to-use manner.
The main requirement was to make the experience of requesting samples from Kerry simple, fast, and efficient. In addition, we needed to reuse existing login credentials to access the new Community Portal.
It was essential that the relationship between the samples and accounts were scalable and easy to manage.
It was also expected that all features including the custom sections of the Community would be fully accessible on desktop, tablet and mobile devices.
The approach
Merkle worked closely with Kerry to understand their requirements and through our discovery phase, all functionality was identified at the inception of the project.
Their existing Salesforce infrastructure was extended by implementing the Partner-facing Community Portal. This allows distributors affiliated with Kerry partners to log-in, search and request samples available to them from Kerry directly; automatising the previously manual process and therefore dramatically reducing the need for e-mail/phone interaction with the partners.
The key objective of the Community is to provide a seamless experience for all of Kerry’s partners. For this reason, the Community is built is such way that it requires minimal steps to search and request a sample.
To further improve the ease of use, the Community can be accessed via a browser available on desktop, tablets and handheld devices, so partners can access it from anywhere, at any time.
A new custom ‘Object’ was also created on Salesforce to manage the accessibility of products for each account.
During the project, an integration was completed with Microsoft Azure to allow partners to log-in to the Community with their existing log-in details.
The outcome
Goal - Improve Partner Experience and optimize Sample Request Processes. New Partner Community Portal allows partners and distributors affiliated with Kerry to search and request samples available to them directly from Kerry. Merkle developed a partner community solution, which:
- Has improved operational efficiencies.
- Enhanced the Partner experience.
- Extended Kerry’s existing Salesforce infrastructure while staying true to the principles of usability and accessibility.
- Built a custom object that manages the accessibility of products for each distributor.
- Allow partners to use existing credentials to log-in to the Community Portal.
- Ensure the Community was desktop, tablet, and mobile compatible.
