A DSG Case Study
Serving Up Optimized
Sales Processes and Real-Time
Insights to OpenTable
“This was one of the smoothest projects we’ve experienced. We really felt that the DSG team
cared about the success of the project.”
—Gina Calhoun, Director of Product Management, OpenTable
200 million diners know OpenTable as one of the leading dining
reservation services on their phones or laptops. Behind OpenTable’s
easy to use application is a company that provides sophisticated
software to 20,000 restaurants worldwide to provide optimized
reservations, table utilization, front-of-house management and guest
loyalty solutions.
OpenTable has grown rapidly to become a leader in its market and, like
many high-growth companies; their internal systems have struggled to
keep pace with their growth. Gina Calhoun, a six year OpenTable veteran
and now Director of Product Management, has been working with
DSG to build a single platform to support both their inside and outside
sales teams and, in the process, combine information and functionality
from three systems into a single Salesforce.com instance. The solution
was designed to provide the sales teams with efficient and consistent
business processes as well as providing management with a detailed,
real-time view into key sales metrics.
“DSG worked as a true partner to understand our business objectives
and design a system that was simple to use, avoided manual and after
the fact data entry and gave us real-time visibility into our key sales
metrics” said Calhoun. Using DSG’s agile implementation methodology,
this was achieved through functional workshops that helped define,
develop and implement best-practice sales processes and identify how
best to migrate historic as well as current deal data into Salesforce.
In addition to consolidating inside and outside sales processes, the
project also had to take into account OpenTable’s international growth
dsgcloud.com
Industry
Online restaurant reservations
for diners and reservation and
guest management solutions for
restaurants
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Web site
www.opentable.com
Challenge
Optimizing sales and service
processes by consolidating
legacy CRM systems
Solution
Single instance of Salesforce.
com managing inside and outside
sales people and processes
A DSG Case Study
Serving Up Optimized Sales Processes and Real-Time
Insights to OpenTable
and support distinct business processes as well as language and character
set issues in markets such as Japan. The final wrinkle in the project was its
timing - DSG initially engaged with OpenTable in June 2011 with a target
live date of mid-August. DSG Project Manager, Cheryl Hoff, said “We knew
that Salesforce could meet OpenTable’s functional requirements and, thanks
to a great working relationship with OpenTable and to us adhering to our
proven DSG Launch implementation methodology, we successfully brought
the project in on-time.”
As Calhoun reported “This was one of the smoothest projects we’ve
experienced. We really felt that the DSG team cared about the success of
the project.” With this project success behind them, OpenTable are now
looking at how they use other recent Salesforce functionality like Chatter as
well as marketing automation systems to serve up even better service to
their customers and even better real-time insights to their management.
About DSG - There is a perfect storm driving the Cloud as companies of all sizes use SaaS
applications to reduce operating costs and increase the effectiveness of their sales, service,
operations and finance systems. DSG has been at the forefront of this move to the Cloud
and has partnered with leading ERP and CRM SaaS vendors like NetSuite and Salesforce.
com to accelerate business performance. With its objective approach and proven Launch
and Optimize methodologies DSG provides the right Cloud solutions to customers and
drives business success while reducing cost, risk and time-to-value. To learn more about
how DSG can cloud accelerate a business visit: www.DSGcloud.com.
dsgcloud.com