British Airways (BA) is making use of cloud computing to better serve its business customers and ensure its employees around the world are better connected and collaborating more effectively.
In particular, Salesforce's platform and offerings have become a core component of what BA is able to do from a technology innovation standpoint as it undergoes massive company wide change under its Velocity banner.
"Our digital strategy is underpinned by Salesforce. It's an exciting time. Digital is very important in our business and Salesforce is helping us to lead that transformation to digital. Salesforce is essentially our virtual, global office," said Ed Millington Jones, sales enablement manager at BA.
The original relationship with Salesforce slightly pre-dates Millington's involvement but, since 2013, he's been actively involved. The main service in play is Sales Cloud, but Chatter among others, have also been deployed.
"The focus for the first part of the partnership was all about understanding our data and mastering our data. That's so we had the same view of customer accounts at both BA and Iberia," Millington Jones said.
"We needed cost efficiency so had a very clear vision for our use of Salesforce. We wanted people to have full visibility of eveything going on as that is very important to us."
The insight afforded by the Salesforce platform has, in some cases, freed up account manager time by 30%, enabling them to work on higher value tasks.
It would appear that BA is a keen adopter of the digital transformation missive that sees companies with legacy and on-premise IT opt for cloud-based services and platforms to not only boost their IT operations but improve all aspects of their organisation, from empowering salespeople with the tools to complete sales out in the field, to surfacing valuable data that was previously difficult to analyse.
