About the Customer

This company is one of North America’s largest marketers and distributors of automotive replacement tires. It serves independent tire dealers, franchise operators, retail customers, and commercial fleet organizations across an extensive network of locations and business units.

As the organization grew, so did the complexity of customer service. Support teams handled thousands of customer and dealer interactions across phone, email, and digital channels, yet the information needed to help each caller was spread across systems and often incomplete or out of date. Leadership wanted a modern service platform that connected the contact center directly to customer data, and partnered with ForeFront to build it on Salesforce Service Cloud.

Knowing Who Is Calling Before the Conversation Starts

The service organization supports a wide mix of callers: independent dealers, franchise operators, fleet customers, retail consumers, distribution partners, and internal sales and operations teams. Years of growth across channels had produced a large customer database, but its contact and account data were duplicated, incomplete, and out of date.

High turnover at tire shops made the problem worse. The person calling was often a junior employee, and a single business might call from a dozen or more lines, including personal cell phones. Agents had to work out who was calling while the customer waited, which added time to every call, strained internal resources, and slowed resolution. The contact center platform offered an out-of-the-box Salesforce connector for inbound calls, but it could not support these use cases. Three challenges stood out:

• Unreliable customer data made it hard to find the right account on a live call.
• The connector’s limitations left critical telephony use cases unsupported.
• Call recordings and transcripts sat outside Salesforce, and regional managers lacked a clear view of service activity.

The company needed a model that identified callers instantly, put context in front of agents, and improved data quality without slowing down the phones, in a way that could scale with growth.

A Connected Service Experience Built Around the Call

ForeFront redesigned the service experience around the call itself, bringing voice, customer data, and service workflows together in Salesforce, and building the capabilities the telephony integration could not provide on its own. The work included:

• Bridging the gap in the contact center integration. When the out-of-the-box connector couldn’t support the company’s use cases, ForeFront worked with the platform vendor’s team, developed custom solutions to make the integration reliable, and then designed the call flow on top of it.
• Knowing the caller before the agent picks up. ForeFront preprocesses each inbound number and works backward to identify the caller. Landlines tied to a business match directly to the right account. Cell phones were harder, because one business can use many numbers, so ForeFront built additional matching logic with the vendor’s team. Calls from suspicious numbers are flagged so agents know they may be dealing with a spammer.
• A screen pop that puts context in front of agents. In the Service Console, each incoming call triggers a screen pop that identifies the contact and shows a mini dashboard for the account. A case opens as the call begins, guided scripting helps agents reach the right information quickly, and assignment rules route cases to the right teams. Agents manage the whole interaction without switching applications.
• Cleaning data without slowing down the call. Agents flag duplicate or conflicting contacts during the call, and flagged records are reviewed through reporting and cleaned up afterward. Behind the scenes, ForeFront led a broader effort to streamline the company’s Salesforce data, refactoring fields and values to reduce technical debt and consolidating duplicate contacts and accounts.
• Everything in one place. After each case, the call recording and transcript are linked to the Salesforce case, so teams can review a conversation without leaving Salesforce. Reports and Dashboards give regional managers visibility into service activity across their regions.

A Contact Center Built Around How Customers Call

By connecting the contact center to Salesforce Service Cloud and extending it where it fell short, the company now runs a service environment designed around how its customers actually call in, and addresses their needs faster than was previously possible. Key outcomes:

• Faster, more confident service. Callers are identified before the agent speaks, even when they call from a personal cell phone or are new to the dealership, and agents have account context and case history from the start of the call.
• Third-party limitations solved. Custom development closed the gaps the out-of-the-box connector left open.
• A cleaner data foundation. Duplicate flagging, post-call cleanup, and a major data refactor created a stronger base for every future customer interaction.
• Less friction for agents. Calls, cases, scripting, and account context live in one console, with no application switching.
• Visibility for leaders. Recordings, transcripts, and regional dashboards give managers the view they need to oversee service performance.

The relationship continues through ForeFront Managed Services, supporting the platform as the service organization grows.

The ForeFront Difference

Customer service transformation goes beyond implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Success means understanding how customers engage, how service teams work, and what it takes when the tools in the middle don’t do what the business needs.

For this company, that meant working through the limits of a third-party contact center connector, building custom solutions where it fell short, and cleaning up years of customer data so agents could find the right customer fast. ForeFront pairs broad Salesforce capabilities with deep integration experience and the willingness to build what the platform doesn’t provide out of the box.