Salesforce com : Purpose-Driven Work Helped PwC Guide Clients Through the Pandemic

Apr 22, 20214 min read

Like many large corporations, global consulting firm PwC quickly shifted gears when the pandemic hit. As the head of PwC's global Salesforce alliance, I saw firsthand how our team and the company at large came together to work with many of our clients around the world. After ensuring the safety of our own global staff, we began guiding our clients in their own purpose-driven work.

Many of us wanted to engage in direct action to help the many people in need. So, internally we encouraged our teams to think broadly on how we could help others globally. Our teams rose to the challenge, embracing PwC's purpose statement to build trust in society and solve important problems.

In collaboration with Salesforce and its powerful platform, we began working with a number of organizations in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, working on large-scale efforts around bushfire relief to forbearance assistance to LGBTQ youth suicide prevention. Here is some of our teams' work and the help that work continues to do.

The Trevor Project

As the largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization focused on helping LGBTQ youth - who are five times more likely to harm themselves or commit suicide compared to their peers* - The Trevor Project (TTP) wanted to streamline and hasten its process to recruit, onboard, and train volunteers. PwC, using the Salesforce platform, assisted TTP in completely reimagining its volunteer experience. The organization aims to add at least 10 times its current crisis counselors by 2022 and process many more monthly applications. Read the full story and *learn more facts about suicide.

Lighthouse for Grieving Children

The Lighthouse, an Ontario, Canada-based organization, offers peer support for grieving children, teenagers, and their families. It relies on financial support from donors and PwC helped simplify Lighthouse's donor management by creating custom dashboards, layouts, pages, and global actions. This guidance enabled Lighthouse to view current and future donations more strategically, easily identify top donors, measure effectiveness of campaigns through donor dollars driven, and provide staff with simplified, more-visual mechanisms to execute repetitive tasks. The result provided Lighthouse staff with an ability to more easily support strategic decision making and increased overall transparency throughout the organization.

PwC continues to work with Lighthouse through a second volunteer day, providing additional automation and enabling Lighthouse staff to focus less time on administrative minutiae and spend more time taking care of the children who need support through their grief journey.

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Project Spirit

PwC Australia teamed with Salesforce and Google to create Project Spirit, a free online community for businesses to share ideas, leverage experience and expertise, and create opportunities. Project Spirit offers support to the 2.3 million businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, helping them shift or reinvent their business models. Each sponsor company's unique skills helped spur economic recovery in Australia. Since launching, Project Spirit drove more than 70,000 page views of users accessing free resources for their businesses and saw over 300 users register to post their needs and offers of resources.

Valley Bank

Valley Bank saw a surge of forbearance requests from loan customers seeking relief due to inability to pay because of COVID-19, but had slow response time due to a cumbersome process. That changed when Salesforce Experience Cloud pages were linked by confirmation emails using Marketing Cloud; Service Cloud replaced the need for spreadsheets; and merged key bank loan data into Salesforce eliminated employees' need to move between different systems looking up customer data. This all provided an easier-to-use online solution to tackle the surge of financial-hardship requests, allowing bank employees to process more in less time under less stress.

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NRF Operation Open Doors

The National Retail Federation (NRF), the trade association for America's $3.9 trillion retail industry, created Operation Open Doors to get retailers back to work while also evolving into a more agile digitally enabled organization. PwC and Salesforce worked with the NRF to create the COVID map, built on the Salesforce Tableau platform. This provided real-time, data-driven updates outlining state-by-state COVID-19 retail restrictions and laws while laying the groundwork for a stronger digital foundation for the future.

Bushfire Recovery Victoria

In the summer of 2019/2020, massive bushfires in Australia burned millions of acres, destroyed 1,400 buildings, and killed millions of animals. From this, Bushfire Recovery Victoria (BRV) was established to work directly with local communities to assist people and organizations with financial assistance, infrastructure support, and mental health.

BRV tapped PwC Australia to help manage citizen queries using Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Flow. This work unified a customer relationship management platform for hub coordinators in eight disparate councils across Victoria, improving overall workflow. It allowed BRV to better understand the impact across the various communities, understand what services were accessed, and what was needed to better provide for future events.

Learnmore about how PwC and Salesforce work together to find solutions for your industry.