Halfords Streamlines Processes and Offers a Better Consumer Experience
A household name in automotive, cycling, and leisure products, Halfords Retail offers more than 460 locations throughout the UK and Ireland. The company is an active participant in the UK’s Cycle to Work scheme, designed to encourage individuals to minimize their carbon footprint, reduce road congestion, and improve their health and wellbeing. Through the Government scheme, Halfords works with employers to allow their employees to pay for a bicycle over time directly through their pay check at a significantly reduced cost. The popularity of this scheme has led Halfords to process documents for more than 2000 applicants every week. The volume of paperwork made the process slow and time-consuming for everyone, taking several days and delaying employees’ bicycle purchases. Halfords sought to enhance and automate the process, provide a better experience for the employees and make it possible for Halfords to handle more applications with little to no additional resources—and in fact, to nearly eliminate the need for paper.
DocuSign Solution
Halfords began researching electronic signature solutions after a member of the company signed a document via DocuSign. Because Halfords already used Salesforce on the backend of its scheme management platform, cycle2work.info, the company sought to benefit from DocuSign’s seamless integration directly with Salesforce as well as its overall ease of use.
Results
Now using DocuSign for Salesforce, Halfords has achieved real results: a streamlined and enhanced Cycle to Work experience for employees and faster processing of paperwork for all parties, so that employees can obtain their bicycles faster than before. Through the online application, an employee opts to access a bicycle which best suits their requirements and budgets. This action automatically produces an agreement, which the employee DocuSigns. Using DocuSign’s workflow and routing features, the document automatically progresses to the employer for approval, and the final, signed document is stored in Salesforce. Steps that previously took days through post now take minutes. “Using DocuSign is helping us at Halfords to provide products to consumers more quickly and easily, often within just a few minutes,” said Charles Ashwell at Halfords. “The experience for employers is significantly improved as well, because they no longer have to physically move paper about the office and can approve in a click.” Processes within Salesforce and DocuSign update the employee’s order status to “approved”. This triggers workflows for a bicycle voucher to be emailed to the employee. The employee prints off the letter of collection and takes it to the store to collect the bike. “DocuSign has provided good value for the money by providing tremendous improvements to Halfords’ process and making it even easier for any organization to provide a Cycle to Work scheme to their staff,” Ashwell said. “With the combined benefits of Salesforce and DocuSign, Halfords upholds its strong brand by offering the most compelling scheme on the market.”
Summary
- Eliminated paper, printing, and postage for more than 100,000 applications per year
- Accelerated approvals from days to minutes
- Dramatically improved the consumer experience
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