Fairtrade Sweden: Modernising customer engagement

Fairtrade is a non-profit organisation that fights against poverty, child labour, and violation of human rights. Started in the Netherlands in the 1980s, it now operates in more than 100 countries, connecting farmers and producers from developing countries to consumers and businesses who want to support fairer trade.

“Fairtrade is a label that enables consumers to know that the product they are buying is made under decent conditions and paid a fair price,” says Daniel Sommerstein, Head of Operations for Fairtrade Sweden.

Products carrying the Fairtrade label are sold all over the world. By purchasing those products, consumers can make small everyday choices that enhance the lives of the people producing them.

Switching from legacy system to Salesforce Nonprofit CRM

Before implementing the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, Fairtrade relied on an older CRM system that didn’t offer the flexibility or modern tools they needed. The old system wasn’t accessible via mobile, which led to uncomfortable situations when customer information was required on the road. It was also hosted on a local server, an expensive and unreliable solution.

“Almost all Fairtrade country organizations have selected Salesforce as their CRM system. Although we in Sweden are an independent organization, when it comes to IT vendors we talk a lot amongst each other and change ideas and experiences,” Daniel mentions.

He continues: “We wanted to manage our customer relationships better. We understood that Salesforce is a modern system and can automate many manual processes like case handling or marketing. It also supports adding different apps later as add-ons so we can implement more features in the future.”

The devil is in the details

Implementing Salesforce started with workshops together with Fairtrade’s key users and Fluido. In those sessions, Fluido and Fairtrade got to know each other better while also getting to know Salesforce as a platform better. Fairtrade’s business requirements were walked through thoroughly.

“The devil is mostly in the details, and these workshops were really professionally handled and structured. Our Fluido team was very helpful and gave us different options, explaining the benefits of each of them,” Daniel says.

Fluido planned the Salesforce architecture and then did the migration from several data sources. Fluido also integrated FormAssembly, which is used to gather data from different web forms, with Salesforce.

“It’s always hard to scope a project. Fluido did a good job by scoping the project hours accurately. We had a tight budget and thus needed to ensure we didn’t waste any of it,” Daniel says gratefully.

Better customer engagement

The project started in January and finished on time in September 2021. Besides implementation, 20 key users over three departments were trained to use the system. “We wanted to make it relevant to the users, so we trained them by the department to increase user adoption,” Daniel says.

By moving to Salesforce, Fairtrade is now in better control of their data.

“One of the benefits for Fairtrade was that we had to go through our data, clean it up and check our processes to see if they work or not. Fluido was a good partner in this project,” Daniel says.

With Salesforce, Fairtrade Sweden is now better equipped to engage with their customers and follow up on tasks and conversations. They can handle their customer applications all in one system and have a better overview of customer relationships. Fairtrade doesn’t need to rely on legacy systems or Excel anymore but are ready for a more digital future.

Photos by Fairtrade Sweden 

Written by Mirka Kurkela