This telecommunications firm’s rapid growth quickly outpaced their archaic business management app, turning it into a ticking time bomb that could affect further progress. It was time to look for something new. Something better.
When Queensland-based telecommunications outfit Eco Communications set up shop in 2007, it was by no means a big company. As Technical Director David Towers remembers, the company was composed of just a few sales and technical personnel.
In the past couple of years, however, Eco Communications has experienced massive growth. The handful of employees it started with soon grew into dozens of people spread across sales, projects, and service departments.
With the company’s growth came the need to consolidate the more extensive processes that eventually arose. According to David, their old business management app in particular wasn’t able to keep up with Eco Communications’ increasing needs. It had become a veritable ticking time bomb that could affect further progress.
It was time to look for something new. Something better.
“Our previous CRM was just really archaic,” explains David. “It was basically just an Access database holding all our customer information.
“We also got big enough that we branched out into different sections in our company. We needed a way to bring all of those processes together so we started looking for a CRM that would meet our needs.”
Hours and Hours of Research
The search involved a lot of first-hand research on David’s part. He talked to service providers, got recommendations from other folks in their industry, and generally just scoured the Internet for the right CRM. He eventually found it via probably the most anti-climactic means possible: an online search.
“I actually just found WORKetc just by chance, by doing a search online,” he recalls with a quick laugh. “It was really chance.
“Straight away I saw that what WORKetc was doing matched what we were trying to achieve. But like I said, I wanted to do the research and see how everything worked myself.”
For the specifics, he turned to meeting with our WORKetc product specialists.
“They were like most clients in that they signed up for the trial and we went through the process of just doing the demo for them,” said one of the WORKetc team. “What was a bit different was that they had quite specific scenarios in terms of their workflow.”
“Working out how to keep doing their workflow within WORKetc was very important to David and his team. Part of the demo process was to help them do that; to see whether or not we could set WORKetc to resolve that workflow for them.”
Queensland-based Eco Communications’ old CRM was “archaic”, and they were looking for something very specific from what they moved to next.
Over the course of the demo, David shared what Eco Communications was trying to achieve. Our product specialist, meanwhile, showed them a glimpse of what WORKetc could do. The system was starting to look like the right fit for David and his team, but they needed additional confirmation.
“We really wanted to confirm that WORKetc did actually do everything it claimed,” explains David. “We wanted to confirm that our business processes could fit within this area.”
Ever cautious, David and his team didn’t immediately go full throttle once they had signed up to start trialing WORKetc. When their company data was successfully migrated over into WORKetc, David continued to do background testing.
“It was great that we got to use our actual data during all this,” David says. “Live testing was going to show any deficiencies or anything that we needed to work on. That wouldn’t have been possible if we were just testing with generic dummy data.”
As for the part that WORKetc had to play, we had a product specialist set about guiding David and his team through the setup period. As Eco Communications was moving from multiple systems — spreadsheets and emails, mainly — into using a CRM, most of the heavy lifting revolved around adapting their previous processes for WORKetc.
More Efficient Processes and Workflows
One of the processes that we helped David with was Eco Communications’ slightly different approach to support.
“We have customers signing-off on things before we do stuff, pretty much all the time,” David explains. “Unlike most other businesses, I’d imagine, we would have a customer sign-off on a support case before it gets sent on through to the guys in charge of implementation.”
By using WORKetc’s integrated quotes system with the support module, the WORKetc team were able to come up with a working solution suited to David.
When a customer calls with a support request, David and his team can now create a quote from that support ticket with one click. That quote is then sent to the customer so they can sign-off on the projected work before it’s sent on through to a technician.
“That level of support was awesome, and the quick timing was incredible,” says David.
Eco Communications worked out a new workflow that gets approval from clients using support tickets combined with quotes in WORKetc.
Aside from adapting Eco Communications’ processes to WORKetc, we also helped David streamline them, making them more efficient and better-equipped to handle the much larger number of projects that the company now engages with.
“Because we just grew from a small company our processes were pretty archaic,” David recalls. “We were basically just working off a template and ticking boxes as we went through. We just relied on a project manager to tick a box, remember where they’re up to, and remember which box to tick next.”
With WORKetc, they can now create default templates that can be turned into new projects with one click. Most of Eco Communications’ projects pretty much follow the same steps, so being able to create a new project off of a template has helped made starting the actual work faster.
“When we start a new project we can just import that template and it’s already got all the steps squared away with all the right timings — like step 1 to step 2 might take two days or half a day or whatever,” David explains. “That’s automatically set up for us. The system even sends our project coordinator a reminder if any project goes over the deadline.
“In that regard, the projects have probably been the most powerful for us. We were relying on humans to do everything before but now we have this process and this cool CRM that helps us out.”