Context
Crunch takes the stress out of accounting by providing fixed-fee packages and bespoke online accounting for contractors, freelancers, sole traders, limited companies, and small businesses. They offer support from experts who are accessible, knowledgeable and passionate about helping their clients grow their business.
Challenge
Crunch already had a highly customised instance of Salesforce which acted as the business’ beating heart. But with over two million lines of code built up over almost ten years, it was significantly hindering the business’ ability to grow.
As their head of transformation and product, Helena Mann explains, “We got to a point where it was almost impossible to introduce anything new. Everything needed a lot of manual effort because it just got too complicated to automate any additional processes.”
Crunch needed a system that would allow them to effectively manage their existing customers and internal processes, but also give them the tools they required to take on different types of new projects that they hadn’t been able to support. ThirdEye was brought in to review their existing technology, then develop a new system that would enable Crunch to automate internal processes and improve the customer experience.
Concept
To allow Crunch to develop a truly flexible platform that could grow with them, ThirdEye moved the business onto the latest instance of the Salesforce platform, Lightning, as well as developing a range of tools that would help them transform their operations.
Crunch’s offering isn’t right for every type of business. To help the sales teams guide potential clients to the right service, ThirdEye developed a product recommendation wizard that identifies if they are a good fit for Crunch’s services, then indicates which service level would work best for them. As Mann highlights, “The new tool meant that the advisor could literally just focus on the conversation with the client, rather than worrying if the person on the phone would qualify or not”.
Once the client is signed-up Crunch takes them through a comprehensive onboarding process. Their old system required the team to rekey the information into Salesforce, which often led to errors. In response, ThirdEye created a custom onboarding wizard that was easy to complete. It dynamically creates the correct records across multiple fields then runs a data integrity check, before being integrated into all their other systems downstream.
Crunch already used Salesforce’s Business Hours functionality to manage some of its everyday tasks, but they wanted to expand its functionality to automate and track other critical business processes. This allowed them to develop service- level agreements (SLA) that accurately communicated completion dates to customers, but also had a real impact internally. “ThirdEye have built a traffic light system which makes it really clear when something’s falling behind. The conversations about managing workflow have significantly decreased as both the accountant and client management teams can now easily prioritise their work” stressed Mann.
ThirdEye have also given Crunch’s operations team the ability to integrate apps from the Salesforce AppExchange themselves, as well giving them the skills to build their own apps using Low Code – a tool that enables users to create apps through a drag-and-drop graphic user-interface.
Conclusion
- Reduce the lines of code from two million to just 500 lines
- On-boarding time halved with inputting errors virtually eliminated
- The product recommendation tool saves over 400-man hours per month
- The efficiency of the new system has allowed client managers to take on over 100 new clients each
“I think in general, the way it’s built has meant that over the last year when we’ve been able to add on various new services and flows ourselves, making it a much easier journey. They’ve full empowered us, encouraged us. They’ve just been there, quietly in the wings. However, they’ve always been there and ready to help. But what makes it for us is they built a system that is flexible enough to help us grow and expand”. Helena Mann, Head Of Transformation And Product, Crunch.