Q Shelter has come a long way over the past 25 years but its customer database systems couldn’t keep up. The Excel spreadsheets that – together with a legacy system called Chilli – had been sufficient in the past became cumbersome and ineffective. Q Shelter needed a new, efficient system that would meet all of the organisation’s day-to-day needs.
“We needed an integrated system that would allow us to capture daily interaction with the people we help, as well as being able to provide meaningful reports for specific key performance indicators,” Ann Earle said, who administers the Salesforce® program. Another key requirement of the new system was ‘clean’ data. “It was essential that all client information would remain secure and that Q Shelter could evolve and grow as it moves forward into the future,” John said.
“We wanted to develop an integrated system that could run our client management and marketing activities now, as well as scale alongside us into the future,” he said. “It didn’t take us long to realise that Salesforce would be able to do all this and more.”
SalesFix and Q Shelter decided to go for an integrated approach. They implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud, which
helps with teams, along with Outlook for Salesforce so that email was connected seamlessly. They also installed MailChimp for Salesforce, so Q Shelter could get in touch easily with its community.
This solution is ideal for Q Shelter, as it allows the organisation to maintain and update customer information while allowing emails to be sent from within the database and via standard email, providing easy access to all the people who receive the newsletter and to Q Shelter members. “It felt like they really took the time to get to know us and our organisation, which meant that the final solution was right for us,” John said.
Implementation can often be the most difficult step of the process, but Salesforce.com® and SalesFix made it as smooth as possible by keeping in touch with Q Shelter every step of the way.
The Q Shelter team was in the loop and knew exactly what to expect in the future, which made the process “an exciting step forward for the organisation, rather than a period of upheaval”.
“Their customer service was of the highest quality: friendly, efficient and performance driven,” John said. “By the time we got to test drive the product using rough data, it dawned on me how carefully SalesFix had listened to our requirements and really understood our brief!”
Q Shelter has come a long way in a short period of time. By making this crucial change to their data management system, they have made a dramatic and lasting improvement to how their service functions, which means they can now efficiently manage their client base and key stakeholders.
“We are so happy with the implementation. It has been a huge success. The Service Cloud has fantastic reporting capabilities that have given us real visibility. Now we also have the flexibility to customise our service. There are no limits anymore.”
“Within a short time of starting to use Salesforce, our staff were seeing its capability and possible new ways to expand its use in the future,” John said.
Importantly, the staff at Q Shelter has been enthusiastic about the system and the organisation has experienced an impressive 100% user adoption rate. This means data is being updated regularly, Salesforce is used for marketing campaigns and the organisation is running more smoothly than ever.
“The whole process has been much easier and more straightforward that you might expect, which has been great for the Q Shelter staff. New database systems can sometimes cause chaos in a business, but Salesforce and SalesFix made this a really smooth and positive transition,” administrator Ann said.
“Our staff love the new system because it allows them to keep track of our clients far more easily,” says John. “The exciting thing is that we are also already seeing so many possibilities for ways for us to use this system in the future. The options are
limitless.”
