AVADO
The challenge
AVADO had an ageing CRM system which had been heavily customised until it became difficult to manage operations across multiple countries (UK, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States). There was a lack of faith amongst AVADO stakeholders regarding the accuracy of data generated by the current CRM system, and it was a slow system to make changes to. AVADO decided that the best way to enable corporate agility, and at the same time enable a single view of the customer, was to have a single, global CRM platform that operated across the business around the world. Once AVADO decided to move forward and implement Salesforce, there was a wide range of business stakeholders who wanted input into the project, and different departments of the organisation with various sales processes. Another major challenge for AVADO was the desire to avoid major changes during peak sales periods.
The solution
Led by makepositive, AVADO went through a structured process to identify business priorities, followed by a series of workshops with multiple key stakeholders covering end to end solutions for the project, and then a finalised delivery roadmap.
During this process, it was decided that implementing Salesforce into the business would begin with service desk functionality, then to the UK sales organisation, and finally to AVADO’s international offices.
It was an agile development process which included daily stand up calls with makepositive, playbacks of user stories, showcases of deliveries, user testing with key stakeholders and regular business feedback to makepositive about the solution.
The project went live in the UK at the end of June 2018, with Salesforce being launched to the UK sales teams, followed by deployment to AVADO’s international offices in August 2018.
The results
Salesforce has been positively received by AVADO, with customers and staff becoming adapted to the new system relatively quickly. Since the implementation, there have been a number of key business benefits to AVADO, including the smoother running of onboarding new hires and taking online payments, creating a streamlined and slick process for the end user.
The international AVADO offices have also seen great benefit from Salesforce – old processes meant that some people didn’t have access to the correct systems, and manual processes like invoice generation are now automated.
AVADO are now in a position that sales people in different locations have visibility on all conversations and interactions with customers, enabling a single view of the business through Salesforce.
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