Walker Fire is a leading provider of fire and security system maintenance in the UK. As a nationwide operation, the company offers fire safety training and products to a wide variety of businesses, making the process of efficiently managing customer enquiries a potentially challenging one.
As the number of new enquiries and sales continued to grow each year, it became evident that the company's existing system for managing both new sales and ongoing customer enquiries was no longer effective.
The ‘traditional’ method of handling client communication, treating each phone call or email as a separate entity, combined with disorganized spreadsheets, often resulted in delays in addressing customer queries.
Simply put, the absence of a streamlined process for handling customer enquiries made it challenging for the customer services team to monitor and improve response times. Keeping track of historical client requests was also difficult. To avoid significant inefficiencies in their operations, the team required a centralized system for managing customer interactions.
Prioritising a Streamlined Approach to Customer Interactions
To address the challenge and modernise how it managed customer interactions, Walker Fire collaborated with Provident CRM to implement SugarCRM’s Sugar Serve and Sugar Sell solutions.
Sugar Serve has become the go-to platform for all Walker Fire’s customer communications. It has allowed the customer services team to transition from manual monitoring of emails and telephone calls to managing enquiries through a streamlined process. The team now has real-time insights and can view each customer request at a glance through a dedicated console. This includes tracing and analysing of all customer interactions – from online chats to support tickets.
Sugar Sell delivers a smoother sales experience through a centralised hub. This helps Walker Fire consolidate sales generated from engineer service visits, office enquiries, and the field-based sales team. All three sales channels have been seamlessly integrated into a dedicated sales opportunities module within Sugar Sell. Now, the team has a comprehensive view of all sales activities.
The Result? Customer Relations that were Responsive and Well-Informed
“We're always trying to push for new levels of customer service. We want to get back to our customers in a certain time frame or deal with a number of customers within a certain KPI. There are a lot of things that we drive forward in terms of dealing with our customers. Sugar is very, very responsive to our requests, which is probably one of the key strengths of the platform.”
- Mark Jones, Chief Operating Officer, Walker Fire
Thanks to a 4 year-long partnership with SugarCRM, the integration of Sugar Serve has significantly improved how Walker Fire handles customer enquiries. This has resulted in a more efficient and responsive customer service process.
The implementation of dashboards showcasing all customer enquiries and conversations has enabled the company to track essential metrics, including the average resolution time for enquiries. This has resulted in a significant decrease in response times. Additionally, the team now possesses a more comprehensive understanding of customers' needs.
Ensuring Readiness for Future Success
The adoption of Sugar Serve, in particular, has helped the company overcome the challenges that came from archaic methods of handling customer requests. Walker Fire now has a streamlined approach to customer relations and sales enquiries and is future-proofed for continued growth.
If you would like to learn more about how SugarCRM can support your business, we can arrange a webinar to show you our services. Alternatively, one of our team would be more than happy to discuss how we can help.
