Safeaid turns to Phocas to become more proactive with data

Need to be more proactive

With its continued growth, the company recognized that data analytics would become increasingly more important to the business. The company’s business management solution, OrderWise, was not open source, so it was difficult to extract data. The process required someone to go into the system, run a report, move it to Excel and then make it look presentable. For Safeaid’s many customers, getting answers to a simple question such as, “What was my spend last month?”, “What categories are we buying?” or “What did the home business spend last month?” was challenging and time consuming.

“We were struggling to manage our business as it grew with our existing software,” said Barry Taylor, Safeaid’s Operations Manager. “At Safeaid, we are all about efficiency - always striving to get the most from our resources and maximise how we manage our customers. We had a lot of leakage, and it was clear that we were being more reactive than proactive.” 

Selecting the company’s first BI solution

Barry started doing some research into business intelligence software, getting a better understanding of how it can provide warnings of customer leakage, and deliver the information needed by the sales and operations teams.

Barry added, “We knew we needed a new perspective, and wanted to get more information out of our systems to maximise our efficiency.”

After moving from OrderWise to NetSuite, Barry and the other business leaders evaluated YellowFin, Sales-I and Phocas.

“We hadn’t used any BI software before, and we noticed quickly that Phocas is very user friendly,” said Barry. “We also spoke with a couple of people who had moved from Sales-I to Phocas and they wholeheartedly recommended Phocas. In addition to helping us get to the right data at the right time, the biggest thing for us was talking to people we know and trust who moved to Phocas. That put Phocas in a strong position to be our first-choice BI system.”

The implementation process and integration with NetSuite was “seamless,” and Barry noted, “Phocas has been an excellent support for Safeaid, bending over backwards in a short period of time to dramatically cut the deployment time.”

Tracking customer usage and buying habits

Now Phocas is used daily by sales, and the full management team. The sales staff review the data to prepare for meetings with customers using Phocas’ dashboard to help buyers understand their spend and product categories. The internal sales support team uses Phocas to track customer usage, identify trends and monitor customer lifecycles. They can use the data to identify customers that have slowed down or stopped buying, leading to proactive sales calls. Operations also uses Phocas to monitor product sales cycles and track usage, something that was difficult to find easily in NetSuite alone.

“We currently have eight alerts set up in Phocas, in addition to a number of dashboards,” said Barry. “The alerts notify us of inactive and cold customers among other trends. With a click of a button, we can review a customer’s account, and determine whether or not we should be concerned.”

Safeaid has also set up customer scorecards that visually illustrate a customer’s annual spend via cumulative charts, graphs and tables; current annual spend compared to previous years; and spend by category groups, among other KPIs. If Safeaid notices a drop in customer spending, the sales team can proactively set up a time to have constructive discussion using real data points to help customers understand their spending habits.

“Tracking customer spend was a major challenge for us prior to Phocas,” said Barry. “Now, we can quickly review top spenders in any month or year. We can review gross profit for a customer any time, and if customers want to challenge our reports or ask a question, we can show them meaningful data on a dashboard. BI has helped us be a lot more responsive - faster in identifying customers that may be walking away or turning to competitors.”