The challenge
At first, OneThreeOneFour used spreadsheets to track their contacts and deals. However, as the company grew, it quickly became impossible to manage large volumes of data in a spreadsheet — it was messy, inefficient and wreaking havoc on the OneThreeOneFour team.
Then, they decided to shop around the CRM market and find the system that suits their specific business needs the best.
What was OneThreeOneFour looking for in a CRM system?
- Tight integration with Gmail
- Integration with WhatsApp
- Informative timeline to keep the entire history of relations with a client
- Collaborative functionality
- Competitive pricing
- Proactive and helpful customer service
Why OneThreeOneFour chose NetHunt CRM
A flexibly and highly customisable system
Since, in their own words, OneThreeOneFour takes up a rather niche industry, the level of customisation that they need to handle all of their business operations needs to be extensive. Most CRM systems on the market are severely limited in things such as the views and stages that they allow their users to create.
NetHunt CRM, however, has allowed OneThreeOneFour to make their CRM system truly theirs by creating custom stages such as “Photos Completed” and “Photos Selected”, as well as folders for things such as the sister companies that OneThreeOneFour owns in order to keep their customer pool nicely segmented between the companies while sharing a workspace.
“Most of the CRM systems on the market now are built for consultancy firms, real estate, or businesses of that nature. That's all the use cases they advertise. Nobody really cares about weddings, right? So the ability to customise NetHunt CRM to our needs is wonderful.”
Timeline for monitoring how the team communicates with the lead & entire history of communication
As Scott himself pointed out, the timeline is a “Simple but very useful feature”. By utilising the timeline Scott was able to get insights into the entire history of communication with that lead. All the messages exchanged, all the calls placed together with their transcripts, all of the customer documents, and everything else related to that lead.
The timeline function is also useful for when Scott needs to take a look at how his team communicates with prospective customers. He can have a nice and consolidated view of his team's activity with the help of the NetHunt CRM timeline, so that he can identify potential issues with the communication process and help resolve them if needed.
“The timeline gives us a consolidated view of what the ongoing conversations are with any given customer. As a manager, I look at my team’s activity and see if there is any situation I need to help out with? I can have a very good consolidated view of that with NetHunt CRM”
Collaborative tools to enable the work of teams scattered across the world
Since OneThreeOneFour has teams scattered across the globe, meaning efficient communication between all of these distributed sales teams is crucial. Luckily, NetHunt CRM’s collaboration enabling features, such as the shared database, dedicated notes section, and @mention functionality.
Views and filters to keep track of important changes in the sales cycle
NetHunt CRM’s highly customisable views allow OneThreeOneFour to gain an insight into their sales processes and customer relationships like they haven’t done before. With the ability to sort their customer database and build insightful sales pipeline, OneThreeOneFour can now identify bottlenecks in their sales process and fix them faster due to being able to see if there’s an overwhelming amount of customers in a single stage.
It also helps them filter customers that aren’t currently relevant to the company's sales processes, such as customers that have just recently completed their journey with the customers, and are currently in the interlude before the time to follow up.
“For the wedding photography industry, we have view like ‘photo show is completed’ and ‘the clients are choosing their photos’.
Then we have views like “we sent the customer the photos” and “customer selected photos” We have a view for “customers are choosing” and one for “the customers that haven't chosen in a certain time period” so we can follow up with them.”
Workflows that help automate the process of capturing leads with web forms
Web forms are important for OneThreeOneFour, as their customers fill in their contact forms and wait for OneThreeOneFour to reach out to them. OneThreeOneFour utilises the webhook function that NetHunt CRM offers to pull information from their web forms into their CRM, where they can then react to the lead and start them on their journey down the sales funnel.
“We have a web hook that automatically records the data. That saves us time when entering new data into the CRM. There's also a field that you can enter customized functions for text or numbers. We use that to link it to a Google form to, then we further process the data and take out next steps.”
Integration with Gmail that places a robust CRM in the heart of the inbox
Centralising your customer relationship management processes into as few tabs as possible is one of the key goals of any modern company. NetHunt CRM has helped OneThreeOneFour move closer to that goal by unifying their CRM experience into a single tab, that tab being their Gmail inbox.
With the full power of a robust CRM suite contained neatly at the side of their inbox, day-to-day processes became less of a hassle to complete.
“It's great to have a CRM built into Gmail because there's no need to exit or switch between two systems unlike HubSpot, which is one of the biggest CRM players there. Having NetHunt CRM built into your Gmail is really convenient due to the sidebar.”
Integration with WhatsApp
In the modern world, communicating with your customers the same way your customers communicate with each other is as important as ever, and when the most popular app in your country happens to be WhatsApp (and its top 3 almost everywhere) – you have to oblige.
OneThreeOneFour have realised it, and have been looking forward to the NetHunt CRM WhatsApp integration. It’s finally here, giving OneThreeOneFour the ability to connect all their customer interactions and consolidate them into a single, neat customer card.
“WhatsApp is the biggest chat app in Singapore. So, more and more we are seeing communication done through WhatsApp rather than email. And so we also want that information to be tracked as part of NetHunt CRM, to complete the overall picture of the customer.”
Competitive pricing that doesn’t drain the funds of a small business
Sure, there are certain CRM solutions that can do EVERYTHING that a business might ever need, whether start-up scale or enterprise. But these solutions tend to be cost expensive, and therefore either inaccessible or draining to small businesses. OneThreeOneFour were glad that they switched to NetHunt CRM, as the pricing structure that we offer allows them to make all their processes more efficient, and all without delivering a nasty blow to their balance sheets.
“NetHunt CRM offers competitive pricing, that’s for sure.”
The results
HURMA has experienced significant benefits from implementing NetHunt CRM, with four key results standing out…
Improved team collaboration
Members now have a shared database which allows them to seamlessly collaborate from all over the world.
More data-driven decisions
Thanks to the custom sales pipelines they built, more insights into their sales process are now available.
Team management
The timeline feature allows OneThreeOne four to monitor the progress of their team, identify potential bottlenecks in the sales process, and track KPI’s.
Better client communication
Contacting customers through apps that customers prefer helps build rapport and provide better service.
“As a business owner, I can now see a better picture of my customers from the start to the end of their journey. When I look into it, I could see exactly which part of the journey they are currently in, and the communications my team has with them. This is a great benefit for any business. As you have more customers - you have more on your plate. It’s impossible to keep track of all of that with Google Sheets in the long run.”
