Green Way Packers allows busy homeowners, commercial offices and seniors the ability to make moving manageable. Serving Calgary and surrounding area, their services include full or partial home packing and unpacking, organization and de-cluttering, renovation preparations, and moving management for seniors. Like most small businesses, Green Way Packers is busy growing the fundamentals of their business and doesn’t want to be bogged down with technology headaches. Here is a list of their pain points and the solution we used to solve the problem:
Pain Point #1
Their first pain point was managing their customer information and interactions. Spreadsheets weren’t working. They needed to manage each packing job and relate that job to a specific customer. There also needed to be a way to get detailed reporting to better analyze jobs and create lists for email marketing.
Solution = Salesforce CRM
A custom “Jobs” object created with over 73 fields specific to their business. Jobs were related to Contacts and reports were setup to monitor all the key metrics important to the business. Now the data is available to their team and the collaborate it using Chatter (the social tool within Salesforce).
Pain Point #2
Email was not working for them using POP email (one way email) from a local hosting provider. Emails on their iPhone were not in sync with email on the MacBooks which made for some serious inefficiencies. Traditional systems of email foldering were used File collaboration was also a problem as the team members work from remote home offices.
Solution = Google Apps For Business
Google Apps for Business (Gmail/Calendar/Drive) was setup to have their email in sync across all their devices (i.e. MacBook, iPad & iPhone). Google Calendars also replaced iCloud calendars to provide a more seamless system for sharing their calendars internally. Cirrus Insight was also used to associate emails to Salesforce “Job” records thereby eliminating the need to organize them in Gmail. They are simply associated to records in Salesforce and then archived in Gmail. Google Drive now allows them to share documents easily and gives them the file syncing capabilities they were used to in Dropbox but with a more seamless integration.
Paint Point #3
Editing spreadsheets offline with an iPad was a problem. Instead of filling out paper forms for an estimate at a job site, Green Way wanted to have a spreadsheet on their iPad available to them offline (as some remote acreages have no signal) for doing estimate calculations.
Solution = QuickOffice for Google Apps
QuickOffice for Google Apps is free of charge and available to iPad users. It was the best solution for editing spreadsheets on an iPad and provided integration with Google Drive. Spreadsheets are now filled out offline and copied across to Google Drive when they are back online. Once in Google Drive, they can be linked to ‘Job’ records in Salesforce for future reference.
Pain Point #4
Phone communications. The main point of contact for the business was their direct numbers on their iPhone. Consequently, there was frustration with maintaining a balance between the business and personal use of their iPhone. It also left a less than professional image to prospects calling in and inquiring about packing services.
Solution = RingCentral
RingCentral is a virtual office phone system that allows small businesses to look and act like much larger companies. RingCentral gives Green Way Packers a toll-free vanity number for their callers and an auto-receptionist who can better direct callers to the sales and operations sides of the business.
Green Way Packers now has the tools in place to meet their needs and at a price that fits their budget. To learn about how Perpetual West can help your company solve IT pain points with cloud solutions, visit our website or call 1 (877) 388-6400.