For New Moms, Speed is Everything: How The Breastfeeding Shop is Rewriting Patient Care Rules With Salesforce

Helping More New Moms While Keeping it Personal

For a new mom waiting for a breast pump, speed is everything. A new breast pump arriving in time (or not) can dramatically shape the first days with her baby. The Breastfeeding Shop, founded by Patty Gatter, was built to make that moment feel less overwhelming — helping mothers navigate insurance, choose the right pump, and feel supported by a real person when they need it most.

In an overwhelming market, that guidance is important. The Breastfeeding Shop’s role is to be the expert in the middle, listening first, then helping each mother understand the best next step on her journey.

That original mission grew harder as the business scaled. Today, the market is much more crowded than it was when Gatter started out. Insurance policies are constantly changing. New pump technology is giving families more choices, but also making it harder for busy new parents to understand what’s right for them.

Gatter and the team knew they needed to stay up-to-date, reach more mothers, and keep every interaction personal. But with the market moving fast, and insurance policies evolving, they were losing more and more time just trying to stay on top of the details — from orders and customer interactions to payer forms and new products.

Adding to the friction was a patchwork of tools that were only slowing the team down. An order could begin its life in an intake email, then fragment across inboxes, texts, messages, and manual handoffs.

In practice, staff might verify eligibility, email the patient from one place, text from another, and then return to the order record to update what had happened. When the order was ready, it was forwarded to shipping, where the team manually entered details into a warehouse portal. From there, another forwarded email sent the order to billing, where the team had to file and categorize everything by hand.

The lost time was painful, but the bigger issue was the experience it created for the moms the business serves. When a mother called for reassurance, the team often had to search across disconnected systems to answer the simplest questions: Has it shipped? Is paperwork missing? Is insurance holding this up? Every extra click pulled their team further away from the human-centric support they wanted to give.

Gatter knew she couldn’t keep adding to this fragmented and manual patchwork of tools. She needed a foundation that could flex around the business she had built, enabling specialist-driven support, payer-specific rules, strict privacy expectations, and a lean team dedicated to supporting new moms.

Ensuring Every Mom is Supported

Gatter began her search by evaluating several customer relationship management (CRM) providers. In that discovery phase, Salesforce stood out as the only solution that could be fully customized to The Breastfeeding Shop’s unique business case. Instead of asking the company to compromise, Salesforce built a system around their specialist workflows and customer promise.

Gatter was acting as CTO at the time, in addition to her CEO responsibilities, working closely with the onboarding team to turn her vision for care into practical workflows. After previous technology changes had left her team feeling overwhelmed and struggling with adoption, Gatter expected the Salesforce launch to be an uphill battle. Instead, she was pleasantly surprised: The onboarding process was seamless, and the team quickly adopted the platform, finding the tool intuitive from day one.

Today, every order enters Salesforce through their website, then gets sorted, prioritized, and routed to the right specialist. That means a Tricare order goes to the person who knows that payer, or a Medicaid order is directed to the expert on that program. Every mom has unique needs, and this workflow means the right specialist can make the experience faster, clearer, and more human-centric.

Once a case is assigned, the team can email or text the mom directly through integrated tools, with every message automatically tied back to the order. When someone calls, customer service can see the whole picture in seconds, from order updates to insurance details or open questions. The mom on the phone doesn’t have to repeat herself and the team doesn’t have to go hunting for information.

When an order is ready to ship, a warehouse integration lets the team transmit information from Salesforce, instead of manually adding it to yet another portal as they previously had to do. Billing moves faster too, with ‌automation sending information into the system instantly. And because every interaction is tracked, reporting is no longer a guessing game. The team can see what’s working, where orders slow down, and how to keep improving the experience.

For both her team and her customers, this new way of working has made life easier. Work that once consumed entire days, like attaching prescriptions, chasing paperwork, and manually moving orders forward, is automated, giving experienced team members more time to support moms directly. As a result, staff went from shipping about 50 items a day to 100, all while delivering a more personal customer experience.

For mothers needing clear answers quickly, that pace is everything. Faster order processing helps them receive pumps sooner, and quicker billing keeps claims progressing. For The Breastfeeding Shop, efficiency means they can give the team more time and space to treat each patient with care.

The company is applying the same principle to how it uses artificial intelligence (AI) in the future. Gatter isn’t interested in replacing human connection, but instead wants Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-secure tools that can be trusted to remove repetitive work, protect customer data, and give staff more time with patients.

To decide which tools are worth pursuing, she asks a simple question: Does this make the process more efficient in a way that brings the team closer to the patient? With Salesforce, the answer has been a resounding yes.

More Room for the Care that Matters Most

The Breastfeeding Shop is proving that growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of a deeply human customer experience. By replacing patchwork tools with one connected system and automating work, the team has refocused on every new mom it serves.

Next, Gatter plans to explore how Agentforce Marketing can help her stay in touch with patients more thoughtfully. She also wants to tighten workflows by enabling the team to use Slack’s AI assistant, Slackbot, to update customer details on Salesforce. For Gatter, that approach will fuel even stronger compliance and builds on her mantra, “If it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen.”

With Salesforce, The Breastfeeding Shop now has a foundation for making work more connected, personal, and efficient. The team is able to pursue its ambitions and keep up with a competitive market, payer rules, and new technology. More importantly, they can do so while making room for the care that every mom and baby deserves.

Want more time for the customer experience that makes your business special? Get started with Salesforce Suites for free or activate Foundations to try out Agentforce 360 today.