Customer clarity helps Bridgement surpass 120% increase in profitability

Headquartered in South Africa, Bridgement has built the simplest way for businesses to access funding by offering a seamless, quick application process and almost instant decisions, allowing its customers to concentrate on growing their business.

South African start-up simplifies access to business funding.

You’re running a small business. You’re working night and day to find new customers, refine your product, and grow your business. What you don’t need is complex and cumbersome financing slowing your progress.

Bridgement’s goal is to transform the market for business funding. The South African start-up, created by a group of data scientists and engineers, has built an all-digital, hyper-streamlined process for small businesses seeking up to $250,000 (R5 million) in fresh funding. Applications can be done in two minutes, with approvals in place within hours.

To help its business scale, Bridgement needs not only a lock-tight understanding of credit risk, but also clarity around every customer and industry segment. It wants its customer interactions to be as responsive as its finance approvals, understanding when best to engage digitally or through service agents.

Bridgement sees a 129% lift in annual sales, two years after adoption.

In a rapidly expanding business, Sales Cloud Enterprise establishes a single view of all sales progress. It enables Bridgement management to understand its sales pipeline, chart inbound versus outbound leads, identify trends by industry segment, and create meaningful KPIs for a growing team. Sales Cloud automates much of the administrative burden, especially those relating to service and sales processes, allowing individuals to focus on revenue growth and the most critical stages in the sales funnel. In the year after adopting Sales Cloud, annual revenues grew 44%. The following year sales were up 129%, with the expectation of 50% annual growth going forward.

Slack streamlines communication among cross-functional teams.

Bridgement has a ‘no emails’ policy. It has used Slack from day one. Slack is used across the organisation and is seen as critical to connecting finance, service, development, and operations teams as the business expands. Soon, in an exciting move, the company will enter the European market, with other markets to follow. Looking ahead, Bridgement is keen to see how AI can summarise Slack channel content, identify common topics, and refine search.

Identifying key marketing triggers across 30 customer segments.

Marketing Cloud helps Bridgement make sense of its growing customer base. It has allowed the company to create more than 30 customer segments and identify key stages of the customer journey. Communications are now triggered automatically, including a link to SMS and WhatsApp communications. In total, 325,000 marketing emails have been sent since adopting Marketing Cloud, with an average increase of 389% in marketing communication month on month.

Bridgement is now able to align customer sign-ups against specific marketing campaigns, providing the insight to inform future marketing spend.

Customer service improves client response times by 185%.

Customer service is a key differentiator and critical to building positive word-of-mouth during Bridgement’s rapid growth stage. The use of Service Cloud has improved client response times by 185%. Email responses that used to take hours now average 11 minutes. Moreover, Bridgement is better able to assess when a customer wants to engage with a human agent or would prefer to correspond through digital channels. The business has been able to establish meaningful KPIs around service quality.