Crunch
“With Salesforce, we can react faster to market changes and opportunities while delivering an amazing customer experience.”
30%
leap in efficiency predicted
Crunch gets a bigger bite of the action with sharper processes and richer insights
Cleaning muddy boots. Packing removal boxes. Filing company accounts. Some tasks just aren’t meant to be fun. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be easy. Crunch burst onto the accountancy scene in 2009 with an innovative accountancy software and services package and has been blazing a trail in online accounting ever since.
“By combining great technology with great people, we free up our customers to focus on running their business. And, thanks to Salesforce, we can focus on growing our business at the same time,” said Helena Mann, Crunch’s Transformation and Programme Lead.
Crunch has already converted nearly 11,000 clients to its trailblazing approach to accounting, and the potential for growth is huge. Its online community, which offers free advice articles, templates, tax calculators, and business guides, attracts 300,000 visitors every month. “We want to increase client subscriptions by 20% every year,” revealed Mann.
Balancing service quality with rapid growth.
As its client base grows, Crunch needs to retain its great reputation: the company’s referral rate is around 50% and its online reviews score sits at an impressive 80%. It aims to be the trusted advisor that’s just an email, phone call, or live chat away for its clients, but that means the company needs to be able to scale its services across all these channels and ensure its software continues to deliver 99.9% uptime.
“We grew so fast in the past that we still had a start-up mentality,” explained Mann. “We started with just one product and one client segment but now have a range of offerings, for sole traders and limited companies - including mortgages, investments, and small business insurance policies.” Crunch also started with a relatively simple Salesforce use case, but this too has evolved.
“Salesforce is so flexible that we kept adding on new features and code but not in a particularly controlled or consistent way,” she added. “We needed to go back to basics and simplify and standardise our processes to ensure we could provide the best customer experience possible.”
As part of its Salesforce reboot, Crunch decided to migrate to the Lightning experience and deepen integrations both with its pioneering online accountancy software and Salesforce AppExchange solutions. To add to the challenge, Crunch had a very tight window for executing on its transformation goals. “Due to accountancy timelines, we had just one weekend to make the move,” revealed Mann. “It was tough, but we did it without any impact on client services or revenue generation.”
Crunch enables its people to work faster and smarter.
The revamped Salesforce experience has already proved a great hit and a great enabler for Crunch’s team of nearly 200 people. “With Salesforce, we can meet almost every demand from the business,” explained Scott McGaffney, Salesforce Manager at Crunch.
Crunch’s management team is confident that smarter workflows and richer automation will eventually unlock efficiency gains of up to 30% across the business. Crunch has already reduced client onboarding times thanks to guided workflows and automated payment links powered by Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. “We used to have to manually open and close tasks and audit client billing to make sure there were no mistakes,” said Mann.
Responding to more client requests with the same resources.
The ability to handle more client queries will be essential as Crunch continues to grow. With Service Cloud, the client services team can respond to more requests without the need to hire more staff. With Salesforce, Crunch can scale the business using existing resources and still meet client SLAs.
The client services team manages up to 30,000 cases every month – from registering businesses for VAT to completing year-end accounts. Salesforce Lightning dashboards provide visibility of case status as well as SLA targets, which helps the team to prioritise individual tasks and overall workloads.
Deeper insights fuel smarter forecasting.
Personalised content enriches prospect nurturing.
A lot of Crunch’s new opportunities come from its website. When a visitor fills in an online form, it feeds into Pardot, which funnels prospects into the most relevant nurture campaign based on their browsing history.
Crunch takes a similar personalised approach with its community subscribers, which has resulted in conversion rates of around 10%. “With Pardot, we can convert anonymous online visitors into named prospects,” said Mann. “Targeted content and campaigns help to push people further up the pipeline.” Crunch uses Pardot to send around 110,000 emails per month.
Adapting to change faster.
Crunch now has a solid platform to support future growth and innovation. “With Salesforce, people can access the data they need when they need it, making them more productive and proactive,” said McGaffney.
As the traditional ways of working and doing business continue to evolve, Crunch can use Salesforce to explore new ideas. For example, it has introduced live chat for SME clients. “With Salesforce, we can react faster to market changes and opportunities while delivering an amazing customer experience,” said Mann.
Explore the products that are helping disguise grow.
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