“Salesforce is the market-leading CRM platform, there’s no point in going for something that isn’t the best.”

The face of retail has changed. With more and more shops going online, ecommerce is booming, and customer expectations have gone through the roof. It’s not good enough to just have amazing products at great prices, the shopping – and delivery – experience is just as important to the modern consumer.

Luckily for retailers, Irish scale-up Scurri was founded to streamline online shipping and delivery, helping them to find the right carriers, providing customers with real time tracking and reporting, and supporting the process every step of the way.

“If you’re not disrupting the market, you’re lagging behind or copying everyone. I founded Scurri to redefine the future of online shipping, and with Salesforce we can put customers at the heart of operations,” said Rory O’Connor, CEO and Founder.

And Scurri has certainly hit a sweet spot in the market. The company is flourishing despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit, and was even ranked as a top 50 global retail tech scale-up in RWRC’s 2020 & 2021 Discovery reports.

“We’re proud to have a 93% customer satisfaction rating and +63 for NPS,” commented O’Connor. “We even hit a +100 NPS rating following Brexit and unlocking greater visibility and accountability with Salesforce was a key factor in that success.”

Scurri provides a dynamic platform to help customers connect and optimise online ordering and shipping. Via Scurri APIs, businesses can connect their existing tools or integrate directly with third-party carriers to create a seamless, fast, and flexible network to help streamline delivery services.

The company currently employs around 45 people and is growing fast, with 64% growth in the 12 months leading up to May 2021. To continue its trajectory of success, the company needed to build strong customer relationships to understand their needs and challenges so it could develop the best possible solutions to address them.

“We work with customers who want to grow their ecommerce operations. We get to know their problems and our engineering team creates a solution to meet their needs,” said Sarah Doran, Product Manager.

Giving customers an amazing experience relies on close collaboration between the marketing, sales, and business development representative (BDR) teams, and Scurri needed to centralise operations on an integrated platform to create a single source of the truth across the whole company.

When Scurri went to market, it wanted to find the best possible solution so it could give customers a world class experience. “Salesforce is the market-leading CRM platform, there was no point in going for something that wasn’t the best,” recalled O’Connor.

The team defined an implementation strategy including smarter workflows, process mapping, and a switch to an account-based marketing approach. They also visited Salesforce’s Dublin office to see how it uses the platform internally and to learn best practices.

When it was time to implement Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, the solution replaced multiple legacy systems and a whole host of Excel spreadsheets. “We focused on getting the basic functionality in place, so we had a solid foundation to build on,” said Doran.

Next, the company needed to get buy-in from the workforce to encourage user adoption of Salesforce Inbox, enabling staff to connect their email, CRM, and customer data to create a seamless sales experience. “Rolling out Salesforce Inbox was crucial to get people onboard with the transformation,” commented Adam Roche, Business Development Manager and Salesforce Super User. “People saw how easy it was to log communications and activities on the platform and realised that it could make their life easier.”

The team also enjoyed the user-friendly interface and having a central repository of live data, meaning reports and metrics are always up to date and nothing needs to be exported or formatted in Excel. When they need to communicate across teams, they use Chatter, which is integrated with Slack. “We’ve reached a point where if it’s not on Salesforce, it doesn’t exist – and that includes commission for sales teams, which is a pretty good incentive,” added Roche.

One of the people responsible for putting structure in place around sales processes was Head of Operations, Rose Power. “We’ve used CRM platforms before, but we needed a more scalable solution and a strategy for success. That meant transforming operations from marketing to BDR and sales using workflows in Salesforce.”

Today, Salesforce unlocks greater visibility of leads as they come in from marketing channels such as the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement webform, are converted into accounts, and go the BDR team for onboarding. Any member of any team can see the status of each and every contact from their Salesforce dashboard, and a sale can’t progress unless the right boxes are ticked or a note has been added explaining why a stage has been skipped.

“Salespeople don’t always like structure by nature, but we explained what we were trying to achieve and how smarter processes would lead to sustainable business growth,” explained Power. “Getting people to understand why you’ve made a change is vital for getting them to accept a new solution, and the feedback we’ve had has been great.”

Standardising processes and centralising data also supports more predictable revenue models and helps the team to identify which leads are most likely to convert.

“We’ve created a culture of trust and transparency. Everyone can see what’s happening on Salesforce and understands why we’re making decisions,” said O’Connor. “I knew Salesforce had made a big impact when I walked over to the sales team and saw every rep was working in Sales Cloud.”

In fact, Scurri employees don’t have to work directly in Salesforce to benefit from the platform. It can generate alerts to prompt an action or notify a user of a significant event even when they’re using other solutions.

To access richer insights, Scurri is using Salesforce reports and dashboards. Better access to data helps the team to become more predictive, for example tracking how long it takes to close deals helps the solution make more intelligent predictions about average lead times.

“Salesforce has helped the whole company become more sales driven. We can qualify leads faster and add more data to records to help the sales managers further down the funnel,” commented Roche. “I can’t picture life without Salesforce now, we’d be lost!”

When a lead becomes a customer, Salesforce also makes account management more efficient, with tasks to notify customers when a product is up for renewal and better visibility driving the right conversations with the right people at the right time.

“Customers are impressed with our knowledge of their account and get a nice experience from lead handover to onboarding, and that gives us a competitive edge. For us, customer satisfaction isn’t just a metric, we also check to make sure they’re actually using their Scurri product rather than just having it available,” said Junior Godoi, Software Engineering Manager.

When the COVID-19 crisis hit, retailers reported a massive surge in online orders and scrambled to find couriers with the capacity to manage the extra deliveries. For Scurri, this created additional demand for services, but it also needed to pivot to home working to create a COVID-safe environment for its staff.

“Salesforce meant we could react very quickly and transition seamlessly to remote working,” recalled Head of Marketing, Sarah Murphy. “In the marketing department we faced additional challenges because we could no longer run events to drum up new business.”

Not one to shy away from a challenge, Scurri took a new approach to marketing with digital events, partnerships to find joint opportunities, and hyper-targeted campaigns to send customers more personalised communications.

“Marketing Cloud Account Engagement helps us automate marketing emails and track engagement rates so we can make sure our campaigns are having the right impact,” added Murphy.

With the pandemic still in full force, retailers were hit with Brexit uncertainty, but once again, Scurri came to the rescue. “We love our customers, and when we hire new people, we look for talent who share that love of people,” explained O’Connor. “We didn’t do everything perfectly after Brexit, but we have honest and open customer relationships built on respect, and together we were able to navigate through the storm.”

In addition to its +100 NPS rating, the company also saw 100% growth in the first quarter of 2021 through acquisitions and by winning more business with existing customers.

“Our growth wasn’t just luck. Our strong processes and stable cloud platform helped us survive COVID-19 and Brexit, and thanks to Salesforce there was very little disruption to services,” said Godoi.

Winning customers is one thing, but keeping them is a whole other skillset, and small integrations have had a powerful impact on the customer experience. “Simple things like integrating G Suite and DocuSign with Salesforce help us to give customers a slicker service – they may seem like tiny processes but when you think about how many times a day we need to sync a calendar or get a document signed the impact on productivity is huge,” added O’Connor.

Business may be booming, but Scurri is not a company to rest on its laurels. It’s continuing to make incremental changes to further optimise its platform and operations, and has plans to implement Salesforce’s artificial intelligence solution, Tableau CRM, to drive more proactive sales.

“We’ve done well on the sales side of things, and we’re applying those lessons and best practices to our marketing processes next,” revealed Murphy. “We’re growing fast, but it needs to be sustainable growth, and getting the best possible foundation in place will be key.”

From humble beginnings, it’s clear to see why this Irish scale-up is taking the delivery market by storm. “The world is changing and becoming more digital. We were lucky to be in the right place at the right time, but in Salesforce we’ve found the right partner to help us adapt and evolve so we can continue blazing a trail into the future,” concluded O’Connor.