Zoho CRM working with Mobile Applications for a full account and contact management solution with a great set of features at a low cost.
Background
Background
Sydney Fish Market (SFM) is the largest fish market in the southern hemisphere and the third largest in the world. It sources products both nationally and internationally, trading more than 13,500 tonnes of seafood every year, including up to 100 sustainable seafood species.
SFM has about 65 staff members who organize the weekday wholesale auction and promote Sydney Fish Market as the center of seafood excellence in the region. Some of them were also tasked to run and oversee the Sydney Seafood School, which is considered to be one of the leading cooking schools in the country.
In 2001, SFM introduced a new online-based seafood trading system called SFM live. SFM live makes buying and selling seafood much easier for traders, providing them with advanced facilities for direct online seafood sales including wild harvest, aquaculture, and frozen products.
Challenges
Challenges
For account and contact management, SFM had been using Excel spreadsheets with a list of names, phone numbers, emails. This caused many issues in the day to day operation of the business, such as:
No single source of truth – As the spreadsheets were passed around via email or physically, each team member could make changes that were not reflected in other staff’s computer.
Inability to see the work of team members – There was no place where a manager or staff member could login to see the work another person was currently doing. If a person was on leave, then another staff member couldn’t take over for the day, as they didn’t know where they were up to.
Time-consuming reporting – Reports would take too much time to generate, and were not used much.
Loss of data – Since there were so many spreadsheets, it became very difficult to manage them all. Hence accounts and contacts with potential were being neglected.
Not staying in touch on the go – While on the road, staff would have to write down notes, then enter them into their computer after getting back.
No scalability – As the business grew, they could not keep working off spreadsheets, it was getting impossible to handle.
No Automation of business processes – Since all the work was being done using emails and spreadsheets, there was no automation of business processes, such as automatically sending emails, automatically triggering alerts or notifications based on certain potential stages, etc.
After noting all the issues mentioned above, management at SFM decided it was time to move to a CRM. SFM found and contracted Oscillosoft, an advanced partner of Zoho, in order to migrate to Zoho.
Solution
Solution
Zoho CRM, Mobile applications
Zoho CRM was chosen due to it’s low cost but great feature set; its intuitive interface; the availability of local partners for implementation, training and support; the native mobile applications for Zoho CRM on iOS and Android
Since Zoho CRM is on the cloud, SFM no longer had collaboration or limited access issues. Each staff member was able to access information on any contact from any internet connected device anywhere.
Zoho CRM’s servers are backed up 24/7, with many redundant servers. As such, SFM no longer had any data loss issues.
Zoho CRM allowed SFM to start assigning tasks to staff members, then track who was doing what. This also allowed them to quickly view what each person was working on.
Reports were generated from within the CRM, and dashboards from those reports. This saved precious time.
There was no more loss of data, as each person was working directly with the CRM. While on the go, they were able to use the Zoho CRM application on Android or iPhone to quickly make changes as needed.
OscilloSoft created a CRM integration application using PHP that took a CSV file from SFM’s on-premises server and uploaded it into the CRM automatically via API. This was carried out after it has been discovered that the staff at SFM still need to do manual exports and imports of data into their CRM.
Results
Results
SFM management and employees were very satisfied with Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM empowered them to be more efficient by increasing collaboration, removing manual processes, and increasing visibility of each Account. Specifically:
Reporting generated from the CRM saved time of management and staff
Staff could now see in one place a 360 view of any client, with all interaction against them stored in the CRM.
Staff found Zoho CRM’s new 2016 interface to be intuitive and easy to use, once they had received training on it.
Since Zoho CRM is a true cloud CRM, staff could view contacts, accounts; make changes; add notes; log phone calls; and add or view tasks anywhere on any device with internet access.
SFM staff members were able to save more time when importing and exporting data from Zoho CRM as they can be done fully automatically in the background, thanks to the PHP application OscilloSoft created for them.
Management and staff can now easily track the exportation and importation of data as the CRM integration application has an exception log and shows history of data imports that users can easily refer to. It also allows the reverting of an import.