Supernova Award Category

The Problem

Like many startups, BancVue’s early growth outpaced its processes, and for a long time the successful financial services business depended on spreadsheets and emails to manage sales, customer service, and marketing operations. The company had more than a thousand spreadsheets flying around before Sugar, and as the business grew, the spreadsheets became more confusing, cumbersome and error-prone. In addition, because pricing and services varied with each contract, every customer interaction was marred by friction and delays. This was a troubling indication that the necessary data wasn’t readily available to all customer-facing employees.

The Solution

Prior to Sugar, BancVue relied on spreadsheets and emails to manage its operations. However, with the company’s explosive growth, it was evident these tools and processes would be inadequate to help successfully scale its business. When BancVue turned to SugarCRM, the company found a true enterprise application with key advantages that would extend well beyond its initial needs. Sugar was quickly deployed company-wide, supporting critical areas including: Sales, Customer Service, Marketing Operations, Vendor Management, Finance, Legal, Technical Operations and Training. Perhaps the most important quality Sugar brings is its platform flexibility. BancVue’s Sugar deployment includes more than 100 customizations to support its wide array of unique business processes. These include functions that manage critical marketing projects, collect scheduled data drops from client institutions, and gather data from more than 40 sources to derive a customer health score.

The results

Sugar improved customer service to financial institutions by combining all customer business processes into a centralized customer platform that allows BancVue to sell, service and support their customers and their customer’s customer with all of the intricacies of local markets with personalized service. Transparency is a crucial element, internally and externally, for BancVue. Sales people and trainers – those who are the face of BancVue to prospects, clients, and client employees – need real-time, immediate access to accurate customer information. Sugar has become essential to BancVue’s business, and some BancVue employees suggest not even an hour goes by that they don’t go into Sugar for something (to look at it for contacts, to check goals, for data from regulatory agencies, etc). Today, BancVue uses Sugar as a true enterprise application, spanning Customer Service, Finance, Legal, Marketing Operations, Sales, Technical Operations and Training.

Sugar has truly improved BancVue's workflows and business processes.  Those, coupled with the insights gained from Sugar’s analytics-based reporting, have saved the company nearly 4,000 staff hours per year, improved revenue forecasting and contributed to BancVue’s rapid growth – which has tripled in size during the past seven years. 

Metrics

BancVue has tripled in size in the seven years since it began to run its business on Sugar. Before Sugar, BancVue’s silos were becoming very painful, and after implementing Sugar, BancVue recovered nearly 4,000 staff hours per year through automation and data consolidation, increased receivables by closing a three-month gap in planning and collections cycle. In addition, Sugar has allowed BancVue to improve revenue forecasting through leads and opportunities pipeline management, speed assessments of clients’ needs for upsell and training opportunities via customized reporting, and enhanced invoice accuracy. 

The Technology

SugarCRM enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships through an individualized CRM user experience that is immersive, engaging and intuitive. With Sugar, all customer-facing employees can make personal connections with every customer to help grow sales, improve customer satisfaction, drive effective marketing campaigns and gain a competition advantage. Based on an innovative user-focused design, Sugar UX™ makes Sugar simple and engaging to use anywhere, anytime. 

Disruptive Factor

Unlike traditional CRM systems that focus on tracking and managing sales by using a "one-size-fits-all" approach, by placing the individual at the center of its solution, SugarCRM puts the "i" in CRM and empowers every customer-facing individual to create extraordinary customer relationships for BancVue. Sugar combines the business process optimization of conventional CRM with the simplicity, mobility and social aspects of a modern consumer app.  Sugar users get contextual intelligence about every contact, company, lead, case or opportunity in an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand format that can be personalized to fit each user’s workflow. 

Shining Moment

Since implementing SugarCRM, BancVue has increased its overall efficiency and productivity, delivering on its commitment to offering smaller financial institutions higher ROI, increased reporting accuracy and the ability to compete against national megabanks.