Head office
Dublin, Ireland
Entirely focused on e-commerce, eDesk is a customer support platform helping online retailers deliver extraordinary customer service everywhere they sell. Founded in 2014, the company is trusted by thousands of customers worldwide.
eDesk’s award-winning artificial intelligence-powered automation tools streamline customer support processes and delivery of business insights. Its platform also seamlessly connects over 200 marketplace, webstore, social media and logistics channels via native integrations. This enables e-commerce brands to resolve their customer queries quicker, so they can focus on selling more and realising their growth potential.
eDesk powers over 50 million conversations every month, resulting in billions of dollars of e-commerce transactions every year. It’s the only customer support solution provider on the Amazon and Walmart developer councils, and its key strategic partners include Google, eBay, Shopify and other major platforms.
headquarters with offices in the UK and US.
months taken to tailor HubSpot to eDesk’s needs.
of workflows cut from ~800 to ~200
Dublin, Ireland
2021
eCommerce
Spring 2023
HubSpot
eDesk had initially implemented HubSpot around 4.5 years previously, but it wasn’t yet tailored to their business needs. As a result, they weren’t able to utilise HubSpot to its full potential.
The team had originally intended to use HubSpot just for marketing automation, but had then realised that it would also function as a CRM. At the time, though, eDesk was using a custom-built CRM solution that they had created in-house.
However, they were experiencing challenges with it, in terms of functionality and capability. As the company grew, and the team added increasing volumes of customer data into their custom-built CRM, day-to-day operations got progressively more complex. Meanwhile, their HubSpot workflows had become increasingly overcomplicated. They were eating into their employees’ time rather than saving it.
eDesk reached out to Provident CRM to bring their HubSpot instance up to scratch. Working with their team over 6 months, from late 2022 to spring 2023, we turned things around.
Using both their legacy CRM and HubSpot had created a lot of data and a lot of mess. Sales, customer support and marketing operations were feeling the strain of the inefficient hybrid system. They were in serious need of a single source of truth for all their customers.
Various other tools were handling disparate parts of the same work processes, creating further confusion. There was no centralised location offering eDesk’s teams a full view of their customers. For example, account executives were constantly switching tools to try to track the progress of contacts who had requested free trials or booked demos. It was tough to create consistency and a defined process for managing the data.
The data confusion meant that multiple eDesk team members would create new workflows, which had steadily layered up over the years. Eventually, hundreds of workflows and tasks overlapped in sales automation and customer success processes. Both of these teams were feeling overwhelmed.
The automations that had been introduced over the years had become duplicated and confused. As a result, rather than saving time and work, they were actually creating more manual work for eDesk’s employees.
They needed their automations to work for them — not create more hassle for them day to day. In addition, there was real reliance on one individual to manage complex workflows that were piled on top of each other.
The workflow and automation complications were generating inaccurate reports, falling far short of useful business insights and clogging up eDesk’s HubSpot system.
As employees had moved on due to natural turnover, understanding of the complex logic they had implemented often left with them. Usually, it soon no longer served the business’ evolving ways of working. The team needed to bring HubSpot right back to basics, for a complete reboot.
eDesk knew that HubSpot had much more to offer — even within the licence they had already had for the past 4.5 years. Many new functions had been rolled out since then, which they were keen to utilise. Naturally, they wanted to feel the full impact and ROI of the licence and premiums they had purchased.
The Provident CRM team held 5 days of discovery communication sessions with eDesk, which was key to this project. We took the time to understand exactly what they needed, even when they didn’t quite yet know it themselves.
We then designed a full process flow with buy-in and sign-off from all eDesk’s stakeholders, adapting to evolving requests as needed.
Gareth Cummings, CTO of eDesk, noted, “Right from the start, the Provident CRM team were very responsive, very quick and clearly knowledgeable about both HubSpot and the wider ecosystem of sales operations.”
We pared eDesk’s HubSpot processes right down, tailoring their CRM to optimise core business tasks:
▪️ Everyday actions in their SaaS product flow
Streamlining lead nurturing, free trials, purchasing and onboarding processes.
▪️ Post-sale customer success
Cleaning up these workflows to make it easier for eDesk’s customer success team to manage their end customers.
▪️ Partner relationships
Sharpening these processes to enable eDesk to better manage its partners, ensuring partner activities were being tracked and engaged in the right way.
We redesigned their workflows to be easy to understand. This fundamentally transformed their HubSpot instance into an intuitive, user-friendly platform that centralises data for their entire team.
Its reduced complexity also means that new eDesk employees can rapidly get to grips with how to use their HubSpot instance.
Their CRM solution now creates transparency and accountability, not confusion! Their teams also save time and headspace, without needing to switch tools and wrestle with the system.
We worked alongside a combined team from eDesk to implement their revamped HubSpot solution, covering sales, marketing, product and development. We also ran hands-on training exercises with eDesk’s full sales, marketing and customer success teams.
This ensured that, by the end of our collaboration, eDesk’s internal team was fully up to speed on the new workloads and setup. They had the knowledge needed to feel confident using and maintaining their refreshed HubSpot instance.
Vastly simplified and tailored to the business, they were ready to evolve with it independently — knowing our team would be on hand if needed.
We were struck by how pragmatic the team was, focused on getting good results and outcomes. It wasn’t about trying to stretch out the project for as long as possible, it was about getting us results and delivery as quickly as possible. I can’t speak highly enough of James and Saagar. They recognised our working style early on and adapted to it. They had brilliant knowledge, request response times and engagement with our team. Honestly, you couldn’t find better partners to work with. It made the project a lot easier, and a lot less stressful.
– Gareth Cummings, CTO, eDesk
▪️ Workflows cut by 75%
We shrunk workflows from ~800 to ~200 for clean, simplified, quicker tasks.
▪️ Less effort, better results
A decreased workload across marketing operations, sales operations and customer success. Freeing up time for real progress, not busy work.
▪️ Custom layouts
We created a new contact and company layout to make it easier for eDesk’s teams to navigate and update items in HubSpot.
▪️ Complete customer records
All in one place, with one login. Accelerating daily operations, and enabling eDesk’s teams to focus on exceeding their end customers’ expectations. There’s no time lost stuck in complex systems, trying to figure them out.
▪️ Implementing new functionalities: custom cards
We helped the eDesk team implement HubSpot’s new custom cards functionality in their CRM. Showing customer data in dashboards, images and text, they provide a quick overview that helps eDesk’s teams respond rapidly and accurately to customer needs.
Implementing HubSpot is only the first step; it’s truly a result of proper customisation that the value of the solution shines through. Gareth also expressed, “We’re really starting to see a shift in the business. We’ve gained capacity and time for teams to focus on individual and business priorities. People just need to be able to trust the systems they work in, and that’s happening now.”
In today’s competitive landscape, it is no longer enough to merely adopt powerful software; businesses must tailor it to align seamlessly with their unique workflows and goals. Provident CRM’s commitment to understanding the intricacies of each client’s business ensures that they derive maximum benefit from the technology they invest in. Together, we are rewriting the rules of customer support, one success story at a time.
HubSpot provides a highly intuitive, scalable, and adaptive CRM platform designed to grow with any size organisation. Offering a myriad of out-of-the-box features and designed to accommodate various integrations and extensions, HubSpot is quick to set-up and starts streamlining your business processes immediately.
With a free Customer Relationship Management platform at its core, HubSpot provides complete software suites for Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service – each dynamic when used as standalone systems, and even more powerful when combined.
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Trevor Rogerson |
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Senior Sales Executive |
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+353 1 6930000 |
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trevor@providentcrm.com |
