Strencom triples their NPS score and improves client satisfaction with Teamwork

Strencom triples their NPS score and improves client satisfaction with Teamwork
Interviewee
Colum Buckley, Director of Operations
Company Name
Strencom
Industry
IT
Headquarters
Cork, Ireland
Size
10-50

Strencom is a leading provider of data networks and private cloud computing services, and has been a Teamwork customer for the past 5 years. For Colum Buckley, Director of Operations at Strencom, Teamwork has allowed them to increase client satisfaction and deliver projects faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Wasted hours

Strencom delivers hundreds of projects to clients on a regular basis, with multiple stakeholders and complex workflows. Prior to using Teamwork, the Strencom team were using traditional methods to manage projects with customers, such as email, spreadsheets, and documents.

This caused two major problems. Firstly, they were struggling to deliver projects on time because of all of the laborious admin work these methods entailed. Secondly, they were leading to frequent breakdowns in the communication with their clients.

Collecting data and creating reports was also an extremely manual and time-consuming process. Team members were limited to producing project updates for clients once a week, combing through long email threads and multiple complex spreadsheets to find the data they needed.

“The delivery team realized that they were spending an average of 45 minutes per report — for an average of 46 reports per week — just to communicate with clients,” Colum told us. (That’s 2,070 minutes per week — over 34 hours.)

Worst of all, they were finding that it was starting to affect their clients’ experience. The team decided to complete an NPS survey — a metric used to measure customer loyalty — to get a sense of how they were being perceived by their clients. This resulted in a score in the low twenties, which didn’t reflect the dedicated project management team and strong commitment to quality service the Strencom team were working so hard to deliver everyday.

Something wasn’t adding up.

"We reached a point where managing projects using email and spreadsheets had become a total nightmare. We knew we had to find a better way. Setting expectations with customers and not keeping them is a major hindrance to a positive experience."

Taking back time

The Strencom team knew that in order to increase client satisfaction they needed to find a tool that would help them manage their projects more effectively and foster closer collaboration with clients. Teamwork allowed them to offer better visibility to their clients throughout the project, dramatically cut down on admin, and reduce the number of files floating back and forth in siloed emails.

5 years later, Strencom now uses Teamwork to support the delivery of every single project. Clients are added to their project as collaborators at the kick-off meeting, allowing them to immediately review their project and access information such as deliverables, tasks, and deadlines. This way, clients can track their project’s progress without the need for an official update from a Strencom project manager, saving the team time while still allowing them to have full control over the information clients can access.

"Clients love how Teamwork gives them real-time visibility into how their projects are progressing. We win over even the most skeptical clients once they see they don’t have to hang around until 5pm on a Thursday waiting for an email or phone call to know what’s happening."

Realizing how much time Teamwork would save the team made internal adoption a breeze, too. Gone are the days of spending hours compiling reports manually; instead, team members can send clients a link to reports within Teamwork in just a few easy clicks. “Teamwork allows us to concentrate on the customer. Now instead of spending time filling in spreadsheets, I can call the customer for a more productive discussion,” Colum says. “It creates the kind of connection you just can’t get over email.”

Tripling their NPS

Today, Strencom maintains an impressive NPS of 73, over double the industry average. Teamwork has given them an edge over competitors in their space by enabling them to guarantee on-time delivery and reliability from the outset.

Teamwork has directly increased Strencom’s client satisfaction by making it easier for their clients to check project progress, provide feedback and approvals, and communicate with the Strencom team, all in one central place. Now, every one of their clients has a more active role in the project life cycle. The tool has helped them to not only increase client communication, but to make it more meaningful, by enabling them to concentrate on what’s important and build more effective relationships.

Using Teamwork has also allowed Strencom to save over four full days’ worth of work on administrative tasks every week. The time that was previously being spent on manual work is now spent on client projects — which means they’ve also been able to increase the number of projects they take on. “Before Teamwork, we topped out at about 30 active projects running simultaneously,” Colum tells us. “Now our average is about 55.”

It’s not only transformed how Strencom works, but it’s also transformed how they’re seen. “Not only are we completing more projects in less time, but we’re getting a reputation for on-time delivery and reliability. Repeat business and referrals are a real testament to this. Our project delivery is now a real value add, which is good for us in Operations and for everyone in the business.”

"Once you realize the savings it delivers, using Teamwork is a no-brainer. It provides transparency, clarity, and accountability from the outset, for both our customers and our own internal team."

– Colum Buckley, Director of Operations at Strencom