How StarfishETL Helped an Office Furniture Retailer Monitor Customer Data More Effectively

Rework Office Furniture sells its products to consumers and businesses. The company was recently highlighted in Forbes as a small business whose use of technology is helping it control costs, boost productivity, and minimize overhead.

The biggest benefit of Rework’s software portfolio, however, is how it enables the company to monitor and engage with customers.

These advantages were no accident. They were the result of well-planned software acquisitions, thoughtful automations, and of course, effective data integration. Let’s look closer at how Rework is able to monitor customer data so effectively.

Step 1: CRM Acquisition & Automation

Rework’s journey began with the recognition of a problem: an inability to centralize customer information that was stifling customer service. Siloed teams had no way to view complete customer profiles for proactive engagement on service issues, lease expirations, or new products.

It was also difficult to recognize cross-sell or upsell opportunities based on the customer’s business situation. For example, customers who were downsizing or moving locations could present a sales opportunity, but Rework’s disconnected systems meant that opportunity could have easily been missed.

To solve the initial concern, Rework adopted CRM and used it to automate customer interactions. When a lease was expiring, the customer received a notification. When a new product was available, the customer was notified. A single source of truth for customer data made it easier to monitor what was happening with each account. However, a visibility issue remained across departments.

Step 2: Bringing it Full Circle with Integration

Marketing automation tools have much more expansive customer-facing capabilities than CRMs. With the ability to create eye-catching email templates, build landing pages, and track marketing-specific metrics, it makes sense that marketing teams would prefer working in the marketing system over the CRM.

The issue with this approach is that it perpetuates the separation of data between departments. Marketing can’t properly segment and target customers when they’re unable to view the entire data set about those customers.

For sales, working in the CRM makes more sense, but it’s still an imperfect process without integration. Sales teams lacking real-time inventory are left guessing or doing extra work to find out if their business can fulfill the customer’s request. Rework understood these roadblocks and turned to StarfishETL to solve them.

Integrating CRM & Marketing Automation

Integrating Rework’s CRM with their marketing automation propelled the automation capacity forward by pulling in additional details to trigger workflows and follow up activities.

StarfishETL fed data back and forth, so the CRM remained the single source of truth, but the marketing teams were still looped into what was going on with accounts. This made it possible to pinpoint marketing and sales efforts with precision.

Integrating CRM & Product Inventory

Rework also added shopping cart features on its website and integrated that inventory data with the CRM. This gave salespeople up-to-date information on what was available, so when a rep wanted to reserve a product for their customer, they could do it from within the CRM. The CRM would then notify the warehouse manager of that reservation.

Applying iPaaS for Scalability

As an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), StarfishETL was agile enough to create the data connections Rework demanded in its current state, but also scalable enough to adapt when the company’s needs shifted.

Combining rich CRM sales data, marketing intent data, and real-time website inventory numbers positioned Rework to serve customers more effectively.

Monitoring and learning from customer data, as well as automating the actions associated with that data, helped Rework build the resiliency it needed to remain stable and profitable in uncertain economic times.