Case Studies – Cyfe

SMCo Thrift’s Sales Dashboard Solution Increases Client Sales by 20%

Phillip Paquette — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:49:49 +0000

SMCo Thrift works with thrift stores to improve business operations, drive funding to help support their non-profit organizations, and develop their marketing initiatives and brand growth.

The client's problem

In 2018, SMCo Thrift ran into industry-specific challenges and issues unique to their business model.

While non-profits may be great at serving others, they “are typically not good at business,” said Evan Crass, Vice President of SMCo Thrift.

They also saw there was room for improvement with KARM Stores, which SMCo Thrift manages and whose profits support Knox Area Rescue Ministries. They were looking for ways to improve the operations at KARM Stores’ 20 locations.

“We were waking up every day wondering how do we do this well?”

One service that SMCo Thrift offers includes the recommendation and implementation of software tools. They started with a tool that gave stores the ability to provide a tax-deductible receipt to donors. Their toolkit grew to include tracking inventory complemented by a point-of-sale system. To tie all of their efforts and report quickly on each store’s performance, they wanted to provide an all-in-one business dashboard.

However, the original dashboard features in their platform were limited to simple raw table views and an ability to export data into Excel.

“A lot of people’s eyes would start swimming when they were looking at those raw numbers.”

They required a better solution that could visualize the key data from each store so it would be easier for their clients to understand and track.

SMCo Thrift's solution

SMCo Thrift first investigated several dashboard solutions. They looked at each of these solutions from the perspective of KARM Stores and improving their toolkit so they could help other organizations.

With their decision process, they considered:

Scalability: They needed a platform they could first test within their organization that could be quickly rolled out to others
Simplicity: Their toolkit was built on SQL and needed the ability to set up simple select statements for queries that could then be easily visualized.
Price: They weighed which platforms provided the most value at an affordable price point that would fit into the budget of a cost-conscious thrift store.

In September 2019, Evan and his team discovered Cyfe’s white label solution, which “allowed them to get to the scale we were looking at. We were able to see big changes early on in the way clients were interacting with data.”

TV Mode for team alignment

Many of the teams that SMCo Thrift works with broadcast dashboards onto a television monitor in the store’s break room. That way, they can have a team huddle at the beginning of a shift to review their current store’s performance and goals including sales and production value.

While taking in donations they can go into SMCo Thrift’s toolkit, ThriftTrac, and categorize item donations and identify what’s sellable. When ThriftTrac users log into the platform, they see a dashboard view of a stores’ KPIs including:

Sales
Product donations
Sellthrough rate

Each thrift store location SMCo Thrift manages also has a second dashboard containing daily sales reports used by the bookkeeper to create the end-of-day journal entries.

Any non-profit team member can also easily share results and provide a snapshot of how much money their store earns with their non-profit’s executive director and board of directors.

Easier data transfer

Many non-profits have a donor management platform system that contains information about donors and acts as a communication tool.

“It’s a pain in the butt though to import and export information from those systems.”

Since partnering with Cyfe, SMCo Thrift’s clients can get quick stats on the average donation amount per donor or send an email to donors. These non-profits may have an outsourced communications specialist so they can easily export those contact details and drop an email blast.

The results

SMCo Thrift’s clients are able to hit their goals faster with a 41% total sales increase across all the organizations they work with after adding Cyfe as a white label solution to their platform. That’s a 20% median sales increase.

“What used to take six months to be able to change course, we’re able to do in half the time or less.”

In their client’s dashboards, SMCo Thrift can take a variety of data points so that any non-profit employee or a thrift store volunteer can see their target goal for a KPI and track their progress.

One of the biggest metrics they can now track in stores is the average price per piece sold, helping non-profits monitor and grow that KPI. They can monitor this KPI to see which particular items sell well and what is the most advantageous price point.

Gauging realistic goals

Due to COVID-19, stores are not seeing the same year-over-year growth. Still, SMCo Thrift can adjust their clients’ targets to more attainable goals. Then visualize the goal as a gauge on the dashboard.

“This provides a simple way for non-profits to understand what metrics they need to meet regardless if that person isn’t great with numbers.”

Letting the data speak for itself

It’s also easier now to sell their software.

“Even though it was the last piece, people really started getting it after we added Cyfe.”

During conferences, they can share the sales success they’ve recorded working with many non-profits and have grown their network to stores across North America. Their clients have over 175 different dashboards.

“Showing that growth has been such a game-changer. At our conference, we invite our customers to join a panel and tell us the most compelling stories like ‘Anytime I am sitting with my team on a Monday morning, I can change the date range and see if we are winning or losing.’”

For SMCo Thrift, Cyfe provides an off-the-shelf tool they can still customize without needing to build a data dashboard from the ground up. Instead, they can focus their development efforts on components unique to their industry.

“As a software developer, you want to be able to mobilize and equip your users to make the best decisions. We realize as a software provider that makes us unique. Cyfe as a partner has allowed us to truly shine.”

Conclusion

Evan and the rest of his team needed a more accessible solution to data reporting that could be easily picked up by their diverse group of clients. Data visualization is a key part of keeping their tool user friendly and helping non-profits hit their goals.

Using Cyfe as a white label solution, SMCo Thrift can customize dashboards for client’s specific needs and scale up their platform. They also have more time to serve new clients and develop solutions specific to non-profit organizations running thrift stores.

Phillip Paquette

Phillip Paquette is the Head Content Marketer and Founder at OnPoint Content. Coming from a background in journalism, in-depth research and interviews are key ingredients in his special sauce. Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments at phillip@onpointcontent.io.

The post SMCo Thrift’s Sales Dashboard Solution Increases Client Sales by 20% appeared first on Cyfe.

How DRIVE® Increased Average Customer Spend by 1.78x with Cyfe Dashboards

Garrett Sussman — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 11:41:36 +0000

Many businesses have small cracks that could lead to larger problems later, like an improperly maintained vehicle leaking fluid. For the past 30+ years, consulting and technology firm DRIVE® has consulted and trained auto and truck repair shops across the U.S. and Canada to grow their companies and fill these cracks. They’re the development firm version of a car mechanic. DRIVE® helps auto shops grow, manage, and operate their business through long term planning and day-to-day operations.

The firm has expanded its own business service offerings as the auto repair industry has matured. Over the past few years, the DRIVE® team began to add marketing and advertising services. The success of these programs has allowed them to innovate and deliver a full agency marketing service program to their customers. These services include:

Web design and development
Social media management
Digital Advertising
Content Marketing
Direct Mail
Email
And more…

DRIVE®’s marketing agency services deliver explosive results for their clients. Their customers consistently see an increase in phone calls, appointments, customers, sales, and revenue.

Challenge:

For Phillip Marzouk, DRIVE®’s Marketing Agency Director, one of the major problems he was facing was communicating those wins to clients. He was looking for a way to highlight that DRIVE® was directly responsible for the new business and increase in sales.

“We want to be able to track what works and what doesn’t on a shop-by-shop basis and determine our customers’ advertising needs to make the most out of their dollars.”

Ever since DRIVE® first started offering web development services, reporting and proving their ongoing value to their clients was a challenge.

“We would send automated reports out of Google Analytics and the customers didn’t understand it,” says Phillip.

His team calls customers once a month and reviews all the data together. Each month, they found themselves re-educating clients on what the various metrics meant and the context around them. It felt like the reports were creating unnecessary confusion and frustration. They were also taking up valuable time.

“We were looking for a system that would allow us to better report to our client base. We were looking for some automation levels in reporting. A tool that would allow us to give access to our client base to a live dashboard. And we wanted the control to show them the numbers that mattered.”

Manually collecting all of the reports and stitching them together would have required time that they didn’t have. An automated reporting system would solve this major dilemma.

Particularly, they needed the ability to customize their dashboard to focus on the numbers that really mattered. This would not only alleviate unnecessary stress for their clients, but it would also highlight the great job they were doing in marketing their business.

Solution:

The Cyfe dashboard was an ideal solution for Phillip’s reporting problems. It connected all of the different data sources that DRIVE® and their clients were already using.

“The most attractive feature of Cyfe was the sheer number of platforms that the dashboard could link up with easily. Most other tools required hours of manual work to pull in the right data accurately. It’s not sustainable or scalable. They couldn’t connect automatically. For a team with minimal developer resources, you can’t depend on connecting to APIs.”

Cyfe connects to everything, and for any custom data, the platform connects to Google Sheets or lets you upload spreadsheets so they can push the data they need.

“When you’re making 400+ dashboards, you simply make a few clicks and it is all connected. Spending minutes per dashboard instead of hours per dashboard. Otherwise, we’d still be building out our clients’ dashboard right now. “

How did Cyfe allow Phillip to give his clients access to their reporting in real-time?

“Clients have a link that they can bookmark in their browser and visit whenever they want. We’ve got some clients that never close their dashboard. Others will only check in once every three months. It’s at their pace.”

With a dashboard shared between account executives, advisors, and the clients, a communication gap was filled. Cyfe surfaced a solution to an unanticipated problem.

“We’re able to use it more efficiently within our organization. What makes us different from other advertising agencies is that we’re an extension of a business development firm. So one of the most important things was to be able to report these numbers to our own business advisors.”

When one of their business advisors touches base with a client, and says, “Hey you’re having a lot of problems bringing in cars. Let’s see what’s going on with your marketing.” They don’t need to take a few days to pull together a marketing report. They can just click on the same link that the client has and see a live update of what’s happening with their marketing.

“When you’re managing 400 plus clients, seconds start to matter. So having that reporting dashboard with a live view, numbers we can curate, and data that we can accurately represent what’s going on was really important to us.”

Results:

So how did Cyfe ultimately impact the business? The primary value centered around improved client communication and support.

Client satisfaction improved substantially.
Customer retention improved.
Customer complaints went down.
Money saved in customer service calls.
50% reduction in customer service calls.
Customers increased average spend by 1.78 times.
Customer LTV increased.

Customer Service and Reputation

The business’s concern about the quality and efficiency of communication has completely changed with Phillip’s investment in reporting. Improving client communication was the result of better access to data. Poor reporting resulted in customers not knowing what they were getting for the money they were spending.

“The number of overall service calls due to a lack of communication has gone down exponentially.”

Cyfe allowed them to connect their website, Google My Business, and Ads into one dashboard to show website calls and calls from Google My Business. The dashboard tied the value to the marketing services.

Before Cyfe, Customers didn’t understand that the high ranking on Google translated to more traffic, phone calls, customers, sales, and ultimately more dollars in their pocket.

Being able to connect the website performance metrics and Google My Business actions into one dashboard clarified to clients what DRIVE® was doing to boost client business.

“Now we don’t have customers not understanding the service or concerned about communication because, at any point in time, they can click on their dashboard link and see live:
‘I’ve got this many calls out of my website. This many calls out of Google My Business. I know where the numbers are coming from. I know what’s happening. Now there’s value to what’s going on.’”

A clear understanding of the marketing performance led to a 50% reduction in customer service calls for DRIVE®. The reduction in calls saved a significant amount of money for the team.

“The very first thing we noticed was that client satisfaction improved substantially. The second thing that we noticed a few weeks down the line was customer retention increased.”

Business Value For Clients and DRIVE® Shops

Now that clients understand the value, they can give Phillip’s team the credit.

“Now clients are saying, ‘You’re responsible for me getting hundreds and hundreds of phone calls in just the last month. I can’t get rid of you.’”

In the context of the pandemic, Phillip and his team were able to show clients that their phone calls and business had increased. The reporting dashboard made a more compelling argument that the clients could invest more in marketing and advertising.

When they made the suggestion to add sanitization services at their client’s businesses
services at their clients’ dealerships, they were able to show in their reporting that the new service resulted in huge spikes of phone calls and sales.

“Clients would be able to attribute where things were coming from. Something that they could never do before. We could do that now with Cyfe dashboarding.”

Cyfe also allowed DRIVE ® to propose increases in advertising spend because they could visualize and attribute the phone calls to the ad spend.

One client had to add a 4th phone line because they were investing more in their advertising and it visibly drove more phone calls and more business. All of these tactics and reporting increased the lifetime value of their clients.

Conclusion

For Phillip and his team at DRIVE®, choosing Cyfe impacted their business operations dramatically. Set up was simple, saving them time in getting their clients’ live access to their performance. It improved customer satisfaction and reduced service calls, improving communication. It clarified and highlighted their value, earning them credit for their spending. It helped them help their clients more effectively.

What was the biggest value of adding Cyfe as your reporting tool of choice?

“The biggest thing that we saw was customers increasing their average spend. One customer became worth more dollars simply from having a dashboarding tool that allowed them to access it at any time and attribute what is working and where their money is going.”

The post How DRIVE® Increased Average Customer Spend by 1.78x with Cyfe Dashboards appeared first on Cyfe.