Salesforce Automation Reduces Spreadsheet Use By 50-75%
Jake Vance, Chief Technology Officer of Lighthouse Financial, joined the North Carolina-based asset-based lender two years ago. “My goal was to bridge the business side of the company with the technology it needed to grow,” said Jake. A main part of that growth was automating many of the cumbersome business processes and systems that Lighthouse relied upon.
“We had a spreadsheet for everything,” Jake said. “It took quite a while to find the data we needed, and every customer communication was handled manually.” It was getting to the point where the team at Lighthouse Financial knew they couldn’t keep using spreadsheets indefinitely. It was time to transition the company to a customer relationship management (CRM) database to track client accounts and related information.
Jake and the Lighthouse team reviewed many CRM systems but chose Salesforce because,
“I’m a strong believer in you get what you pay for, and Salesforce just seemed to us like the leading CRM in the industry. We definitely got a lot out of Salesforce, and rSTAR helped us get even more from it.”
Jake chose rSTAR Technologies for Salesforce managed services. These services included what Jake dubbed “polishing the gem” or putting the finishing touches on Salesforce for Lighthouse, including adding Salesforce App Exchange apps, launching custom workflows, and automating previously manually created emails.
One such Salesforce automation completed by rSTAR stands out to Jake as an example of how automation can improve efficiency in a powerful way.
“We have an email that we send to clients to close out a project,” said Jake. “We had a template, but we had to manually copy and paste it into a fresh email every time we wanted to use it. I brought this challenge to the rSTAR team, and they helped me understand what was possible. They built a report generator that automated the entire process. It saved each person on my team about an hour a day. It was a huge time saver!”
Knowing what was possible is one of the most important aspects of the work completed with rSTAR, said Jake. “I was brand new to Salesforce when we started. I would ask our rSTAR project manager if there was a solution to a problem, and just by working with him, I learned a lot about Salesforce and could bring that back to the team. I would just have to talk to our rSTAR team, and they would walk me through what was possible and how we could get it done. It was a great experience.”
Although Lighthouse Financial isn’t entirely weaned off spreadsheets yet, Jake is pleased with the progress the company has made transitioning from their cumbersome manual systems to Salesforce. “It’s a transition,” Jake said. “We are using about 50-75% fewer spreadsheets, and we continue moving forward on our automation journey.”
As Lighthouse Financial continues using Salesforce, Jake looks forward to continuing his company’s relationship with rSTAR. “As challenges come up, I know they have our back.”
