Customer Stories
Transforming Vizlib's customer renewal process
In today’s fast-paced business world, organizations are constantly seeking ways to improve efficiency, streamline processes, and maximize productivity. Vizlib, a software company providing data analytics solutions on top of the QlikSense platform, faced a significant challenge in managing customer renewals. The manual labour involved in processing renewals, generating quotes, and ensuring a seamless customer experience was time-consuming and prone to errors. Vizlib partnered with Zimple to overcome these challenges and revolutionize their renewal process.
Challenges in streamlining customer renewals
Vizlib’s primary challenge revolved around managing customer renewals effectively. With a one-year subscription model, ensuring timely and accurate renewals was crucial for their recurring revenue stream. However, the existing CRM system, Pipedrive, was not well-suited to handle this specific process.
“It felt to me like Pipedrive wasn’t particularly well geared up towards a renewable revenue stream. It felt more like a sort of perpetual license type model,” explains Julie Pickrell, Head of Customer Success at Vizlib.
Vizlib’s team found themselves engaged in extensive manual labour, including identifying renewal dates, creating quotes, obtaining customer agreement, adjusting licenses, and implementing price increases. The lack of automation made the process laborious, increasing the likelihood of mistakes.
Automation and CRM expertise from Zimple
To address these challenges, Vizlib wanted to establish an internal process to manage renewals more seamlessly. However, setting up a new system and ensuring its smooth operation required additional expertise and automation capabilities. This is where Zimple came in.
Zimple leveraged their knowledge and experience to develop the necessary automation solutions. A separate pipeline in Pipedrive dedicated to renewals was created, which is now managed by the customer success team. Zimple consolidated individual deals and products, providing Vizlib with a comprehensive overview of each customer’s renewal, including the number of products and their respective prices. With this data readily available, generating accurate quotes and processing renewals became streamlined. The manual effort of individually calculating and summing up product prices for each customer was eliminated, saving significant time and reducing the risk of errors.
Increased efficiency and productivity
Working with Zimple yielded improvements for Vizlib, primarily in terms of increased efficiency and productivity. By automating the renewal process and eliminating manual labour, Vizlib’s customer success management and sales operations teams save valuable time. Each team member now reclaims approximately half a day each week, which can be redirected towards higher-value activities, such as customer adoption and exploring growth opportunities. The renewal process itself became faster and less prone to errors, leading to smoother transactions and improved customer experience.
Vizlib’s customer success managers reported improved engagement with their customers and higher job satisfaction as they could dedicate more time to value-added activities and building relationships with customers. Additionally, the finance team observed faster cash collection times, improved invoicing, and reduced number of errors, contributing to overall operational efficiency.
“We’re sending out quotes much earlier than we used to. We’re aiming to start the renewal process three months ahead of time to give the customer plenty of time to get all the approvals on their side. All of that means that we get our purchase orders earlier, that we can start invoicing earlier and that our cash collections all happen a lot earlier,” Julie explains.
Throughout the implementation process, Vizlib found Zimple to be highly professional and knowledgeable in their work. Zimple quickly grasped the business problem at hand and offered thoughtful solutions. Effective communication channels ensured prompt responses and regular progress updates. Although there were minor delays, Zimple’s transparency and proactive approach guaranteed a smooth implementation process that lasted approximately six to seven weeks. Based on their positive experience, Vizlib wholeheartedly recommends Zimple as a trusted partner for organizations seeking a professional and effective Pipedrive partner.
“I always felt confident that they quickly understood what the business problem was that we were trying to solve and that they were quite thoughtful in terms of coming up with a solution for it. The communication was good,” Julie praises.