Customer Success Story

Viewpoint Construction Software

At a Glance
Company	Viewpoint Construction Software
Industry	Construction management software
Headquarters	Portland, OR
Employees	74
Business Challenge	Disjointed customer databases created inefficiencies in tracking and managing customer relationships
Solution	Clientele CRM
Business Benefits	Quicker and more personalized responses to customer calls Automated workflow ensures support calls are answered in a timely manned and escalated as needed Reporting from comprehensive data enables better project and resource planning

After 20 years of providing accounting, project management and estimating software to the construction industry, Viewpoint Construction Software understands the advantages of building on top of a strong foundation. However, like many companies that lived through the shifting technologies of the past two decades, they had built, acquired or inherited a number of different software database programs along the way which created separate islands of information and hindered the company’s ability to shared consistent and timely information across departments.

Viewpoint sought a CRM solution that could combine their various databases into one common customer database that would be accessible by the entire company. Furthermore, the solution would need to be customizable and be able to support anticipated expansion. After six months of researching the customer database market, sitting through demos and attending trade shows, Viewpoint’s committee selected Epicor’s Clientele CRM solution.

“What impressed us immediately about Clientele was its clean user interface. What sold us on Clientele was its powerful customization capability,” said Rob Humphreys, application development manager for Viewpoint.  Viewpoint retained critical information stored in the legacy systems by importing the data directly into Clientele., and made modifications to the solution to preserve certain business processes used with the previous system.

Sharing Information Means Better Service

Since implementing the CRM strategy, Viewpoint is tracking more customers with better information in less time. Where before, departments couldn’t share information electronically with other departments, with Clientele, every department at Viewpoint now has access to the same common pool of information, resulting in better customer service.

Where before, departments couldn’t share information electronically with other departments, with Clientele, every department at Viewpoint now has access to the same common pool of information, resulting in better customer service.

“All of our departments access the same information in Clientele: sales and marketing, customer support and service, application development, system development, and administration,” said Myrna Hostetler, Viewpoint’s president. “Clientele is truly a company-wide, mission-critical solution.”

Responses to customer calls have been quicker and more personalized with Clientele. In addition, since Viewpoint receives so much critical information from its customers, product planning is both targeted and proactive. Pam Snodgrass, customer services and support manager, noted, “We’re gathering so much more information than we did before. With Clientele, we have this great tool at our fingertips.”

Whenever a Viewpoint support or sales representative talks to a customer, they can simply click on the Notes icon in Clientele to see the latest notes for that customer’s account. Clicking on the Calls icon brings up the entire call history for a particular customer, while clicking on the Training icon shows what training that customer has completed. Viewpoint’s customers appreciate the fact they don’t have to spend time repeating themselves or bringing somebody new up-to-speed on an issue every time they call.

Clientele Conductor Automates Viewpoint Work Flow

Viewpoint also installed Clientele Conductor, a companion product to Clientele CRM used to automate workflow processes, from monitoring the database to sending e-mail, fax or pager notifications all based on user-defined criteria. Viewpoint set-up Conductor to notify key individuals and team leaders whenever a call has been in the call queue for 60 minutes, or when a call remained unresolved for seven days.

With Clientele Conductor, call activity improved almost immediately. Viewpoint also automated its training setup process, including class registration and confirmation and also helps manage Viewpoint’s custom programming projects. Through these automated reminders managed through Clientele, Viewpoint is seeing a faster response from customers who are sent quotes for custom programming projects. 

Billable Projects Stay on Track with Clientele

Viewpoint customized Clientele to do more than track calls. Using Clientele, they now manage all of their billable programming projects, showing resources assigned to a project as well as an expected completion date. The number of hours worked by programmers on a project is collected from a time posting form, written in Clientele.

“Tracking projects in Clientele gives us the ability to respond to new customers who need an on-site installation, without jeopardizing existing projects that already have completion estimates,” said Humphreys. “It gives us the information we need to be flexible enough to move some projects ahead of others.” To help oversee a multitude of concurrent projects, Viewpoint regularly runs reports based on Clientele data.

Planning for the Future
Because of Clientele’s scalability, Viewpoint believes they now have a strong foundation upon which to build the technological infrastructure that will handle future growth. “We have found the more we do with Clientele, the more we think of other things to do with it,” said Hostetler. “Clientele is exactly what we had in mind when we started our search for a CRM solution: one source for all of our information that can grow as we grow.”