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Customer success story

From Standard CRM to Ideal Platform: Corvus Janitorial Creates the Ultimate Franchisee Experience

The team at Corvus Janitorial Systems is on a mission to make their franchisees’ lives better. That may sound like a lofty goal for a franchisor of office cleaning businesses, but Executive Vice President Tanja LeMotte assures you it’s very much within reach.

After all, the franchise-based business takes great pride in creating outstanding relationships with its stakeholders. From the start, its founders have embraced one of the most misunderstood and often overlooked indicators of success: Invest in your franchisees, and they’ll take care of their customers.

By empowering franchisees with all of the resources they need to create healthy and vibrant workplaces, Corvus Janitorial Systems is cultivating customers for life. It’s the kind of approach that’s bound to fascinate even the most savvy sales, marketing and customer service teams.

Dealing with growing pains 

To say Corvus Janitorial’s franchisee-first model has worked well would be a vast understatement. Within eight years of its founding, the Chicago-based cleaning company had expanded from a small, started-from-scratch venture into a thriving business. The firm now serves thousands of owner-operated franchises in 19 municipalities stretching from Florida to Colorado, and continues to expand.

Of course, all that growth came with its own set of challenges. As the number of franchisees swelled, so did the spreadsheets and paper logs that were being used to track important operating metrics. Reporting and visibility became cumbersome and unwieldy.

“We really needed to bring all business processes into one place,” LeMotte says. “[The spreadsheets] worked well for the size of our business, but as we grew we very much needed a better system for building out workflows and a process to best support the system.”

Franchisor and franchisee teammates were spending so much time recording and tracking production that it had become difficult to focus on what teams really wanted to be doing: keeping schools, medical facilities, recreational buildings and other influential workplaces polished and professional. They had an important job to do. And they needed technology that would empower them to do it right.

LeMotte and her team knew exactly what to do next. The time had come to find a more robust solution.

Finding the right solution

When Corvus Janitorial set out to find a new method for supporting its ever-expanding array of territories and franchisees, they knew the decision would be a big one. The franchisor president and chief administrative officer worked together to research vendors, and both CEOs were involved in making a final decision.

At first, the group considered investing in Salesforce. But that particular CRM was quickly ruled out when matched against the company’s top three decision criteria: end-user experience, ease of configuration and cost.

“You want it to be a long-term commitment when choosing the right customer experience (CX) platform, so being thoughtful on the front end and getting buy-in from leaders is really important,” says LeMotte.

After some in-depth research, Corvus Janitorial landed on SugarCRM. At first, the goal was to standardize the company’s sales process.

“We wanted to give our sales team easier access to the information they need to effectively sell,” LeMotte explains. “We also needed our leaders to be able to have clear visibility into the numbers.”

But once leadership started to explore the system, they discovered the Sugar platform can be used to do so much more. “We realized that bringing our day-to-day operations into Sugar made so much sense,” LeMotte says.

That’s when Corvus Janitorial began to lean on Sugar dashlets, modules and configurations. They learned that by leveraging prebuilt apps and integrations, they could create a platform to match the business’s exact needs. When things got a little complex — the company needed a way to serve both franchisee and janitorial customers — they turned to implementation partner Technology Advisors to create a full-blown CX platform designed to meet Corvus Janitorial’s unique business processes. And they did it all without having to hire developers or custom code in-house.

“I love how the platform allows you to think like a coder without needing the skill sets of Javascript or PHP,” Tanja says. “You create the fields you need and then automate workflows around them.”

Reaching for Bigger, Better Results

Since starting with Sugar in 2012, Corvus Janitorial’s operations have continually changed for the better. There’s no more tedious, time-consuming data entry to trudge through. Updates can be made in an instant — from anywhere, at any time.

“Our team relies on Sugar Mobile to log real-time data while out in the field,” LeMotte says. “This saves a lot of ‘paperwork’ time that used to be tacked onto the end of each day, and gives staff quick and easy access to information that wasn’t available before.”

“Sales outreach has swelled from 70 to 120+ calls a day, and alignment with marketing is stronger than ever. Without Sugar workflows routing data to the right teammates, we would not be able to handle the volume of sales follow-up that’s needed on any given day,” comments LeMotte.

Perhaps best of all, daily dashboards keep leadership up-to-speed on the latest activities and monthly metrics so they know when to provide praise for jobs well done.

Next up, Corvus Janitorial will be implementing Sugar Market and adding an ERP integration — along with many other platform enhancements including texting, maps, e-signatures and a franchisee portal. As the hub of all company activities, Sugar ensures Corvus Janitorial can continue to empower its people with everything they need to create outstanding customer experiences.

“We’re happy to be partnered with a technology provider that listens to the wants and needs of its customers,” says LeMotte. “By putting Sugar at the center, we’re reinforcing our ability to help franchisees grow, prosper and prevail as business owners...which we know can positively impact lives.