StepOz is the pioneer in providing walking holidays across Australia. Recently, they have expanded their destinations to New Zealand, Japan and many European countries.
As a business manager in a touring company, Liz wears many different hats at work. She oversees day-to-day operations to ensure efficient service delivery and researches products and partnerships to identify business development opportunities. At the same time, she is also in charge of the company’s financial management, including monitoring revenues, budgeting (including marketing activities) and forecasting revenues.
Liz and her team used Service Cloud to manage the sales from their website booking forms. However, after spending 18 months with the previous partner, they still had little understanding of the Salesforce platform. Their knowledge was limited to accessing and entering records in the custom objects that the previous partner created for them. They didn’t know about Salesforce standard objects and best practices as well as how to fully utilise Salesforce functionalities with their current licenses. Last but not least, they were not aware of the free resources that can help them improve their skills, such as Trailhead.
“We want to keep our customers’ experience with StepOz consistent in every touch point they have with our staff and our providers.”
“A great amount of our time is spent on arranging accommodations and logistics for our customers. Since many of our suppliers are small Airbnbs in very remote areas, we often need to check their availabilities manually by calling them as they don’t often respond to emails.”
“Though we may not be able to automate the logistics part of our work, we really want to automate the insertion of break day and the flexible selection of start date or end date for our customers.”
“It has been a long journey and it hasn’t been the easiest thing, but we believe the rewards awaiting us and our customers will make it all worthwhile in the end.”
After operating with traditional processes for nearly 30 years, StepOz realised the need for digitalisation to personalise their customer experience, improve operational efficiency through automation and make strategic decisions with real-time data. They chose Salesforce as a platform to support this organisational change.
StepOz reached out to Salesforce and was introduced to three Salesforce partners. They decided to go with a low-cost Salesforce partner, who just recently got TripADeal as a customer.
Liz was excited about the prospect of onboarding her company to Salesforce very soon. This will be the start of the transformation in experience for her team members and customers. Unfortunately for Liz and StepOz, many challenges were waiting ahead.
The decision to hire any Consultants without performing due diligence on their track records and carefully considering if they are qualified enough to deliver a complex solution.
StepOz implemented Salesforce with the help of the offshore Salesforce partner. Their walking products are more complicated than most touring companies because of the flexibility in choosing walking types (self-guided or group-guided walks), walking duration, rest day, and start and end dates.
StepOz went along with their first Salesforce partner’s plan of creating custom objects because at first glance (only), building custom objects for their complex products seemed easier than trying to optimise those products with standard Salesforce objects.
Liz was full of hope thinking about the outcomes of this implementation. As it was her and StepOz’s first engagement with any Salesforce partner, they trusted that the partner knew what they were doing.
The decision to jump into creating custom objects without trying to make the most out of Salesforce standard processes and practices.
StepOz had expected to have a stable system up and running 12 months after the project’s kick-off at most. However, 18 months later, the partner only completed their business process for self-guided product in Salesforce, and even that process did not suit their needs (for example, the form was really unstable). The business process for group-guided walk had yet to be completed, and the partner kept asking to extend the deadlines and budgets for that product.
As the timeline seemed to continuously be pushed back and the partner spent more money than they could actually deliver, the StepOz team felt that they needed to do something to put an end to this. Liz had to reach out to the Salesforce ecosystem for support.
After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and 18 months of stressful work to receive an incomplete solution that failed to satisfy their needs, Liz as well as other StepOz staff felt very frustrated and lacked confidence in the solutions.
At the time Liz was reaching out to Salesforce for support, her company needed to have their current issues with the business process for self-guided walks fixed and the functionalities for group-guided walks to be finalised. They were also looking for some partner to help them support their BAU activities.
Liz was introduced to both Girikon and another Salesforce partner. She and the rest of the StepOz team unanimously chose Girikon due to Girikon’s cultural fit with StepOz (both are small and nimble companies) and Girikon’s thorough understanding of the challenges as well as what needed to be done.
Liz was pleased with Girikon’s professionalism and willingness to help her company find issues. However, impacted by the negative experience with the previous partner, she kept herself sceptical. Also, at this point, StepOz members were still confused and did not have a full grasp of what went wrong in the previous implementation.
Before going any further, StepOz needed to have a clear view and understanding of what really went wrong with the previous partner’s implementation.
StepOz had a few discovery sessions with Girikon. Girikon helped them investigate their Salesforce org’s architecture and understand their previous implementation. Girikon showed them that best Salesforce practices were not followed. One of the examples of the substandard Salesforce practices was over-utilising custom objects as they did before. Girikon also showed them standard Salesforce objects, flows and multiple standard functionalities that they can achieve with their current Salesforce licenses. It was not until then that StepOz discovered that Trailhead could empower their staff to learn independently rather than solely depending on any Salesforce partner for knowledge.
Liz and the StepOz team were already aware that there were issues with the previous implementation, but they were taken aback to discover the full extent of the problems. They were understandably frustrated with the previous partner upon realising the amount of work required to address the current issues.
At the same time, StepOz was planning to introduce a new business unit in Europe.
Girikon created a roadmap for StepOz to achieve the desired business processes with standard Salesforce architecture, taking into consideration their various business needs at that time: fixing issues, stabilising the system, finalising functionalities, introducing a new business unit in Europe and setting a foundation for future implementation of Marketing Cloud.
Though a lot of work was waiting for them ahead, Liz and her team felt reassured by the detailed plan of action presented by Girikon.
On top of everything, the StepOz team still needed to resume BAU activities, rebuild their architecture for sustainable success and roll out a new business unit in Europe to scale their business.
Following the roadmap, Girikon started three streams of work: BAU, Project and onboarding a new business unit. With BAU, Girikon did knowledge transfer with the StepOz team in the first two months and quick-fixing issues in the next six months to stabilise the system and ensure that StepOz could operate as usual. With Project, in the background, Girikon built their new architecture and helped them with data migration. At the same time, in a separate org, Girikon developed and deployed their new business unit, enabling multi-currency support in their Salesforce org so that they can manage their walking products in different currencies. After 8 months of providing stress-free work and effective communication to our client, Girikon overhauled StepOz’s Salesforce system.
Liz and the team are now very happy that the Girikon team could do a lot for them during a short period, compared to their previous partner. They are more than thrilled to see tangible results achieved from the implementation, such as stable booking forms for their customers. Girikon also helped them address various operational inefficiencies, such as the challenge of managing numerous custom reports internally. Using Salesforce standard objects, Girikon helped StepOz create new reports to track bookings monthly and helped Liz monitor revenues coming from the current month as well as the upcoming months. Last but not least, they were very impressed that Girikon did all this support and project work while also ensuring that they could roll out their new business unit in time, instead of dragging it for another year.
