Workiro achieves customer 360° by integrating support, finance, and sales data with Celigo

About

Workiro is a software company specializing in document management and productivity apps that has been in business for over 20 years. Boasting over 61,000 customers and over 1 million users, they have expanded globally with business units in the UK, Australia, and the US. Attesting to their enormous success, they are listed on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker GETB.

Background

Since Workiro had been in business for so long, they had been running on a homegrown ERP/CRM system developed internally by their software engineers over the years. When they spun off from a larger Australian company, this presented an opportunity to rebuild their operations in a modern, scalable fashion.

Workiro’s Virtual Cabinet business model operates on custom configuration. No two deals are the same, as the product and pricing are individualized for each customer. For this reason, access to invoice and billing data is critical to helping the sales team accurately assess upsell opportunities and requests from existing customers.

The challenge

The old systems made closing deals inefficient: data was difficult to access due to the terminal style interface, there was no mobile access when salespeople were traveling, and it was downright impossible to find invoices or see what products each customer used. The team had little visibility into the state of each customer and prospect. As a result, these difficulties with data access challenged Workiro’s otherwise successful business model.

To replace their old systems, Workiro selected Zendesk as the support and customer success management solution, NetSuite as their ERP and Salesforce as their CRM. However, simply migrating to these new applications wouldn’t solve all of their problems, because modernizing their processes required complete data synchronization across these applications. This meant that customer invoices and billing from NetSuite needed to be accessible in Salesforce to accurate assess custom pricing for each deal. To complete this operational transformation, recurring billing from other product lines and SaaS business models processed on Chargebee also needed to be integrated with NetSuite.

The solution

Workiro researched numerous different options to integrate Zendesk, Salesforce, NetSuite and beyond. They asked NetSuite to recommend the best iPaaS platform for Workiro and they pointed the team to Celigo. NetSuite’s recommendation was not the only reason that Workiro found Celigo attractive: pricing was fair and predictable, and featured prebuilt flows along with the ability to build customizable integrations.

Jason Ross, Workiro’s CIO, had an immediate positive first impression of Celigo. “I was very happy and impressed with the Celigo team. I could tell they were dedicated and care a lot about the success of customers,” he said. “They were always willing to bend over backwards and jump in to resolve issues quickly, even if they occurred later in the day. It was an all-around great experience.”

With prebuilt integration apps, Ross and his team were able to quickly integrate Zendesk-NetSuite and Salesforce-NetSuite. This resolved many of their immediate issues revolving around data access, automated synchronization, and customer visibility. Turning their attention to Chargebee, they got to work on building custom integration flows for billing processes, completing the final step of the transformation. While his team had a ton of technical expertise and experience with integrations, building and deploying them had never been as easy as it was on Celigo. Speaking of his experience, Ross said: “I wanted to build the flows myself. Celigo is visual, not wizard-driven, which I appreciated as a technical person. Building the integration flows was easy and pretty uneventful.”

Bottom line

Through a combination of prebuilt and custom integrations, Workiro achieved the modern operational transformation they wanted. “Without Celigo, there’d be very little automation between the front sales office and back finance office,” Ross remarked. “The team now has the visibility they need to best serve the customer. Our support, finance, sales, and operations teams are all looking at the same data, they’re just looking at them through three different lenses.” This meant that they were able to scale their custom pricing model, which continues to see high profits and massive success.

Ross attributes Workiro’s competitive advantages to their emphasis on integrations, and more specifically to the impact Integrator.io had on their operations and revenue stream. His team had experience with other integration platforms, but they did not meet his needs for features, efficiency and cost. With Celigo automating the billing cycle and giving the company realtime visiblity into their customers, the front office can focus on driving more deals and realize Workiro’s goals for growth.