CRMMETRY: A DRIVING FORCE OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

WHILE MANY companies have tentatively begun to digitise work processes, CRMmetry Jamaica, the Salesforce solutions partner that has been a driving force of digital transformation in the region, sees a much bigger revolution coming.

CRMmetry is the first Salesforce consultancy in the Englishspeaking Caribbean. The company was founded by Jordan Baskett and Andrea Johnson, business transplants from New York who came back home to answer the digital demand in 2017. The company, headquartered in Kingston, offers customised customer and constituent relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Jordan Baskett, CEO, said CRMmetry has been a “fouryear, overnight success story”. In 2018 business was challenging, but times have changed. Baskett recalls, “This company for the first two years was Andrea and I trying to get a break. Things were different then, and the concept of ‘cloud’ was not as highly praised as it is now locally. Since then, however, our revenue has at least doubled every year and we now work with some of the largest companies in Jamaica.”

For the company, he added, “Employment numbers have pretty much doubled year-over-year. However, the most exciting part is not the employment numbers, but the individuals. We have an amazing team, with a senior business analyst, who formerly consulted for one of the largest investment banks in London, and another consultant who ran Salesforce operations for one of the region’s largest telecoms. Our technical lead is also one of the region’s first Salesforce-certified application architects, to name a few.”

INTERESTED IN HIRING GOOD TALENT

The company currently has staff on the ground in Panama, Trinidad and Jamaica, with the latter two countries being their primary markets. As they expand, they expect to continue to work more throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. He also added that “CRMmetry is very interested in hiring the best talent that is comfortable working in a very transparent, circular management structure”.

CRMmetry implements Salesforce for clients in specified operational areas and very often when the results are in, they request applications in other areas. The company currently has seven active projects.

Baskett detailed that “Salesforce allows businesses to have great 360-degree views around their sales, marketing and service efforts. Meaning they can manage their business processes and total throughput of all those efforts”. The platform offers businesses an efficient systemised way to manage customer contacts and track sales activity. It does this through services such as Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Data Cloud, Community Cloud, Commerce Cloud and more. Baskett said, “Salesforce, by its nature and its wide spectrum of products, allows it to be a onestop shop for businesses across varying industries to manage, maintain and communicate with its stakeholders.

“We are currently working with clients in hospitality, real estate, financial services, manufacturing, communications and professional services industries.”

INCREMENTAL APPROACH

For many companies in the region, the approach to going digital is incremental, but gathers speed when there is evidence of proven results.

Andrea Johnson, COO, said that many companies see the benefits of digitisation, but often begin with one area of operation or one team, assessing progress and adding other team members and other teams over time.

Johnson added, “To help speed up digital transformation, Salesforce has the largest add-on marketplace of any CRM. So you can add apps like Gsuite, or Dropbox in Salesforce with little to no integration. You can now even integrate AWS servers natively. It’s the number one CRM in the world with 20 per cent of the world market share, because it’s the most customisable platform in the world.”

While the company has signed non-disclosure agreements with all clients so proprietary information cannot be shared without their approval, the average Salesforce customer experiences a 28 per cent increase in revenue, a 32 per cent increase in agent productivity, a 26 per cent ROI, 24 per cent faster resolution time, and approximately 37 per cent faster deployments. CRMmetry customers have experienced ROI consistent with the industry average.

CRMmetry’s customer nexus is 80 per cent in Jamaica, but the company has done projects with clients in Turks and Caicos, St Kitts, the United States of America, and has been involved in deals in Trinidad. They are also starting to explore Barbados and The Bahamas, along with other regions within the Caribbean.

Baskett, when asked about the average time it takes to implement a new project for a company, outlined, “On average, it can be anywhere from 1.5 months to six months. It depends on the digital maturity of the customer and the size of the team we are implementing for. In other words, it really depends on the ability of a customer to respond and take advantage of technological developments that would affect the implementation timeline, as we may have to help them to lay a proper foundation to be more agile.”

The CEO stated, “We are really excited about the developments happening in the regional financial space. We assist financial institutions to understand their complex relationships with all types of customers and provide better customer service and transparency.” He also elaborated that“for manufacturing companies, CRMmetry can manage the complete process commercially and across retail – from orders, route and delivery planning, AI-based merchandising, loyalty management, and rebate management”.