We are really proud to have Communitech on board as a client and excited that they wanted to share their Evercontact story with us below! Communitech is really a perfect partner for us, as they not only have a smart and productive team, but we both have a common goal: to provide innovative solutions to make it easier for other companies to start, grow and succeed.

 

 

About Communitech

Founded by a group of entrepreneurs in 1997, Communitech is an industry-led innovation center in Waterloo Region, supporting a tech cluster of nearly 1,000 companies employing 30,000 people. Communitech supports tech companies at all stages of their growth and development – from startups to rapidly growing mid-sized companies and large global players. A member of the Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs, Communitech supports companies in commercializing innovation and technology, with the goal of creating a greater number of successful global businesses.

 

The “Contact Problem” They Were Facing

We’ve heard people say before “if you have contacts, you have a contact problem” 🙂

Within the digital world, many companies’ most important goal is to foster interaction with their clients and, to do so, having all your contact ducks-in-a-line is where that game starts (or stops!).  We checked in with Rob Drimmie, Communitech’s Director of Technical Strategy, and he shared the challenges they used to have with their contact management.

“Previously, our weekly average for contact additions to our CRM Salesforce was about 25 accounts, and this represented what ALL of our teammates added (not counting bulk uploads from events).  Considering that at Communitech we exchange with hundreds and hundreds of new people every week, that meant we were missing a ton of contact data, and hence losing the opportunity of growing our community & building a continued business relationship with so many of these new contacts.”  

 

 

How Evercontact helps

In early 2014, Communitech started testing out Evercontact and added 7 colleagues, then 20 more and finally 50 total.  On a daily basis all of these 50 individuals from various positions (C-suite, Program & Account managers, Support) communicate with new & established clients.  Behind the scenes in Outlook, Evercontact automatically detects any new contact data in those email exchanges and then pushes contact suggestions to Salesforce where Communitech has a lead “dispatcher” who chooses to save them as a lead or contact, or to keep the database clean & not add certain contacts.

 

“Whereas before we only had 25 new contact additions in Salesforce/week, in just the first 3 months with Evercontact with 20 or so folks on board, the service created/updated 1000 contacts in our Salesforce database, hence 10x what we were doing before manually and we hadn’t even added the full 50 teammates yet.”

“Not only does Evercontact save us time daily, but it’s quite affordable when compared to other solutions which can be expensive at a dollar a record, especially for a database our size. So Evercontact, which inherently targets active contacts, is a great way to optimize an operations budget spend: the ROI is clear, and, most importantly, the data quality is constantly updated! “

 

And how does that translate into real value for Communitech?

Rob Drimmie continued:

“There is the obvious “saving us countless days of our team otherwise having to copy and paste contact data.” But just as important, now, without any effort internally, the Evercontact integration means that our entire team has access to the latest contact information on our community that, in the past, could have been 1) missing 2) out of date or 3) just plain wrong.

As a not-for-profit, value for money is something we consider deeply with every purchase. Communitech is successful because we hire great people and we use tools and technologies that allow them to spend time on the tasks they do so well. Managing contacts, chasing updated phone numbers or anything like that is at best a distraction and at worse diminishes their effectiveness. Automated contact management with Evercontact means they never need to waste that time.

We’d like to thanks Communitech for sharing on the blog today & wish them continued success in their efforts to step up innovation within Ontario & beyond!