CX Consulting is a Cape Town managed security services provider for small and medium businesses. It looks after its clients’ IT infrastructure and endpoints, and handles their governance, risk, compliance and cybersecurity. Before BaseCloud, Pieter ran a custom open-source CRM, and with communication all over the place, keeping track of what went where was an administrative nightmare.
Now a proposal that took half an hour is done in under five minutes with BaseCloud CRM, and if a client hasn’t replied within two days, automated follow-up emails go out so no follow-up is missed. Website enquiries get an immediate response instead of waiting for Monday. Since connecting Claude through the CRM connector, client reporting that used to take one or two weeks takes about an hour.
“What would have taken us a week, two weeks, can be done in an hour's time.”
Transcript
So it makes it so much easier reporting to clients. What would have taken us a week, two weeks, can be done in an hour's time.
CX Consulting is an MSSP. We service both the medium and small business side. We've got two components. The one is your traditional IT management. We look after IT infrastructure and manage endpoints for clients. And then we've got governance, risk and compliance and cybersecurity on the other pillar. We've been operating now for almost seven years.
I had a custom open-source CRM that I tried to customise as far as possible. Communication was literally all over the place. It was a bit of an administrative nightmare to manage exactly what goes where. But now, moving over to BaseCloud, it's a breeze.
I'm going to be honest with you: I was very, very skeptical in the beginning. And then as we started working with it and delving into it, especially in the past two weeks or so, when the MCP plugin came into effect, managing the business is literally a breeze. So it makes it so much easier reporting to clients. What would have taken us a week, two weeks, can be done in an hour's time.
It's customisable. That's one thing that I like. It's not like you buy this service and now need to squeeze your business around and change your systems to fit what the CRM can do. I can't see my business ever running without BaseCloud.
It has been very easy. And the support that we got from the BaseCloud team was amazing. You drop an email: "Hey, I'm stuck with this," and within a couple of minutes you get a response: "Let's hop onto a Teams meeting and get it sorted." It's really the easiest of all the CRM programs that I have ever been exposed to. If you know what you're doing, you can have your company up and running in less than an hour.
Well, we can start off with doing a proposal. A proposal could have taken about half an hour. With the proposal automation on BaseCloud, it's literally not even five minutes. It's done.
If you don't get any communication back from the client within another two days, automated emails go out. So it's not like you send an email and then, "Oh shoot, I forgot to follow up." The follow-up is there. So you literally can't miss any follow-ups.
If someone enquires on the website, there's that flow. It's not that someone fills in a form on a Friday night and hopefully you get back to them by Monday morning. It's immediate. It's there. And that's what I like. In today's age, the quicker you respond, the better your chance to close that client.
The power that's been given to us with Claude, the good response we get from the team... it's difficult for me to say what you guys can do better. I love the way the user interface looks. It's nice and easy to understand. It's not cluttered. And I like that we've got the ability to plug some of our other platforms into the CRM.
Don't look at the cost. Calculate the amount of time the CRM system will save you. It will basically pay for itself within the first week. There's literally no way around it.
And I'm not even talking about missed follow-ups. Those missed follow-ups could have sent the client to someone else. So you're looking at potential missed revenue. So I would say to you guys: this is a no-brainer. Move over. You might think it's going to cost you. It's actually going to save you money, and it's going to make you money.
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