Honey Bee Baker is a high-end bakery in Silver Lakes, Pretoria, making celebration cakes for weddings, birthdays and baby showers for private, venue, wholesale and corporate clients. Their old overseas CRM didn’t talk to their banks, payments took forever to update, and support was slow, so when they brought their admin in-house they decided to start fresh.
With BaseCloud CRM set up around the way they work, the system now handles the nitty-gritty that used to eat most of their time. They estimate it saves around 7 hours of production admin and at least half an hour with every customer.
“It's that 20/80 principle: sometimes the 20% you can't handle with the system takes about 80% of your time. And that's something BaseCloud solved for us.”
Transcript
We run a high-end bakery from Pretoria, in the Silver Lakes area. We specialise in celebration cakes for weddings, birthdays, baby showers and so on, to be part of the memories people make. We have a full range of products, from very small up to very high-end, and a wide variety of clients. We work with a bunch of venues, some wholesale clients and some corporate clients. So if you have a celebration coming up, we can help you.
There was obviously a lot of manual administration, which took a lot of time. I actually didn't realise how quick it can be until we started using BaseCloud.
I'd been having some issues with the CRM I was using. It's an overseas company, so it didn't talk to some of our other programs that well, especially the banks. It took forever to update payments. And the support took quite a while to come back to me. And then it was very much a "did you turn it off and on again?" vibe. So I was considering moving. It just feels like a lot to move your whole system over to a new one, so I was kind of hesitant about that. Then we wanted to move our admin more in-house. I had a remote admin who did a lot of the work, but we realised it would be more beneficial to move it in-house. So I thought, instead of teaching somebody an old system and then moving to a new one, let's just start fresh and run everything on a new system.
I think the onboarding... they made it much easier than I'd anticipated. With a lot of other systems I've tried, you get a 7-day trial, and I feel you need a lot more time on a system before you can see its potential. But having a customer success manager was extremely helpful, because she could talk me through the basics of the system from the get-go. So that really helped a lot. And as I got to know more of the features, it expanded what I was able to do with the system. So everything just grew from there.
I think definitely the customisability of it. You're not pushed into a specific system that you have to conform everything to. We have a very specific way of doing things, and you can program BaseCloud to work around that and do exactly what you want it to do. A lot of the others are a set system you have to conform to, and then you handle all the other nitty-gritty separately. But BaseCloud I can program to handle the nitty-gritty as well. It's that 20/80 principle: sometimes the 20% you can't handle with the system takes about 80% of your time. And that's something BaseCloud solved for us.
From our production side, probably 7 hours of admin, I guess. And from the customer side it's hard to say, because we get a lot of different inquiries. But possibly at least half an hour with every customer we transact with. So around 15 hours of admin as well. It really adds up.
I haven't worked with any company before that worked so closely with what I needed and then made improvements on that. That's definitely something that stands out.
It's nice to know there are people who actually have your back and care about what you do.
It can be suitable to any business in any field, because it's so customisable. It doesn't just handle one type of business. It can really be expanded to any aspect of your business. So yeah, definitely worthwhile looking at.
