Business challenges hindering growth

When Crema connected with the founder of ProfessionalChats, Scott Hansen, they were a small business with explosive growth. The business had strong month-over-month sales, but the technology they used to start the business was not holding up to the rising demand put on the system and their team. In order to bolster support for growth and defend their position in the market, the ProfessionalChats team entrusted Crema to help solve many of their technology challenges over several years of working together.

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These technology improvements fell into three main categories.

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Employee Workflow

• Systems needed to be built that would empower employees to work more efficiently and accurately. This included being able to chat with several customers at the same time in separate business sectors and ensuring information was communicated accurately.

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Customer Experience

• The platform needed to improve customer experience and exceed customer expectations of service and business performance.
• It needed to drive business to their customers by delivering warm leads.

Competitive Advantage

• The new system needed to be proprietary to the company.
• The platform needed to be built to scale and be HIPAA compliant to support growth into medical practices and doctors’ offices.
• The new chat system needed to position the company as an innovative, high-growth leader in the industry and an attractive target for acquisition by a larger company.

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Objectives and goals of the work

• To rebuild the bootstrapped platform of off-the-shelf technology into a proprietary chat system capable of meeting the demands of their growing business while improving chat performance, scalability, HIPAA compliance, employee efficiency and accuracy, and improved customer experience.

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• All of these improvements would not happen overnight. Our team worked to prioritize the product development process to solve the largest challenges first, while supporting the day-to-day technical operations of growth for ProfessionalChats.

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• Concurrently, the teams needed to ensure that current customers did not lose any sense of value from the system. We worked closely on a transition plan from the old platform to the new, monitoring for performance and creating contingency plans.

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Results

• 1000% revenue growth during the time we worked together.
• Scaled from 10 employees to 150 employees to support hundreds of new customers.
• Ability to enter into new markets with a HIPAA-compliant chat system.
• Company acquisition by Ruby Receptionists in Portland, Oregon.
• Integration of the ProfessionalChats system into the Ruby Receptionist system is actively underway.

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An acquisition to remember

In late 2018, ProfessionalChats had been acquired by Portland, OR company Ruby Receptionists.

"The acquisition plays a strategic role in expanding Ruby’s ability to engage with customers through all different channels, including digital and online platforms. The addition of ProfessionalChats allows Ruby’s customers to seamlessly add online chat to their website, Facebook and Google listing." For the full press release, click here.

During this time, Crema continued to serve ProfessionalChats as normal while plans for integration began to form.

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Integrating into Ruby Receptionists

After the acquisition in late 2018, Crema began working closely with Ruby Receptionists’ Chief Product and Technology Officer Katharine Nester, as well as their Director of Product Management, Dan Porter. Their goals to integrate ProfessionalChats software into their current platform are still underway.

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