Search

Avetta saves millions of dollars a year for clients like GE, CEMEX, BASF, and Verizon. More importantly, the company’s SaaS-based service saves lives. It prevents accidents and injuries by streamlining prequalification of its clients’ contractors—from window cleaners to cell tower climbers.

The business model is golden, as Avetta’s 30% year-over-year growth clearly shows. But after years of racing forward, underinvestment in internal technology and automation began to impact the company’s ability to scale.

Avetta hired Slalom to implement Salesforce Service Cloud and update their Sales Cloud solution, but the partnership led to something more—a cultural transformation.

“In the past, we’d done everything manually, and it had worked,” says Avetta CTO Adam Thier. “We had grown to a very large size, with 52,000 contractors in our system, still operating our support desk on sticky notes.”

Because Avetta was so successful, it was easy to throw people at problems and keep charging ahead. But employees felt the strain. First-call resolution of customer issues was virtually impossible and siloed systems made it difficult to get a 360-view of the customer experience. Eventually an easily preventable data error with a key client was the final straw, and Avetta made a commitment to invest in change.

Slalom helped Avetta pinpoint 192 specific challenges—from the absence of a case management system to billing, reporting, and training needs. In less than three months, we helped Avetta resolve 113 of these, including all its critical priorities.

Avetta built its technology ecosystem around Organizer, the proprietary vendor management software at the core of its business. The ecosystem includes a subscription billing platform, accounting system, and marketing automation platform. Avetta purchased Salesforce to receive customer data from all these systems and enable better customer relationships—but needed help bringing it all together.

Slalom architected data flows, introduced customer IDs to resolve duplicate accounts, and leveraged Amazon Redshift and Dell Boomi to enable ongoing data synchronization. For the first time, Avetta employees could see all their customer information in one place and trust the data. This was the key to remedying poor adoption of Salesforce Sales Cloud and enabled successful implementation of Service Cloud as a call center and ticketing system.

Slalom also accelerated one of the most time-consuming parts of Avetta’s new client onboarding process—adding lists of contractors to Organizer and identifying which ones are already in the system. Interns were spending hundreds of hours filling in missing data and comparing companies with similar names, often through grueling web searches. We identified an opportunity to replace all that manual effort with a data enrichment tool that another group at Avetta had already purchased. We also automated loading of the enhanced data into Salesforce and converting new contractors into opportunities. Now Avetta can onboard new clients in minutes, instead of weeks.

When Slalom started talking with Avetta, we heard symptoms. We kept digging until we had a deep understanding of how the business wins and where it needed to improve to keep winning. “We are myopically focused on understanding the client’s business,” says Rogers.

This perspective helped Courtney Francis, a Slalom organizational effectiveness consultant, build trust with Avetta’s sales and support teams. “What I really added to the process was, ‘How does this work for real life?’”

A Louisiana native, Francis braved the snows of a Utah winter to meet in person with both teams and thoroughly understand their existing processes. She then advocated for their needs throughout the implementation, ensuring that the solution would be human-centered and—in partnership with Avetta trainers—making sure employees knew how to use it.

Today, Avetta has taken the pressure off its people and balanced the golden triangle of people, process, and technology. With all three working in sync, the company has reliable data and cohesive insight on its customers. Avetta employees are embracing the efficiencies of technology, while also collaborating more effectively to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

“It’s unbelievable how well-positioned we are,” Thier concludes.