In 2014, United Capital Financial Advisors planned to more than double revenue over the next three-to-five years. However, the company’s leadership team knew they couldn’t reach this ambitious goal with their current customer information management system.
Brandon Gage, the company’s senior vice president of technology, dreamed of re-engineering the company’s Salesforce® implementation in an effort to shorten sales cycles, improve employee productivity, and generate more revenue.
Trying to customize with code
At first, Brandon’s team tried to customize their user experience with Salesforce’s Visualforce user interface framework. However, the IT team quickly became frustrated with this tool.
The team’s backlog grew, and other mission-critical tasks took priority over Visualforce customizations. As time went on, the company’s Visualforce interface remained static.United Capital’s business users also didn’t like the user interface built with Visualforce.
The new pages didn’t offer the ease-of-use the advisors needed for day-to-day activities, customer information was always just out of reach, and many advisors simply refused to use the system.
Others complained about losing critical prospect information in the abyss of the confusing system. Brandon realized that United Capital’s growth goals were at risk because his team didn’t have the tools to quickly adapt to the company’s changing needs.
A drag-and-drop solution
Then Brandon heard about Skuid, a drag-and-drop tool to customize Salesforce user experiences. He halted Visualforce development and started creating a new Salesforce user interface with Skuid.
Brandon’s staff received advanced training from Skuid solutions engineers and then implemented their own internal Skuid user-training program.“Skuid is a complete reinvention of how we think, how we work, and how our employees are engaged,” Brandon says.
Reaping the results
By foregoing Visualforce programming and using Skuid to rebuild their Salesforce user experience, Brandon’s team saved more than 56 weeks of development time and $454,000. On top of the initial savings, Skuid is having an ongoing impact on United Capital’s bottom line.
Today, United Capital saves an estimated 40 hours of custom code development per incident.With Skuid, the IT staff can bypass the Salesforce unit test system, eliminating hours waiting for unit tests to run and issues to resolve.
In addition, United Capital saves an average of 30 hours each week by not having to hand-code markup, queries, and presentation layer logic. The results go far beyond cost savings for IT.
The new user interface accelerated advisement processes and shortened sales cycles. The time savings played a significant role in helping both United Capital’s advisors and IT staff meet the company’s ambitious objectives.
“The Skuid solution is intuitive, easy on the eyes, and fun to use,” Brandon adds. “Clean, simple, key visuals at the top of each page provide users with all the data they need.
Customer prospects are always visible and organized in four sales-cycle stages. It is so easy there is no need for training manuals or checklists.” With Skuid, Brandon’s team has:
- Overcome the obstacles presented by Visualforce development
- Become highly skilled at presenting complex customer information, tailored to the needs of users with different functions and diverse skill sets
- Established a truly scalable and cost-effective method for managing user experience across a diverse user base
"You can save so much time by having happy users,” Brandon says. “Skuid makes data actionable on every single screen.” To learn more about Skuid, get a free 30-day trial of our Salesforce app or get an unlimited trial for your Salesforce developer org.
