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Larsen Jewellery SugarCRM Case Study
About Larsen Jewellery
Larsen Jewellery was founded in Sydney in 2006, on the concept of getting customers directly involved with the jewellery creation process. Since then the business has grown, opening a branch in Melbourne and setting its sights on Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide too.
CRM Change Agent - Lars Larsen
Lars Larsen isn’t a jeweller, but he’s brought a bright idea to Australia’s jewellery world with a thriving brand that is well-loved by its customers. Larsen Jewellery has created a specific niche in custom-made fine jewellery, focussing on special experiences, lifetime customer relationships and personal service.
Larsen Jewellery’s success is grounded on Larsen’s business- minded approach, which he brings from a career in investment banking. “I’m not a jeweller by trade,” he explains, “but that’s actually an advantage. It’s my role to make sure our business runs efficiently, and I can focus on that 100%.”
“Without CRM we’d continue to do well, but disadvantages would surface in time. Our CRM is about making improvements and stepping up. It’s not addressing a specific downside but rather capturing upside – being able to seize more opportunities.“
Lars Larsen
Situation
Larsen Jewellery had been managing its customer information entirely on paper since it first started trading. Even payments were recorded in traditional column books by hand. This was working fine with a low volume of high-value sales, but there was potential for error and manual processes weren’t scalable in line with the brand’s growth strategy. The business needed CRM that would enable better processes and data management whilst maintaining the brand’s highly personalised service.
The Solution
CRM Online worked closely with the Larsen Jewellery Team to understand the entire customer experience, from walk-in bookings, to the detail that went into delivering a personalised experience.
Managing Bookings
Given the nature of a walk-in retail store, there needed to be an elegant booking in process, so that both return customers and new customers could efficiently be booked in to the next available jeweller for a design consult. For this process, CRM Online implemented an enquiry and booking form used across branches to quickly allocate walk-in customers to available desks. Jewellers could then simply bring up the new walk-in enquiry, and start driving the design consult experience.
Quoting that Guides Next Steps
As a custom designer jewellery business, it was vital that the consult experience was unhindered by technology, and that information was presented in a natural way to drive next steps. Select your metal type, select your ring size, done -- now, options are presented, would you like engraving? Yes? Perfect! Next, here are a few more relevant options you may want to consider.
Only by showing information progressively, could this process be flowing, and support the jewellers. Now, on to printing out the design documentation.
Generation of Customer Documentation
CRM Online leveraged the Flexidocs platform, a cloud-based document automation solution for SugarCRM designed to allow you to merge your CRM record data, and related data, into your own Microsoft Word document templates. This introduced a wealth of formatting possibilities, where we could explore the full creative set of tools available in Word to design various documents.
Flexidocs provided an automated way of quickly generating documents and ensured that manual re-entry was completely eliminated from the process of issuing documentation.
Clear, Consistent Processes.
Larsen Jewellery is only just staring on their CRM journey following the first phase of implementation, but already the benefits are clear.
“We’ve made our processes much easier and more efficient, and minimised human error,” says Larsen, adding: “We achieve this with lots of checks and balances that just aren’t possible when doing things manually.”
The CRM has various trigger points and automated prompts during the sales, production and service processes. “This is designed to help us avoid mistakes and make sure things happen on time, which adds polish to what we do,” says Larsen.
Delivering a Better Customer Experience.
Staff can now instantly access customer information. Larsen explains: “All our data is in one place and is instantly accessible. This has a good impact in so many ways. Even just looking up an outstanding balance when a customer comes in to pick up their jewellery – we’re not trying to make sense of scribbles on paper!"
““CRM Online helped us customise and set up SugarCRM. We could not have been in better hands. The service was fantastic and they went out of their way to make sure that we ended up with a system that was perfectly tailored to us. Couldn’t recommend more highly.“
Lars Larsen
CRM Strategy and Solution
There are CRM solutions designed specifically for the jewellery industry, but none is flexible enough to facilitate Larsen Jewellery’s requirements.
“We spent years researching what CRM to go with, and had a few false starts,” says Larsen. “We tested off-the-shelf products, some of which are designed for our industry, but quickly saw they weren’t flexible enough and pulled the plug before implementation.”
Larsen then took the opposite approach and considered a completely custom-built solution. “We spoke to a technology firm about building our CRM from scratch, but in hindsight I’m relieved we didn’t go this route and end up with something that wouldn’t easily evolve.”
Why SugarCRM?
“Then we looked at Sugar and it excelled,” says Larsen. “It’s the perfect CRM to handle our complex production processes – professionally designed to work out of the box, but so flexible it’s like having a custom-built CRM. I’m pretty sure no- one else has Sugar set up like we do.”
The Sugar solution, enhanced with Flexidocs, lets staff easily capture information and use it to make the customer experience even better. Customer details are all in one place, from contact information and enquiries to jewellery sketches, certificates, payment histories and service records.
“By making life easier for our jewellers and customer service people, I’m helping them focus their energy on delivering exquisite workmanship and outstanding experience.“
Lars Larsen
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