Our Services: SuiteCRM

Problem: Reflections are one of the UK's largest Hairdressing Apprenticeship providers in the UK with over 500 students learning at any one time. With so many student applications managing this process was proving difficult, very manually intensive and prone to mistakes. There was no way to know how many students were in the application process and at what stage they were. Reflections also have many key learner software applications once a student is on a course and each one of the would need to be set up manually. If there was a system that could manage the entire end-to-end application process and then automatically manage the onboarding of student applications that value would be huge.

Solution: Rakata deployed our CRM to manage the application process. The complex and detailed application forms are now completely digital and online, the management of parent/guardian authorisation where required is completely automated and the integration into key applications is totally seamless. These applications include PICS, Active Directory, Moodle and others. Following the successful deployment of the CRM Rakata now manage the complete Technology landscape including all website hosting, and complete IT managed services for over 200 devices including servers, routers desktop & laptops across 3 sites and all associated applications.

One of the UK's largest lead generation companies with over 800 staff Pursuit marketing had an all too common patchy landscape of various systems including spreadsheets (of course!), small databases, SAAS tools and no single point source of the truth and extremely manual processes to try and manage it all. Rakata over an 8-month period has deployed SuiteCRM, tailored it to their needs and integrated specific value add tools such as customer portals, online forms, data imports, bespoke reporting and many more. That economic benefit to Pursuit is huge. SuiteCRM is open source so there is no licence cost meaning Rakata can support the CRM as a whole based on the number of users but not licensed per user. The saving when compared to comparable solutions such as MS Dynamics & Salesforce is huge and support much more tailored to their needs.

Problem:  Proten is a specialist property preservation company that as contractors and surveyors provide property preservation, protection and repair solutions. Managing a growing business with manual processes, however, was proving an ever-increasing problem. All processes were manual, tricky to manage and prone to costly errors. Proten like most companies managed with very knowledgeable people that were tricky to replace when they were not there, the odd Access database and of course excel spreadsheets. They wanted an integrated solution that managed customer enquiries, the survey booking process, the surveyor's diary, the subsequent survey documentation and integration with document management tools to move the survey documents around the business without having to engage with employees to do this task. The Proten management team knew there was not a product on the market that could do exactly what they needed. They had also witnessed numerous attempts with previous employers to implement off-the-shelf solutions which had ended up botched and partially working implementations or even complete failures.

Solution:  Rakata has deployed a customised SuiteCRM instance that manages the complete end-to-end process from the initial customer engagement to complete surveyor management. Customer engagement such as surveyor appointments are totally automated with Email and SMS automatically sent. Surveyors' appointments are totally integrated into their Office 365 diaries and every aspect of the survey can be managed from the CRM. Surveyors are informed of relevant documents and changes all via the CRM and their phones. The success of phase 1 has now been expanded to phase 2 which will be the full end-to-end management of the restoration work which often follows a successful survey of customer engagement. Following the success of the CRM Rakata now provide complete Technology support services including IT support to over 30 employees including servers, desktops/laptops, and applications over 3 sites spanning the entire country.