About BloomSmith
Formed in 2015, BloomSmith provides VAT-bridging loans on real estate transactions to address funding and loan-to-value shortfalls in the lending market. Their customers are mainly experienced borrowers who are looking to benefit from an intelligent transaction structure in preference to a fixed legal charge.
Before adopting SpotlerCRM in 2019, the company's process for contact management was using a combination of whiteboards and spreadsheets to manage their data and customer relationships. As the business grew and their aspirations became more complex, they realised they needed a more sophisticated system to manage this. That's when they turned to SpotlerCRM.
Nigel Smith, CEO of BloomSmith explained, “The business was growing rapidly and we realised that to achieve our aspirations we needed to change, and we needed to achieve this change in its simplest form.”
CRM with Case Management
The Service & Support option available in the SpotlerCRM is crucial to the way BloomSmith runs its business, providing the ability to track customer support cases from the point of opening through to closure.
Nigel added, “When we first signed up for the CRM, we saw it as a way of managing our customers. We then realised the case management system was able to manage our deals and from that came to realise that we didn’t have to use the CRM as just a database, but more of a ‘deal management’ system.”
Customisation that Makes a Difference
Customising the CRM fields was also important to BloomSmith, in particular the introduction of calculable fields, which have helped save the company a lot of time. Nigel commented, “The process of implementing customisation started with the team actioning it themselves, but found they needed help with the more complex requirements. After a few calls to the SpotlerCRM, the customisations were implemented. However, this level of support has also meant our team is now confident to create custom fields for themselves.”
Going forward, BloomSmith is looking to customise the reporting functionality of their personal dashboards and understand how this can be used to highlight data relevant to their objectives. The team has booked a call time with SpotlerCRM’ Technical Success team to help create the charts and widgets they would like for their dashboards.
The CRM Potential
When asked how the CRM has benefited BloomSmith’s operations, Nigel Smith commented, “The CRM has benefited us in every way possible. Now all our customer data is in one place, and all the data is stored in the cloud, which is backed up and secure.
Nigel continues, “Another example of how the CRM has benefited us is in using the integrated marketing tool. We previously ran our marketing emails through Outlook and after a year of using the Simple Marketing tool, we upgraded to the Advanced Marketing tool. This has provided us with the different design features and ways to target different audiences.”
Nigel concludes, “The CRM has the capabilities to fit into all aspects of how any business operates, from record keeping and relationship management to reporting and marketing. For us, it has become an essential tool in helping manage our growth and has allowed us to achieve our business objectives, these objectives have also evolved in terms of sophistication, complexity, and scale due to our use of the CRM.”