Welcome to Insycle Insiders, a series of short conversations with customers that have made Insycle a key part of their data management strategy.
In this edition, we spoke with James Marshall, Systems Analyst from Kitchen Magic, a kitchen renovation company with locations in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. They’ve served tens of thousands of customers on the east coast, and use sophisticated sales and marketing operations to keep a consistent flow of new high-value opportunities coming into their sales pipeline.
This is the story of how their disconnected customer data was causing them headaches that prevented them from using HubSpot to its full potential, and how they used Insycle to remedy those problems.
Let’s get started.
Tell us who you are, what is Kitchen Magic?
I’m James Marshall, a systems analyst for Kitchen Magic, a sales and marketing company that remodels kitchens. My goal is to get all systems that we use — CRM or anywhere that customer data is stored — uniform and consistent.
What problems were you looking to solve?
We love using Hubspot, it gives us awesome customer intelligence as well as a great segmenting tool, but we couldn't get it to agree with our proprietary CRM that we have in place.
We needed to continue to use our proprietary CRM as well as our new dialing software that our sales team was adopting. The challenge with HubSpot is that it only allowed us to append to existing customer information or to deduplicate records based on a single-factor, an email address. Since we serve an older demographic, roughly 20% of our prospects and customers don't even have an email address.
So I went searching for a solution.
Within HubSpot, I searched for one of their existing partners at the time, and Insycle wasn’t yet available on their marketplace. I was trying all sorts of Google searches and finally, found Insycle.
By this time, I was thinking to myself — “Okay, I'm just setting myself up for more disappointment.” That was my experience. Every vendor said, “We can do this. We can do that,” and it was never exactly what I wanted.
Then I signed up for the Insycle trial. Within a couple of hours, I had several emails from Chen and Jonathan. I got all the help that I needed to start using Insycle. With Insycle, we had the ability to deduplicate records using any unique field. That's when I was sold. Insycle allowed us to be able to connect our internal CRM, HubSpot, and our dialer software as we had hoped.
How did you deal with these issues before?
We really had to use HubSpot as just a marketing tool. We couldn't use it as the serious CRM that we wanted to. So to store our proprietary information, we used our premise-based CRM. When we want to make mailing lists or use marketing automation we use HubSpot.
We had to manually update records in HubSpot if a job sold, or a prospect wanted to be removed from a mailing list, because we weren't capturing that information all in one place. We had HubSpot working independently. We had our internal CRM working independently. But they weren't talking to each other.
There was a lot of manual updating that we had to do in HubSpot in order to provide a good customer experience because we didn't want to send marketing emails to people that already made it through the buying funnel and we definitely didn't want to send marketing emails to customers. We have such a great system, but we kept creating duplicate records in HubSpot. Before Insycle we had 6,000 duplicates (by phone number) inside of HubSpot. Now we have zero.
To be honest with you, it was a continuous struggle. We wanted to use HubSpot for all that HubSpot could do. I wouldn't say that there was any nightmare situation, but maybe a series of daily not-so-good dreams.
How are you using Insycle today?
I'm glad you asked. Around the time I was investigating Insycle, we had already decided on a new dialer software that would integrate with our premise-based CRM. We wanted to use HubSpot as the CRM to do that but wouldn't have been able to do that without Insycle because we had no way to sync the third-party CRM.
We use a 20-digit lead ID for the ID that we use to keep records in sync. Because Insycle allows us to use any field when we're updating or importing records, that's the field that we chose. From what I remember, I don't think Insycle was ready for a 20-digit ID at first. But within a day the Insycle team had an update for us.
The other use that has come up is the bulk data correction tool, which is huge for us. Now that we have our duplicates under control, we probably use the bulk data correction tool more than anything.
In HubSpot, you have to set up a workflow. Then you have to wait for your smart list to populate. Then you can set up the workflow to make the changes. In Insycle, you just do a quick query and say “Okay, I want these fields to be...this”. It's that simple.
Also I'm a huge fan of the grid edit feature!
Normally, if I find several fields with a similar problem, I can't just set up a workflow to change one field. It might be something stupid, like, a whole bunch of records have a “1” in front of the phone number. How on earth am I going to get rid of those ones?
If a handful of them get stuck in there, I can use Insycle’s grid edit to fix it. All I have to do is search for any phone number that starts with a “1” so I can find them all. Then I use grid edit to eliminate the ones.
There are probably hundreds of uses I haven’t considered with the templates that you can set up. We have a template set up for the bulk editor, which allows me to look for things that I know are typical problems — why calls get stuck, why customers stop getting contacted. Once a week, I just query them using a template that's already in existence, and then fix them in bulk.
What was the biggest impact on your business?
Other than time savings, the biggest impact Insycle has had on our business has been giving us an easy way to deduplicate records using any field. Sometimes we'll do it by mobile phone to be extra safe. Sometimes we do it by address because we can accidentally end up sending two sales reps to the same house. That's been prevented before.
The biggest impact is that it actually allowed us to use HubSpot as the awesome CRM that it is. It allowed us to use that company-wide, where we weren't able to do it before because of its limitations.
What advice would you give about customer data management?
I would definitely recommend consistency of format. It doesn't matter if you favor a particular kind of format. With phone numbers, it doesn’t matter if you like the punctuation (the parentheses and dashes) — that's fine. But make sure that you collect all phone numbers that way. If you choose no punctuation like we do, because that will work through any automated dialer solution, collect all of your data that way.
Set up web forms and APIs to collect data in a uniform way. That just makes life easier, especially down the road. If you have a problem with duplicates or managing your data, in that case, I’d recommend using Insycle.
