How Strata Geosystems Used Decorum to Improve Their Order Management Process and Customer Experience

Strata Geosystems is a global leader in geosynthetic manufacturing and soil reinforcement technology

Headquarters

Mumbai, India

Company Size

450+ team members

Website

https://www.strataglobal.com/

The Challenge

Strata Geosystems encountered numerous obstacles in managing their orders, struggling with an overly complex and redundant workflow, significant communication bottlenecks, and extensive paperwork requirements. The company handled both domestic and international orders daily, each characterized by complex specifications. This absence of an effective solution not only diminished the team's efficiency but also severely impacted their Customer Experience (CX), hindering their ability to provide optimal service to their customers.

The Outcome

Strata Geosystems revolutionized its process with the integration of Decorum, streamlining every step from order receipt to dispatch and more. This transformation was achieved through our comprehensive suite of solutions: a company portal designed for the operations team, an order portal tailored for customer convenience, and a CRM system optimized for the sales team. This not only enhanced operational efficiency and improved communication across the board but also significantly uplifted the CX, resulting in more positive outcomes and feedback from their customers.

Our order process was quite complex, with several product variables. This resulted in a lot of offline communication. We were looking to build a custom solution when we stumbled upon Decorum. Decorum has helped map out our complicated process and automate it, easing several operational tasks.

Gautam Dalmia

Chief Development Officer, Strata

The Quest for a Solution

Strata's order process was tedious and prone to errors. The online and offline back-and-forth communication between teams and customers increased the time to process an order by 5-7 days. As someone from their operations team said, “it was a mess”.

Strata's Processes Before Decorum:

Order Capture: Customers struggled with sending long and detailed emails for their orders. They had to specify many item-level and order-level details such as perforations, texture, seam strength, and port of discharge. It would sometimes take up to 40 back-and-forth emails to get all the details required for Strata to process the order.

Order Approval: The process then required physical printing of orders for signature approvals and manual data entry into their ERP system (SAP), creating a deeper bottleneck for larger orders needing multiple approval signatures. This significantly increased wait time for customers, causing further delays in order processing.

Coordination with Manufacturing Team: With three or more office members involved, coordinating with the manufacturing plant was inefficient, often leading to miscommunications. The manual creation of their internal document for the plant called Intimation of Manufacturing (IOM) for each order was tedious and added significant delays to order completion and delivery.

Document Handling: For every order and every dispatch, crucial documents like Purchase Order and Bill of Lading were scattered across different email accounts, computers and phones, further slowing down the operations.

Dispatch: Customers were often left in the dark, unaware of their order status due to a deeply inefficient dispatch process that relied on yet another Excel sheet for planning. There was constant back-and-forth communication between the customer, the office, and the plant over emails and phone calls, further delaying the flow of necessary information to the customer.

Communication: Any communication with customers beyond their orders, for events such as updates to price list, introduction of new items, company events, and packaging details from the company's end, as well as customer inquiries, issues, and concerns from customer's end were all disorganized, lacking a systematic approach to recording and tracking these interactions.

This process was slow and inefficient. The time difference with their international customers and the complexity of their item customization further reduced their efficiency and severely affected the CX.

There used to be a long delay between when a customer raised a query and when it was resolved, due to the different time zones.

Dimple

Sales Support Executive, Strata

As Strata experienced business growth, there was an urgent need for a streamlined solution to not only manage the rising order volume efficiently but also to significantly improve the customer experience.

Strata <> Decorum: The Journey Begins

Strata realized that they needed a software solution to fix their complex ordering process to improve their CX but couldn't find the right fit, leading them to consider an custom solution. However, a chance meeting of one of Strata's global sales team members with one of Decorum's founders served as an opportunity to understand that Decorum perfectly matched Strata's needs, solving their problem and improving CX without the need for a time-consuming and expensive custom-built software.

I was in conversation with more than 3 vendors to create a platform that could streamline our order generation and processing flow. No other company could provide such a user-friendly, flexible, and easily customizable application as Decorum. Decorum is a platform that has helped us reduce email exchanges, made reporting significantly easier, and, most importantly, provided an easy-to-use application for all our customers globally. The team was able to customize the app based on our needs and has made it very easy for the admin team to make changes along the way.

Richika Bhawnani

Ex-Strata Global Sales & Marketing

The Implementation Journey

At this stage, Decorum was still taking shape as a SaaS product. Strata was our first big account, and tackling Strata's complex needs required us to go deeper into some of our features, and also gain the trust of their skeptical senior board members. The team at Decorum worked tirelessly to navigate these challenges.

Steps That Made the Implementation a Success:

Understanding the needs of all the stakeholders: Decorum worked closely with Strata to thoroughly understand all the touchpoints with their customers with the intent to elevate customer experience and improve operational efficiency. It was very clear that streamlining interactions between the team and the customers like order processing and sharing relevant documents was the overarching solution for Strata's problems.

Making Decorum flexible: To address Strata's varied customer handling, Decorum increased its software's flexibility in almost every aspect including the metric system, order flow, and item-level customization. This adaptability allowed Strata to capture unique cases, simplifying the process without developer intervention.

Onboarding in stages: Decorum was initially tested with Strata's most critical and complex customer, followed by a phased rollout. Starting with Strata's operations team and international customers, it expanded to include domestic customers and other teams, after confirming user satisfaction and comfort with the system.

Staying focused and optimistic: The project's success was driven by a few heroes from Strata's team who spearheaded this initiative to address the aforementioned challenges, and by Decorum's commitment to eliminate this bottleneck for Strata, allowing it to keep their customers satisfied.

What Changed at Strata with Decorum?

With Customer Portal

The comprehensive features of Decorum's customer portal redefined Strata's communication with its customers and vice versa. Strata's initial customers were very happy with this development as it made interactions organized and hassle-free. With Strata's branded portal, customers enjoyed a personalized experience with accurate order placement, streamlined dispatch tracking, centralized document access, timely information sharing, and more!

With Company Portal

Decorum's company portal transformed Strata's internal operations by eliminating the unfitting reliance on Excel sheets, reducing lengthy email threads and decreasing the frequency of phone calls. The workflow now was far less prone to errors and manual dependency, and it became much easier for the team to manage important data like individual price lists, customer information, and item specifications. The portal allowed the right stakeholders to be informed in real-time and eased coordination between Strata's offices and plants across multiple locations. The enhanced reports and dashboards provided valuable insights to the team, and above all, the happy customers energized the team at Strata in more ways than one.

Fun Fact The outstanding experience with Decorum's customer portal delighted one of Strata's customers in the United States so much so that within a few weeks they emailed the team at Decorum to set up the portal for their customers as well: “After having used the Decorum app, we would like to coordinate with you on getting similar functionality for our customers.”

We used to spend hours processing a single order. Now, with automated notifications and centralized document management, everything's at our fingertips!

Dimple

Sales Support Executive, Strata

Top Benefits for Strata

Comprehensive Item-Level and Order-Level Specifications: This feature enforced all details to be captured from the get-go by allowing the team to create required or optional fields at both item-level and order-level, reducing errors caused by missing details and enabling faster order processing.

Secured Price Lists: The price list feature provided a safe space for Strata to easily record, manage and share multiple price lists. With securely managed access, it removed worries about unauthorized viewing and editing.

Centralized Document Management: Important internal and external documents, from packaging information to bill of lading were better organized and easily searchable both by Strata and its customers.

Extensive Unit of Measurement: Strata's products were intricate with specific dimensions such as length and width, alongside cautious calculations such as area and the number of rolls, adding layers of complexity to the process. By offering unit measurements in formats familiar to each customer rather than adhering to a single standard, Strata significantly enhanced the customer experience.

Custom Order Flows: Decorum enabled Strata to customize order journeys based on several factors such as order value and customer location, allowing for personalized flows to meet different requirements.

Seamless Communication & Useful Reports: Communication with customers regarding orders and outside of that became simpler. Apart from documents, Strata was able to make announcements and share updates with their customers on the portal with text and image banners. Additionally, a weekly summary email for C-level executives offered a snapshot of activities, enhancing transparency and reducing oversight.

Enhancing Customer Interactions and Satisfaction With Decorum CRM

Within the next few months, Decorum became an integral part of Strata's day-to-day operations. The team's positive feedback and customers appreciation for the easy-to-use customer portal and real-time updates highlighted Decorum's impact on enhancing the customer experience (CX) and overall workflow.

While Decorum usage was increasing with time, Gautam Dalmia, the Chief Development Officer at Strata was exploring few Customer Relationship Management (CRM) softwares to tackle the challenge of managing an expanding sales team and increasing leads both in India and internationally. One day, during a routine call, Gautam threw a curve ball and asked for a demonstration of Decorum CRM. Even though Decorum CRM was in its nascent stage at that time, Gautam realized that it would be the most suitable solution for Strata due to several overlapping operations. After seeing the initial development, he decided to stop his search and wait for Decorum CRM to be developed.

Once Decorum CRM was rolled out to Strata's domestic and international sales teams, the crucial benefits of maintaining a single source of truth became evident. All data on one platform enabled seamless conversion of leads to customers. Decorum suite of customer portal, company portal and CRM unified the sales operations and enhanced CX by keeping customers informed throughout the process. This decision marked a significant step towards optimizing their sales strategy and customer service capabilities.

Fun Fact Strata had begun Salesforce implementation but realized midway that Decorum CRM suited their needs better and made the switch.

Before and After Decorum

Order Processing

Complex & Manual: The absence of streamlined systems led to time-consuming, tedious and error-prone processes.

Streamlined & Swift: Automation and streamlining reduced order processing time and closed gaps for errors.

Communication

Redundant: A lack of centralized communication made information sharing difficult, further aggravated by time zone differences.

Efficient: A single platform for all communication did away with confusion and enabled seamless interaction, regardless of location.

Customer Experience

Frustrated: The inability to communicate with Strata efficiently and to get real-time updates on their orders left customers in the dark.

Satisfied: Real-time tracking and time zone-sensitive support led to soaring customer satisfaction levels, with much better overall communication with Strata.

Decorum Drives Significant Growth for Strata Geosystems

75%

Time to approve customer order

90%

No. of email exchanges between company and customer

100%

No. of mistakes in order processing

Strata's inefficient internal operations hindered the experience for their customers. The sales team wasn't equipped with the right tools to manage and close their leads, and the management didn't have a clear and accurate overview of day-to-day operations. The chance meeting of the right people from Strata and Decorum sparked this journey and both the teams have only grown from there on. Decorum has revolutionized the operations at Strata with its unified platform, which in turn has greatly improved the CX for Strata's customers.

As someone who personally uses Decorum on a daily basis one aspect that truly stands out for me is the support we receive from Decorum's team. They are available 24/7 and respond quickly to any queries we have. They are always on their toes to solve our concerns and do it with immense patience and expertise. We couldn't be happier with the results and the outstanding support we receive from the Decorum team.

Dimple

Sales Support Executive, Strata