Case Study: me&u creates better visibility over its customers

Technology startup me&u, known for its QR code ordering system in hospitality venues has obtained visibility over its customers and tightened its processes.

Katrina Barry, global CEO at me&u speaks to Digital Nation about how the brand went from using various spreadsheets to centralising its customer data and processes onto one platform.

Barry said the startup was running sales pipelines, activation pipelines and account management pipelines in a series of Excel spreadsheets hosted on individual computers across the world.

“Some contracts were under our founders’ bed. We needed a CRM that would enable us to become an efficient business, whereby we could use it for our entire process,” she said.

“From lead generation through to sales through to activation, onboarding, then through to account management and be able to link that through to sales performance."

To merge all these spreadsheets together, Barry and the team at me&u turned to Salesforce.

Barry said traditionally people use Salesforce for sales lead generation, tracking pipelines for visibility over productivity.

At me&u, they needed a “secondary pipeline” to track the technical integration of a venue onto their system.

“But that's a pipeline that's got a series of different phases and we needed to be able to visualise that funnel if you will and understand we've already accounted for that [venue],” she said.

Me&u also uses Salesforce for account management of their venues once they are live on their platform.

“They're using [me&u] to transform their business, they're increasing the cart size,” Barry said.

“Our promise is we help hospitality venues transform their business by increasing their sales by about 30 percent for every sale that goes through me&u, but also transform efficiency in your operations by using technical products like docket merging and docket holding.”

Barry explained that the brand uses Salesforce to give me&u full visibility of how a venue uses the platform.

“How many orders went through, what was the size of those orders, and give us warning signs, in terms of we know that that venue hasn't had many orders today, what's going on there? Or this venue has been declining in terms of the orders,” she said.

“It gives us clues to issues on attrition or retention that we need to solve as well. At the same time, as a leader, I needed to have visibility across the entire business chain and the very different functions that ultimately, I needed one single customer view for.”

Barry said me&u has also shortened its activation time for new customers.

“Once we'd sold a venue, it took us like that nine weeks to activate that and get live. Now we've got that down to three to four weeks because we have a much clearer understanding of the pipeline, the funnel and where each account is at during that process,” she said.

“It improved team productivity and efficiency. And for management, the visibility on that.”