UK-based vitamin supplement retailer replaces Odoo with Zoho CRM for enhanced customer data management

Key results:

• Annual savings$50,000

The company

The Good Vitamin Company is a leading provider of high-quality dietary supplements and is dedicated to promoting health and wellness worldwide and has been in the UK for nearly 50 years. With a commitment to sourcing the finest ingredients and adhering to stringent quality standards, they offer a diverse range of vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements designed to promote overall well-being. Their products are formulated based on scientific research and manufactured in state-of-the-art facilities to ensure purity and potency.

The challenge

The Good Vitamin Company is one of four brands under its parent company, Vitamins Direct Group. Initially, the Good Vitamin Company used Odoo, primarily for order booking. Though it served as a decent accounting system, the company wasn't satisfied with its capabilities as a CRM tool; it could maintain customer information, it couldn't offer them complete visibility of customer history, and couldn't integrate with their telephony tool, RingCentral—two considerations which were vital to the D2C brand. This led them to use spreadsheets to track all the things Odoo couldn't.

After a thorough evaluation of MS Dynamics and Zoho CRM, the team chose Zoho CRM in 2019 for its affordability and customizability and never looked back.

The solution

Joining hands with Zoho's partner network

Ram Swamy, CEO of the Good Vitamin Company, understands the importance of user adoption. Working along with Rays and Reach, a Zoho implementation partner, they customized the system to suit their sales agents' needs.

The company uses the Contacts module to manage all of their customer information. Their target demographic consists of customers over the age of 40—a demographic that prefers placing orders over the phone and relies on that same communication method to receive updates, too. By integrating RingCentral with Zoho CRM, sales agents directly call customers from the CRM interface.

Each week, agents are assigned a variety of customer types—including active, dormant, and reactive. Each agent handles approximately 9,000 customers. Sales agents use the Activities module extensively to track open and closed calls and pull call-based reports. This particular module provides complete transparency into each sales agent's efforts with each customer.

Tailoring the system to meet business requirements

The team at the Good Vitamin Company has made thorough use of Zoho CRM's customizable layouts and fields, which detail the entire purchase history of each customer, the marketing campaigns that are targeted at them, and the products they might be interested in based on their recent purchases.

It also tracks information such as the last order date and the frequency at which each customer orders each product. A unique custom field calculates when a customer expects to run out of stock on a particular product—an indicator which helps sales agents identify opportunities to close sales by calling two weeks before stock runs out.

The team also uses a custom module to track which offers apply to which customers and which customers have taken advantage of those offers. They also make all their contact decisions using purchase history, customer preferences, callbacks, and prior notes—all available in the CRM itself.

Optimizing processes through seamless integrations

Once a sales agent makes a sale over the phone, they close the deal using a custom "Claim customer" button, which assigns the customer to the agent in Zoho Books. They then create a record in the Sales Orders module for the customer in Zoho Books to process the order. The company uses the integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Books to manage invoicing and payments.

They've integrated Zoho CRM with Zoho Inventory to manage sales orders, packages, and shipping details, as well as with Zoho Analytics to derive data driven insights. However, to comply with GDPR requirements, sales agents are only allowed access to certain reports. Hence, Rays and Reach came up with a clever way to embed the reports that sales agents need as a web tab within Zoho CRM, improving both privacy compliance and efficiency.

By integrating Zoho CRM with Zoho WorkDrive, agents can access product specification documents stored in the online file management system directly from the CRM system as they're speaking to customers. Similarly, with Zoho Desk connected to the CRM system, agents can also see calls and emails received from customers regarding order-related inquiries, product complaints, and more—all within the same interface. The same applies to the integration with Zoho SalesIQ, which enables agents to track customers' engagement with the website and what products they've viewed in order to upsell/cross-sell to them.

The company's marketing team also sends out campaigns using Rays and Reach's custom Mailchimp integration and integrates it with Zoho CRM to track the information in the Campaigns module.

These integrations seamlessly capture details from other tools in Zoho CRM to provide a comprehensive view of customer data.

Benefits

Within just three months of implementing the system, the company was able to see the results and benefits of optimizing Zoho CRM.