Canadian Choice Windows & Doors adopts Zoho One to grow their business across Canada

The Company

Canadian Choice Windows and Doors Inc. is a leading manufacturer of windows in Canada. The company is family-owned and has been in business for over 30 years. It has offices across Canada. With over 3,000 reviews on Homestars and more than 100,000 satisfied customers the company is rated #1 in Ontario, Canada.

The company developed and introduced DraftLOCK to Canadian customers - the revolutionary technology in windows manufacturing. DraftLOCK windows outperform most of the windows sold today in durability and in energy efficiency.

A few years back the company management realized that they needed a single, purpose-built application for their operations management. So, they turned to DirectReach, a Zoho Partner in Canada, to design and implement a custom cloud-based CRM and ERP platform.

“ZOHO is a game changer for us. The expertise the DirectReach team provides allowed us to FINALLY enjoy an end-to-end solution that does everything we needed: CRM, Marketing Automation, Analytics, Inventory Management, and QuickBooks integration with our CRM.”

Simon Pozneris, President at Canadian Choice Windows & Doors

Key benefits:

  • 28% increase in revenue over the last 2 years
  • 37% drop in errors related to factory orders
  • 21% drop in the number of new service requests related to products or installations
  • Saving 1,800+ hours per year. Cost savings of up to $100,000/year from staff redeployment
  • 50% improvement in employee retention because of clear operational processes

The Challenge

Canadian Choice Windows & Doors were using Google Sheets to keep track of their customers, MailChimp for email marketing, Zapier for custom integrations, and QuickBooks for invoicing and financial management. This meant each department of the company became extremely siloed and records became difficult to manage. These are the main business challenges uncovered in 2019 during the discovery session:

  • Absence of consolidated customer database
  • Low conversion for appointments to closed/won deals. No visibility for leads (appointments) management
  • Disintegrated systems
  • Lack of operational processes. Inefficient team
    • - Manual commission calculations
    • - Absence of standardized processes
    • - No accountability. Lots of mistakes
    • - No automated emails/text messages and surveys
    • - Chaos in service department
  • Lack of reports/visibility into the company’s main business KPIs
  • No upsell or referral programs in place
  • Low customer satisfaction from window/door installations

The Solution

Managing the sales team of over 70 representatives spread out across Canada is no easy task, that’s why Canadian Choice Windows and Doors needed to standardize their operations so that each office delivered consistent and efficient client experiences.

Canadian Choice team started by creating a new blueprint (a process for the team to follow within the CRM) for the sales appointments (opportunities) in Zoho CRM. This was done in their custom Jobs module. Within the module, different user profiles were given access at pre- determined stages. This allowed their sales representatives to have control of an opportunity within the sales stage before transferring control to the production team. Providing a “step-by- step” client management process right within the CRM was key to winning the sales team. It streamlined the CRM usage process and increased the speed of adoption. DirectReach also helped the sales team with creating multiple ready-to-use sales email and SMS templates to make sure the customer follow ups are less exhausting for the sales team.

Using automation to minimize time spent

Canadian Choice Windows and Doors is currently leveraging over 10 applications available in Zoho One:

Zoho Campaigns and Zoho Bookings. The company is heavily invested in the paid media (e.g., Google AdWords, PPC, etc.) to drive new business. They are leveraging these two platforms for automating appointment scheduling and lead nurturing. The lead qualification process has been fully automated and standardized, and the company increased the lead to opportunity conversion by 25%.

Zoho Sign. This is an alternative to DocuSign from Zoho that comes with Zoho One license. The sales team has been leveraging it for quotes and contracts review and approval.

Zoho Analytics. You cannot operate your business if you don’t have visibility into your business performance. It’s not just about the revenue number on your dashboard - you need to have a more granular view of the performance across different departments. The Canadian Choice team worked with the DirectReach team to create individual dashboards, as well as the shared ones to monitor the key KPIs. Each employee has an individual role-based dashboard that gives them a clear idea about their performance. The marketing department has a set of reports that not only allows them to understand the performance of each marketing channel, but also give them a perspective on the cities they need to target. Each sales rep can see their closing ratio, commission numbers, and many other metrics right from their mobile device.

Zoho SalesIQ for online chat and Zoho Desk for managing consumer care related inquiries. Customer satisfaction and customer support resolution time are crucial elements of the business. The customer support team has been leveraging these two Zoho products that are integrated with the CRM to address any concerns of their customers, answer questions, as well as to get new business. If the customers are treated well, they come back to you with more business, as well as they refer new clients to you.

“From the beginning of our relationship DirectReach team has been a thoughtful, honest, and reliable partner. They were genuinely interested in our business and guided us through every step on the way to our company's first CRM. The implementation went very smoothly, and we plan to keep the team involved to help us maximize our use of Zoho One stack over time.”

Norman Verblonski, Vice President of Operations

Being a Zoho One customer, Canadian Choice get access to over 50 different applications, and many of these applications play a crucial role in the daily operations. The most important thing here is that all these applications are seamlessly integrated by DirectReach team with their CRM solution. This way, when any employee opens a customer record, they get a 360-degree view of the customer lifecycle – marketing campaigns engagement, calls received, emails sent, products purchased, any support or service requests created, etc.

Benefits and ROI

With the implementation of Zoho One, Canadian Choice finds it incredibly easy to understand where the business stands. Articulating important information quickly and clearly represents a huge advantage when it comes to making key decisions.

28% revenue growth in the last two years

The company was able to see Zoho One's impact within six months of Zoho One implementation for their business:

Standardized operational workflows. Improved employee productivity. Zoho One automates multiple aspects for a business by eliminating time-intensive, repetitive tasks, and reducing ad-hoc reporting with easy to create standardized reports.

Automated commission calculations for sales reps. This helped to relieve one headcount and provide a great motivational tool for the sales team to use in assessing daily performance.

Standard processes for leads (appointments) management across the sales team. This resulted in 12% increase in the appointments conversion.

QuickBooks integration resulted in eliminating the need for an additional human bookkeeping resource. Zoho automatically syncs the customers, estimates, deposit, and final customer invoices as well as the bills from vendors. This also helps the company eliminate errors related to manual data entry and transfers.

Automated follow up emails, text messages, and surveys - Tesla-like customer journeys for new leads and customers. CASL-compliant email campaigns.

Chat and FAQs for customer support.

Telephony platform (VoIP) integration with their CRM (when the customer calls the customer record opens on the agent’s screen).

Customer referral, upsell and cross-sell campaigns. These initiatives now contribute to 12% of the overall revenue.

Analytics. Dedicated dashboards:

  • Individual dashboards for the sales reps
  • Role-based dashboards(marketing,productordering,installations,service, finance, etc.)
  • Business KPIs

Another huge benefit has been employee retention. Each employee within the organization has clear KPIs for their roles, and there is a standard operational process for each role and this made a big difference when it comes to creating a positive work environment.

“DirectReach team has been a constant source of help and consistently available to us in creating, managing, and maintaining our CRM and other related apps. We have been extremely happy with the service their team has provided; they continue to expand our knowledge and capacity for Zoho apps, and we look forward to a long-term partnership with them.”

Simon Pozneris, President at Canadian Choice Windows & Doors

Next on the Roadmap:

Artificial Intelligence (AI). Now that most of the internal and external-facing processes are digitized on the Zoho One platform, DirectReach is set to help Canadian Choice automate even more of the day-to-day operation. We are currently working on implementing an AI powered resolution that aims to reduce the volume consumer inquires based on the extensive knowledge base the company-built overtime. No staff participation will be needed to answer common condensation and energy rating questions!

End-to-end online shopping experience. DirectReach had also started working on a workflow that would allow Canadian Choice customers to configure, compare and shop for windows and doors – online. This process will involve a customized WordPress website fully integrated with Zoho CRM and Zoho Inventory.