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When the Rosslyn Business Improvement District realized it needed a better solution to manage its data and communications, its first step was talking with its IT provider at the time.
“I spent a lot of time on the phone with a couple of their folks,” says the BID’s Santya Lanman. “And it was difficult to fully convey our business structure and needs for them to translate into Salesforce parameters.”
Those difficulties eventually led the BID to work with Aptaria. It’s a relationship that has produced great results in 2014.
The BID, which supports economic development in Rosslyn, Va., relies heavily on its database of property owners. Before engaging with Aptaria, it was managing its data and communications with property owners through a complex CRM designed for commercial real estate companies. The CRM made relatively simple tasks difficult — for example, every contact was associated with accounts and opportunities. But opportunities was a meaningless category for the BID, creating extra work and confusion for staff.
Aptaria’s work has made things much simpler. After listening to the problems the BID was encountering with its CRM, we began to build a solution custom-fit for the BID’s needs, with user-centric design and a fair price point.
All work in the database now revolves around just three primary objects – contacts, companies and properties. Options to create unnecessary associations have been removed. “The end user doesn’t need to go to lots of different places to meet the information objectives they are set to meet,” Lanman says.
The CRM is in the implementation phase as of summer 2014, and even then it was apparent that Aptaria’s solution would streamline operations for the BID. With a simpler workflow and a clean user experience, the BID has seen greater adoption by the staff – an invaluable improvement.
“I expect that the solution will be transformative once it is fully implemented,” Lanman says. “I expect that it will allow us to view and analyze our business interactions in a way we have never done before.”
At Aptaria, we’re thrilled to continue to develop this solution with the BID.
“They responded quickly when we called, and their turn-around on tasks was likewise fast,” Lanman says. “I count Aptaria as our long-term Salesforce partner and would not hesitate to recommend them to others.”
