Based on their recent success, Rich Dale, Chief Executive Officer at Flowlens outlined several contributing factors for their growth and offered advice for other companies seeking to protect their businesses and continue to grow at this time. He said:
“In the current environment, with so many offices closed and staff having to work from home, it’s vital that your business adapts so you can operate online.
“We’re a digital company, so the transition to home offices was smooth for us because we were used to online collaboration and we took advantage of our ability to work remotely. We shifted a lot of our sales strategy to online as well, investing time in our social media channels and improving our Google rankings. This activity soon translated into more enquiries and new customers.
“Secondly, it may seem obvious but something that never fails is great customer service. That has always been vital to our success, but we used the lockdown period to analysis how we served customers, designing new processes and resources which helped them get the most out of Flowlens.
“By providing additional support for our current customers, addressing their changing needs and developing new MRP features for them, we were able create growth for ourselves with already established customers rather than depending on new sales. Respond to customer feedback, treat them well and reap the rewards.”
For new business, Flowlens has looked far beyond local shores and all the way to Australia where they have secured a number of new customers. Rich continued: “Due to the nature of our work, we can service customers anywhere in the world. The quality of our products can compete with many international providers, so it’s no surprise to us that companies from across the globe have chosen Flowlens as their system of choice, and our newest client in Australia is just one example of that.”
Flowlens is a CRM and MRP software system designed specifically to support small and medium sized manufacturing businesses.
“Rather than being ‘all things to all people’, and failing, Flowlens focused on the equipment manufacturing SME and ensured we were experts in understanding their needs and providing the specific tools to solve them. This was even more relevant during lockdown because before, businesses didn’t have the time to change their systems from cumbersome spreadsheets and manual processes, despite the loss of time and effort they caused.
“Given time to review their processes, the weaknesses in offline, outdated approaches were exposed and the inability for colleagues to be in the same building to resolve issues led many manufacturers to turn to Flowlens. Our product was perfectly suited to solve these problems, because it is cloud based, available anywhere and we had designed it specifically with our target customer needs in mind.”
Rich concluded: “We are still a long way from putting the pandemic behind us and there are still other uncertainties around Brexit and global politics, but we know we – like many other Northern Ireland companies – have the resilience to roll with the punches.”
For more information on the work of Flowlens manufacturing CRM and MRP system, visit www.flowlens.com.
Flowlens MD Rich Dale
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