From a CRUD app to the powerful Operations Software: The Success Story of MerciApp & Forest Admin
Forest Admin has empowered the Customer Support and Sales teams at MerciApp to handle many tasks independently, reducing the need for constant interaction with the development team. This autonomy has resulted in substantial time savings for both teams.
Executive Summary
MerciApp is an advanced writing assistant compatible with all online tools through the browser extension. As a French alternative to Grammarly, MerciApp is valued by individuals learning French as a foreign language and by native speakers using it in a professional setting to prevent typos and improve writing style.
We recently interviewed Éric Ly, the co-founder and Head of Backend Infrastructure at MerciApp. He provided insights into the initial integration of Forest Admin as a basic CRUD app and its subsequent evolution into a powerful operations software.
At present, MerciApp’s customer support, sales, and development teams extensively use Forest Admin. Customer support uses it to help users, manage onboarding processes, and understand feature usage. The sales team uses the data to comprehend user behavior and customize their outreach efforts. The development and product teams benefit from security features and access to the staging environment, enabling them to test different scenarios without affecting the production environment.
About MerciApp
French is the second most popular foreign language to study. It is renowned not only for its beauty but also for its quite complex spelling that can be challenging to master by foreigners (the article's author included) and even by native speakers. As a matter of fact, an average francophone person makes 33 mistakes per day (!) in professional conversations.
Luckily, thanks to MerciApp, writing in French is easier and it helps avoid mistakes, sometimes embarrassing (I won't quote them, you know). It is an advanced French language writing assistant that offers spelling, grammar, and style corrections, as well as a personalized dictionary, a library of synonyms, alerts on Anglicisms, swear words, pleonasms, overly complex sentences, and other words and structures to avoid. On top of that, MerciApp can rewrite the content provided, making sure it's error-free and written in the appropriate style.
MerciApp is available as a browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Edge), a Microsoft Office add-in, and integrates with various platforms such as Gmail, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
What made MerciApp choose Forest Admin
When Éric Ly was working on MerciApp, he was certain he didn't want to build an admin panel from scratch. Drawing from his past freelance and entrepreneurial experiences, he recalled that creating and managing one in-house was a daunting task, consuming too much time that could have been better spent on developing the core application.
We know as developers that building a back office is quite costly... And it's not our favorite task, especially when you have a new big and exciting project to create.
The original requirement was straightforward: a user-friendly interface with basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionalities and role management. Éric decided to look for a SaaS solution. He found Forest Admin, and it perfectly fit the initial needs of MerciApp. Then, it also grew together with the company and its operations.
How MerciApp uses Forest Admin
Initially, the tech team didn't plan to give that many non-dev team members access to the admin panel, but that changed quickly. The Customer Support and Sales teams requested easy access to relevant customer data, which is essential for their work. At first, MerciApp's tech team was reluctant to add custom features to the admin panel, but then they found the capabilities of Forest Admin's Node.js agent. This allowed MerciApp to integrate Forest Admin into their private API, enabling the use of custom features without duplicating their existing codebase. It greatly simplified incorporating custom business workflows into an admin panel, making it a powerful operations software used by Customer Support, Sales, Product, and other teams at MerciApp.
One of the customizations that is particularly appreciated by sales and customer support teams is custom fields that allow them to access user data stored in the database in a clear and user-friendly way. Fields allow the display of data that would otherwise need to be computed with SQL queries, for example, the number of words written by the user, how often they used the rewrite function, and so on.
That way, Customer Support and Success teams have a glimpse of whether and how specifically MerciApp users take advantage of different features, such as the dictionary or a premium feature that rewrites the content provided by users. With those insights, they can provide support proactively and at the right time. The Sales Team, on the other hand, analyzes user data to propose higher plans based on their needs.
Forest Admin has made MerciApp's Customer Support and Sales teams much more autonomous. Before using it, assisting customers used to be much more difficult and expensive. Now, the CS team can easily access relevant user data, and they can also take various actions - for example, enabling or disabling features for many customers at the same time. They can do this thanks to Custom Actions and Workspaces that facilitate day-to-day operations by providing everything the CS team needs on one screen.
Developers at MerciApp also appreciate the developer features provided by Forest Admin. They take advantage of development and staging environments to test features and only push to production once everything is ready and tested. They appreciate security features such as two-factor authentication and the hybrid architecture of the Forest Admin Node.js agent.
Summary
Overall, Forest Admin has been a robust and flexible solution for MerciApp, enabling them to manage their data securely and efficiently while continually adapting to their evolving needs.
It has empowered the Customer Support and Sales teams to handle many tasks independently, reducing the need for constant interaction with the development team. This autonomy has resulted in substantial time savings for both teams.
Thanks to Forest Admin everyone saves time. The customer support saves time because they are autonomous to access and act upon user data. Developers save time because they don't have to build tools for business teams - plenty of them are available out-of-the-box and customizations are quick and easy to make. - said Éric Ly.