How Spendesk consolidated its customer data into Forest Admin for Customer Success and Support

Spendesk is the new way to manage team expenses, without having to lend out the company card or fill out expense reports! Their mission is to revolutionize company expense procedures from purchase requests to payments and receipt processing. How? By using their SaaS software that provides employees with straightforward, traceable means of payment, allowing CFOs to monitor expenses in real time and automating recurring accounting tasks.

Since its inception, Spendesk hasn’t had a real Admin Panel. Like many growing companies, the admin panel wasn’t a priority as the customer-facing product needed continuous improvement. But with the increasing amount of users and operations, the need for advanced customer-management, support, data visualization and related questions arose.

A better way to access customer information

Guilhem Bellion - lead developer at Spendesk - started implementing Forest Admin as Spendesk’s admin panel last summer giving employees insight into customers’ in-app activity.

This new admin panel made Maylis Amram - customer success at Spendesk - forget about old SQL queries she had to perform directly into the raw database to access customers’ information. This process used to require a lot of back and forth with the dev team and created frustration within the success team as they weren’t autonomous for more complex queries. It wasn’t scalable at all and they couldn’t see the Forest Admin for the 🌲🌲🌲.

“It took me literally 1 min to set up Forest Admin on Spendesk and I don’t have to worry about maintaining my admin panel anymore. The absence of a DSL makes Forest Admin really easy to use with literally no learning curve.”

Guilhem Bellion, CTO at Spendesk

Before Forest, all the data were split into different services (Full story, Intercom, Close.io, SQL queries, etc.) and getting access to basic information such as the number of users or recent payments would take dozens of minutes. With Forest’s dashboard it’s a matter of seconds and all the KPIs are aggregated in one place.

Managing customer workflow now easy as pie with segments

It usually takes a week for a company to be fully onboarded on Spendesk. An audit from a bank (Know Your Bank) is required to make sure the company is solvent. If the company is approved, it can transfer funds to its Spendesk account and employees can start making requests.

To better keep track of this onboarding workflow, Maylis created different segments into Forest. Without any line of code, she managed to build her own automated segments of the onboarding workflow. In a single click, the support team can now have an overview of all users stuck in these different steps and be more proactive in their follow-up.

Powerful search combined with smart views and custom actions

When it comes to fixing an issue on a payment request, Spendesk’s support team must be highly responsive.

They needed to visualize in no time all the information related to a customer while being on the phone with them. Thanks to Forest’s flexibility and customization Guilhem created a smart view of each company profile. By typing the company name in the search bar, Maylis has access to all the data she needs to serenely engage a conversation with users. She can also extend their free trial, set up a discount, order a physical credit card, etc. in the blink of an eye as those specific actions are directly implemented in the account smart view.

“With Forest Admin I no longer have to leave my admin panel to answer customer emails or cancel orders and their related payments. Everything is performed in the same place. It’s truly helpful to me, keeping the same context throughout all my customer success operations.”

Maylis Amram, Head of Customer Success at Spendesk

Results

Forest Admin saved their development team a considerable amount of time. They were able to allocate their technical resources on the product without dealing with support’s matters.

Thanks to its easy customisation, Forest Admin has given more autonomy to sales and support teams. It helps them to keep the same context throughout all the customer success operations as they can smoothly navigate through the data (from a user, to its card number, to its card activity, etc.).

What's next?

• If you want to build your Admin Panel with Forest Admin: visit our website.
• If you want more details on the way our customers use Forest Admin, don't hesitate to contact us.