Enhanced Team Efficiency: A Case Study Roundup

Efficiency is something most business owners strive for, but it can feel elusive. When you’re not sure exactly what to change to make your team more productive and collaborative with less effort, it can help to hear success stories.

Accelo users have a lot of those to share!

These four examples will inspire you to consider the potential impact of the right technology on team efficiency at your service business.

Accounting Firm Leadership Experiences Relief

At HeimLantz CPAs and Advisors, accuracy and timeliness matter. But in 2021, the firm’s talented team was struggling to drum up either of those using their outdated practice management software. The leadership team knew it was time to find a solution that could reduce the excess manual effort they were all expending just to find basic information.

COO Laura Macauley says the switch to Accelo was the efficiency boost the firm needed. Not only could these accountants and financial experts more easily manage projects and billing for their most complex clients, but the firm’s leaders finally had the necessary transparency to make sound decisions. Laura and her colleagues replaced static spreadsheets with Accelo’s live reports, applying custom filters to access the exact data they need when they need it.

The number of reports I used to pull — it was such a waste of time. Now, any team member can generate live lists without guidance and save them easily without having to export over and over and replace files.

Laura Macauley, COO

Signs of increased team efficiency at HeimLantz: 

• Ability to forecast revenue mid-project facilitated quick adjustments
• Automated management of large, fixed-fee contracts reduced billing time
• Quick access to real-time data replaced repetitive exporting and saving

Agency Improves Employee Well-Being With Better Systems

Full-service scientific communications agency HDMZ once had a common affliction: lack of visibility. Especially when tight deadlines arose, the team could see their workflows were permeable, but leadership didn’t have the overview they needed to make corrections. Email-based communication was one obvious inefficiency.

After adopting and customizing Accelo, Director of Talent Management Emily Doherty says HDMZ employees would find it strange to go back to using email for file tracking or project management. As the team has become more distributed post-pandemic, they’ve come to rely on the Activity Stream for client communication history.

There are myriad ways to configure Accelo to meet our needs, and it’s super easy. Things get done, and they don’t get lost.

Emily Doherty, Director of Talent Management

Signs of increased team efficiency at HDMZ: 

• Client portal and Activity Stream reduced time spent on communication
• Reduction in busy work mitigated employee stress and lowered turnover
• Streamlined processes supported an ambitious scaling goal

READ NEXT: 9 Efficiency Hacks for Client Service Professionals

Design and Construction Firm Cuts Redundant Tasks

AREI Designs had a good problem: too many projects to juggle at any given time. The leadership team wanted to move away from tedious email communication, so General Manager Logan Wiltshire spent over 300 hours researching software platforms.

Accelo offered the firm the ability to automatically track project history and client communication internally, plus give client portal access to its clientele of builders. The newfound efficiency didn’t just save the team time and effort — it helped them avoid potentially costly mistakes.

Before we had Accelo, we were losing a lot of dollars because we couldn’t track revisions and how many iterations a plan had gone through. We didn’t always know whether we were going through those iterations because of mistakes that we had made or mistakes the builders had made.

Logan Wiltshire, General Manager

Signs of increased team efficiency at AREI Designs: 

• Central source of information decreased administrative work by 80%
• Easy client portal requests resulted in 150% reduction in time spent booking jobs
• Ability to break down home plans into versions reduced potential error

IT Business Scales at a Mind-Blowing Rate

Stuart Watson, Founder of LeapIT, wanted to scale his business but found himself bogged down with all it took to manage current clients. Not to mention, the rest of his team was wasting time training new help desk employees, running through an excessive number of steps to onboard new clients and chasing those who needed to renew domains.

By implementing better collaboration for the support desk, templating project creation and automating domain renewals, LeapIT became a productivity machine. And they can prove it with their accurate Accelo time logs. 

From everyone’s point of view, all the information you need to know is right there in Accelo. It’s having that single system with all the information that just makes it so efficient.

Stuart Watson, CEO and Founder

Signs of increased team efficiency at LeapIT: 

• Increased ticket turnover by 50% in two years — and 20% YoY since then 
• Automation helped the business save £60,000 per year
• Easing workflows has reduced stress for leadership

How Efficient Could Your Team Be?

Optimized efficiency looks different at every business, but the root catalysts are the same — namely, reducing redundant tasks and improving communication. Accelo can help with both! Start your free trial or explore the platform by setting up a demo.

Already an Accelo user? Visit the Accelo Community to learn how we’re working to make the platform even more supportive of team efficiency with upcoming major upgrades.

About the Author

Chelsea Williams is Senior Copywriter at Accelo, where she shares unique insights with service professionals and tells user stories via blogs, eBooks, industry reports and more. She has over 15 years of B2B and B2C writing experience — primarily in tech, sales, education and healthcare. Chelsea is an AWAI-certified Master Copywriter trained in brand storytelling and microcopy.