Fresh Egg implemented Synergist in 2015, where the system was chosen for its “specialist understanding of how agencies work.”
Since then, Fresh Egg has grown and matured, expanding its service offering and increasing headcount. “Seven years is a long time in the life of a digital agency but because we are always busy that time does fly past!…”
It was the formation of a new commercial operations group that allowed for a comprehensive internal review where it was agreed that Synergist could do a lot more to improve agency-wide reporting.
“We didn’t fully understand what all the existing reports were showing us, or what data was in there. And we realised that since we’d taken the system on, a lot of useful additional functionality had been added that we weren’t yet using.”
“There were various voices around the organisation saying we need X, Y, Z tools. And we’re like, we’ve got a tool!” Sarah laughs, “We need to see what else it can do. We know it can give us a lot more.”
Synergist has a rich array of features, and following a strategic review internally of our management information, we realised we just weren’t using the full functionality we were paying for.
Sarah Tunstall, COO, Fresh Egg
Working alongside Client Services Director, Louise Neale, the agency had a series of bi-weekly remote sessions to uncover what they wanted to achieve. What started as a reporting wish list soon flowered into a consultative process, where Louise was able to show them other ideas and approaches from working with other leading agencies.
“It’s a great exercise to stand back and hear about what’s worked and what hasn’t worked for other similar businesses…”
“In one of our recent sessions, we built a very useful big report, which actually includes about nine things that we thought would be separately reported.”
Changing system settings, creating report views, data viewer reports and helping replace spreadsheets that had crept back into the business, Louise’s one-to-one support helped them streamline critical reporting and gave them access to accurate, real-time management information.
The recent 12.8 update gives users the ability to create custom dashboards with the exact data and reports they’re looking for, that update in real-time. Sarah adds “this update links perfectly time-wise for us to be able to share the value of what we’ve been working on with the wider team.”
“Our project managers and account directors, responsible for managing time and budgets for clients, are now able to understand in a much richer way what actual delivery looks like versus estimates, they’re getting much clearer reports on that now”, Maria shares. “Our heads of departments also have a much clearer understanding of capacity, where teams are spending their time” and how that impacts pipeline.
With Synergist, Fresh Egg now has “a much wider array of profitability metrics at its disposal.”
“Having somebody looking over what you’ve been doing and what you want to achieve, with knowledge of what else is happening in the market and making recommendations for improvement and efficiency is undoubtedly a good thing.”
Maria admits, “I thought I knew the system set-up and file maintenance elements of it quite well and I would be surprised now if any other agency could say ‘yes, I know every single element of this system inside out’. You just can’t know all it contains. The Agency Works insights have added real value – the process has been well worth it.”
“It’s advantageous to maximising the investment.”
Both Sarah and Maria believe you should be continually investing in your system and processes as it’s about more than just having them in place.
Fresh Egg “will continue to get consultancy, whether that’s once a year or every few months, but just getting to this point has been amazing and I couldn’t recommend Louise enough to be honest.”
“We now include ongoing Synergist consultancy in our budget as a core part of keeping up to date with the system, whereas previously it might have been written off as just a technology cost.”
