Cloud Coach
Redefining User Experience in Professional Services Delivery

The previous generation of Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools relied heavily on reporting capability targeted at management, which often left the end-users dissatisfied with their user experience, as they navigated slow and cumbersome screens with user un-friendly data entry, leading to poor quality data capture and a lot of wasted time.

Cloud Coach noticed this market gap and fills it with its next-generation PSA tool, which delivers a fantastic user experience for end users, saving them considerable time each day, while still giving the management all the great reporting they need, such as project profitability, utilization and revenue recognition metrics. In a professional services business where the salary and overhead cost of employees is one of the biggest expenses being able to drive efficiency across a team’s daily activities has a huge impact on a company’s bottom line.

The company, which began its journey consultants carrying out Salesforce implementations, was approached to build a solution running on the Salesforce Platform when Salesforce’s AppExchange came into existence. With a vision to make project delivery a seamless and user-friendly process, Cloud Coach concentrates on creating best of breed Professional Services Automation and Project Management solutions. “We help clients with a process improvement solution that focuses on helping our clients deliver their services more efficiently and profitably,” says Peter Lee, CEO of Cloud Coach.

Cloud Coach enables clients to take control of their business performance using the Cloud Coach six-step methodology for managing project and service delivery

1 - Initiation

• Automating project creation when opportunities close in the CRM
• Leverage best practice templates for consistent client delivery
• Automated notifications to key stakeholders

2 - Timelines

• Snapshotting of baselines to track timeline performance
• Visualize the critical path and prioritize accordingly
• Continuous efficiency improvements using actual delivery timelines

3 - Documents

• Capture, track and deliver client requirements
• Store and share key documents along the way
• Share project progress with clients

In a services business being able to drive efficiency across your team’s daily activities has a huge impact on profitability

4 - Controls

• Identify, rank and mitigate project risks
• Successfully resolve issues as they come up
• Manage client change requests

5 - Resources

• Setting up a skills matrix for the client
• Finding the right person at the right time
• Collaborate to get the work done on time

6 - Finances

• Track your planned and actual costs to keep control of project profitability
• Apply advanced rating so you can bill your clients
• Recognize revenue with confidence as projects progress

“Throughout each of the six steps we focus on saving users’ time,” says Lee. “This can be as simple as reducing the number of clicks it takes an individual to update records such as closing out a task early, right the way through to our ‘Intelligent’ Timecard Genius that can recommend to a user what records they should be capturing time against on any particular day of the week”.

All the information captured provides the business with an unprecedented 360 view from many different actionable perspectives, be it sales looking at upsell opportunities, operations looking at efficiency metrics by client type, customer success identifying and mitigating future potential churn while finance are tracking profitability by product line.