Katrina Oko-Odoi
Sr. Content Marketing Manager
Like so many other companies in the trades sector, specialty contractor Egan Company was faced with difficult decisions when the pandemic hit. The Minnesota-based company was committed to remaining a local-first business — and with nearly 70% of its workforce essential at jobsites in-state, contracts demanded it. But as quarantine progressed, work-from-home became inevitable for its office workers.
Eventually, Egan consolidated its office space and fully embraced a hybrid work model. This gave employees whose roles kept them behind a desk more flexibility to work from home, while protocols were put in place to keep workers in the field safe. And with Copper already in the team’s tech toolbox, Egan could rely on the CRM to help facilitate this transition and maintain a reliable single source of truth to keep everyone in sync and moving forward.
Crystallizing internal communications
Egan’s office-based teams had already been using Copper for a couple of years prior to COVID-19, with the championing of Director Jessica Johnson and Egan’s Marketing Team. They’d onboarded Copper in 2018 to help improve internal communications and gain full visibility into the sales and prospecting activities around open opportunities. With multiple offices and numerous jobsites across the state, they’d needed a central source of information to keep all teams and business units on the same page.
Egan’s complex operating structure required a CRM system that was flexible enough to adapt to the unique processes and workflows of 10 different operating groups — from electrical, to mechanical, glass/glazing, IT and more. With custom pipelines built out for each group, Egan set up Copper to handle its individual requests and track the details teams needed to access at any given moment. After implementing the CRM, Jessica and her executive colleagues quickly came to rely on the convenience of Copper’s mobile app to keep all data up to date and everyone on the same page.
But staying connected and accessible on mobile became even more important in 2020 when employees were no longer working out of a company office.
Going fully hybrid with Copper
It hasn’t been easy to maintain an equal playing field between employees at jobsites and those working remotely since the move to hybrid work, Jessica acknowledges. But the team has found Copper’s mobile app helpful in maintaining flexibility and accessibility to a centralized hub where all team members can stay up to date on customer activities, no matter where they’re working from on any given day.
The mobile app updates in real time, enabling those on the go to access information on customers or opportunities quickly. Egan’s teams have found the app especially useful for:
- After-hours maintenance calls from customers (they have a team on call 24 hours): the after-hours lead pulls up the mobile app to see who last interacted with the customer, so they immediately know who to update about the need.
- Activity logging on the go: Account managers and project managers can log activity notes on their phone after in-person meetings with customers or prospects, ensuring no small detail ever slips through the cracks.
- Quick access in meetings: The app also comes in handy during meetings when it’s inconvenient to access Copper on the web app. Team leaders can quickly pull up the latest activity on strategic accounts from their phone to answer questions in real time.
- Auto-logging customer calls from mobile: Any calls Egan team members have with customers on their cellphones are automatically logged in Copper through the mobile app, eliminating the need to manually enter the interaction.
- Smart prospecting while networking: In-person trade shows may not be back yet, but the app is useful for networking on the fly when sales reps are out on meetings. With a quick search on the mobile app, reps can access any history with a prospect so they know what to say next.
For such a large, distributed team of nearly 1,000 employees, the ability to log these updates in real time while on the go is a big difference-maker. “No one has to remember to send an email to update an account after they get back to their desk,” Jessica says, explaining that important details used to slip through the cracks when the team relied primarily on email for such communications.
“Today, for example, our Director of Sales is at a couple of jobsites, he just tagged me in a note letting me know that the customer contact he met with is retiring and there’s a new person taking over the role.” That’s a critical detail that could help Egan’s team maintain a positive relationship with a strategic account during a leadership transition.
Improving company culture
The benefits of using Copper extend beyond quantifiable numbers, Jessica explains, and that’s a good thing. The platform has helped shape how the team works together, and their overall mindset about customer relationships. The new processes and transparency that Copper has introduced into Egan have dramatically impacted the company culture as a whole.
“For us, it’s made us stronger as a team and it’s strengthened the culture that we have around our customers, the importance of teamwork and the importance of collaboration.”
Now that’s a win in our book.
About Egan Company
Egan Company is a privately-owned, specialty contractor providing building trades to general contractors, engineers, building owners, property managers, and facility engineers. Specialties include: electrical, mechanical, curtainwall/glazing/metal panels (InterClad), millwrights, building technology, controls and system integration, and 24/7 service. Egan serves every stage of a building and provides in-house expertise in planning, design and engineering, construction, and maintenance. For more information about Egan Company, visit www.eganco.com.
