Interview with new customer Nicola Ray, Founder and CEO at UK-based marketing consultancy Modern

Modern has risen above the challenges of the past couple of years to grow significantly. In late 2021 this speedy growth, coupled with the need for its 50 employees to work remotely for most of that time, made it necessary to explore simpler, more effective, and scalable ways to manage their consultancy workflows.

Following a careful review of work management systems, Modern opted to work with Scoro, beginning its implementation in January 2022. We caught up with Nicola to talk about the business’s recent success and find out why she chose Scoro. As Nicola explains:

“Customer relationships are important to us. Change is constant in the sectors we work in; when our key contacts leave a client company, we often stay with the original business, as well as getting introduced into their new organization.”

There’s also another factor that adds to the longevity of their client partnerships. Nicola adds: “We do a lot of consultancy work, helping clients do things they have never done before. This can be complex, and it often necessitates long-term commitments.”

As an end-to-end work management solution, Scoro fosters effective customer relationship management between Modern and their clients. Communication is at its heart – creating a ‘single source of truth’ during active project management phases, enabling consultancy staff, contractors, and clients to stay connected in real time and avoid misunderstandings, delays, and errors. It also allows consultancies such as Modern to segment customers for marketing campaigns and to schedule contact.

Scoro is designed to be flexible and customizable, making marketing project management simpler. Crucially, it integrates with Modern’s specialist tools and systems easily and enables bespoke dashboards and other visualizations within a few clicks. 

An integrated solution supporting growth

Like every consultancy business, Modern needs to keep a close eye both on how individual projects are progressing, and capacity within teams, so that tasks can be assigned for optimal efficiency. Previously, they needed multiple systems to achieve this, including Smartsheet for task ticketing and Streamtime for agency management. 

These systems didn’t integrate and were therefore unable to support the business’s plan to double in size by 2024. Today, Scoro is replacing these systems to provide a unified, end-to-end platform.

“We needed a system that lets us manage longer-term consultancy programs as well as short-term projects – a platform that doesn’t focus just on time and materials, but that supports multi-currency working and is scalable enough to grow along with us.” 

Nicola adds: “Scoro gives us all that and we are quickly transitioning projects and data into it. We can already see that Scoro is a massive leap from what we had and that we are going to get lots of value from it.”

 Taking time management to the next level

For any business that sells both time and expertise, effective time-tracking is essential. For Modern, however, traditional timesheet systems were only partly successful. As Nicola says, while some teams were adept at logging project time and costs assiduously, sometimes down to the minute, others didn’t have the time or inclination to manually log work in such detail. This resulted in the business having an incomplete view of cost control and profitability. As Nicola explains:

“It’s easy to log time in Scoro. It almost happens in the background, so we can pull the data we need easily.”

Just as customer relationship management is important to our consultancy clients, it’s also at the heart of what we do here at Scoro. So, we asked Nicola how she found the procurement and onboarding experience with us. Nicola explains that they’d looked online for project management providers but had a couple of bad experiences. As a busy CEO, Nicole explains:

“I don’t have time to chase up providers repeatedly for information, or to sign up for a lengthy trial to see if we like the product. We had to ask ourselves if it takes two weeks for a potential customer to get an answer to their questions, what will the ongoing support be like? Meanwhile, Scoro made it easy for us to test if it was a good fit for our business from the outset. The introductory videos were really helpful, and the pricing structure was easy to understand.”

Work smarter, not harder

At Scoro, we help customers ‘work smarter, not harder’ and our customer success stories highlight the efficiency savings that our platform enables. With such significant savings pointing towards the possibility of a four-day working week becoming a reality for marketing consultancies, we asked Nicola if this is something they’ve considered.

It’s a question that has many aspects to it, not least what agency staff would prefer, and whether clients’ expectations would allow for consultancy staff to be available on fewer days throughout the week.

“[A four-day week] comes down to the appetite of the team and the efficiency of the business. If you are asking ‘could Scoro enable us to do that?’ the answer is yes, it probably could.”

If you’re keen to find out how other companies have transformed the way they work, check out some of our customer success stories.