Everyone has their favorite local haunts: the bookstore with limited edition hardcovers or the coffee shop with your favorite latte. But behind the scenes at all small businesses is a small team deciding how to accept payments, reward customer loyalty, and more.
To make it happen, many small and medium-sized businesses turn to SaltPay, a payments company with products that help automate point of sale, loyalty wallets, and ways for merchants to accept payments over the phone.
“Our goal is to empower merchants so they can do more and grow their businesses with less effort,” says Miguel Eusébio, who works in Customer Relations at SaltPay. “To do that, we need to first empower our team of agents who support our customers.”
Miguel partners with the tech team to build the internal systems that support agents use to serve merchants and partners. “Together, our goal is to make the SaltPay customer experience as seamless as our products make running a small or medium business,” Miguel explains.
This is the story of how SaltPay was able to bring together critical user data and support workflows into one Retool app to replace a disjointed and slow customer support process.
As SaltPay acquired more customers over the years, they started to realize that a lot of their existing processes—and the tooling built to support them—needed a major upgrade.
“Agents and our entire customer-facing team were not equipped to best serve merchants, so we weren’t providing the best possible service,” Miguel says.
What’s more, the tech team wasn’t focusing their energy where it was most useful—on building SaltPay’s merchant-facing products.
Instead, product and engineering juggled over 10 back-office systems that were slow and hard to use. “Simply, it was impossible to provide good customer service because of how long it took to perform basic tasks or find simple merchant information,” Miguel explains.
The tech team faced a decision: where should they focus their time?
They could develop back-office apps for support agents or build core products and integrations for merchants to grow their business. They ultimately decided that they needed to focus on building SaltPay and empowering merchants instead of spending all their time on back-office work.
So they sought out a way to make back-office development faster, more efficient, and better able to serve the support team’s needs—without costing them their core product offering.
“We needed our tech teams to work on expanding and improving our core products as we prepare to scale, so we started looking for a back-office solution,” Miguel says.
More specifically, they were looking for a solution that met the following requirements:
- Would make it easy to build back-office apps without costing the tech team time and development resources
- Provided critical features like SSO and on-premise hosting to ensure security and scalability
- Was built on an API-first infrastructure so integrations would be effortless
After investigating a variety of alternatives to their homegrown systems, Miguel discovered Retool. Within just a few days of testing Retool, the team decided to roll it out to power SaltPays back-office needs.
Today, all customer relations agent workflows are powered by a Retool dashboard. “Our goal was to save agents time when handling merchant inquiries or updates, so we built a Retool dashboard where agents can view merchant information in one place,” Miguel explains.
It all starts with an incredibly simple view where agents can search and find merchants.
From there, agents are able to run through any of their most critical processes. The dashboard allows them to:
- Search and find merchants quickly and easily, instead of searching through various databases
- See merchant profiles and important data in one place, rather than toggling between tools to find different metrics and reports
- Take action directly from the dashboard, such as adding or closing an outlet and editing merchant information
Before using Retool, agents had to search through multiple back-office tools, taking time and slowing their responsiveness to customers. “But with our plans to scale and the increasing volume of customers, this method wouldn’t work,” says Miguel.
Now, with a central source of truth, merchant data updates happen in real time and agents only need to navigate to Retool to help a customer—no more tracking information down across multiple tools. Agents are better equipped to respond to requests and customers see their issues resolved faster.
“Retool has allowed us to easily build apps and a user interface for our agents so our tech team can focus on building our product and APIs, in order to empower our customers,” Miguel says.
Since rolling out the Retool customer relations dashboard, SaltPay agents have access to more tools and are empowered to better help merchants.
What’s more, they’re less dependent on the tech team to respond to requests and build back-office solutions—and when they do need an update to the tool, the tech team can make it happen on the same day.
Finally, all agent workflows are simplified. With fewer manual tasks to complete, agents can move through their days faster and assist more customers.
“Retool saves our team time and helps us provide a better service for customers by empowering agents to respond faster and with more information and allowing our tech team to focus on building, improving, and scaling our core product offering,” Miguel says.
Just as they’re expanding their product offerings for merchants weekly, SaltPay hopes to automate even more back-office tasks using Retool and expand to include other workflows and features, too.
Want more? Check out Miguel's demo from our Retool Lightning Demos series.
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