Customer Testimonials

It is amazing to witness the diversity within the 702 audience. People of all races are phoning as well as sending e-mails requesting services from us. Each time they specify that they listened to radio 702 and heard us during the live interview.

Our customers now always address us by saying congratulations for winning and thereafter go into the details of their problem. The competition itself attracted lots of attention and the live radio interview was the cherry on top. The most notable difference for us is the volume of work, which has increased substantially. We’re now looking into recruiting additional staff to help cope with the increasing demand. Turnover is likely to triple within the next three months and we would like to explore more media opportunities to make the most of our status as both a finalist and a winner of the competition. There is huge potential for growth. We would like to thank Pastel & 702 for the opportunity that was afforded to us.

We hereby confirm that Gallagher Convention Centre utilises Pastel Irontree Software as a backup tool for our Pastel Evolution BIC and Rendezvous data. While still on a trial version of Pastel Irontree our server crashed. Using Pastel Irontree, we had the excellent assistance of our Pastel Irontree Business Partner and were able to retrieve all our data within an hour, without any hassles or data loss.

When we got Pastel Partner, I deliberately set up the general ledger so that each mine site was a sub-account, with an eye to eventually producing management accounts with which each site manager could run his operation as a mini business. This meant that when Pastel BIC was launched, we were ready and never looked back. Now, at the click of a button, we can provide each site manager with a forecast against which he must order his product and report on variations. Pastel BIC also automates our factory planning, so that we know how much product to produce at any given time. It has also streamlined the management of our outsourced transport.

Over the past nine years, we have found Pastel’s solutions to be perfect for our size of organisation, offering the right level of functionality and an easy to use interface. So when our finance team requested Business Intelligence (BI) functionality, it made sense to stay with the same platform and upgrade to a newer version of the software that delivered this functionality.

At this point in our growth phase, I need to produce 55 separate monthly accounts covering all our different interests - including the Gauteng distribution centre that handles up to R10 million’s worth of inventory a month. Pastel Evolution, which runs that distribution centre as well as our head office, and Pastel Partner, which runs the regional distribution centres handling about R3 million a month and each of the regional offices, enables me to do that pretty much at the touch of a button.

Our old software was not suitable for bulk electronic mailshots. For one thing, it didn’t allow me to group customers in ways that would enable me to send them new product information that is directly relevant to them. Because of the enormous range of products that our machines make possible we have customers in most industry sectors. So we have to tailor our product and other sales information to the interests of given sectors, in order to capture their interest.

Now, with the latest version of ACT!, which has been customised slightly to meet our specific CRM requirements, I can send out bulk emails to particular categories of customers – at the touch of a button. The solution therefore enables me to work faster, much more efficiently, and to much better effect in terms of keeping customers informed and, as a consequence, generating sales.

As masters of sales techniques ourselves, we operated very successfully for many years without a CRM solution. But now that we have ACT!, we can’t imagine being able to do without it. We have a saying at Dale Carnegie that it’s the hard work you do up front that makes selling easier. ACT! makes it easier to do that upfront hard work by enabling us to track and monitor all customer contacts at the touch of a button. It also enables me to track the performance of our sales staff and take the right remedial steps to improve someone’s sales volumes. For instance, if I see that a sales person has made and attended five appointments but hasn’t closed a deal, I can work on his face-to-face selling skills.

It's a complex business, with raw materials having to be moved around the world and USN stock being held by different manufacturers in different countries. We therefore needed an accounting system that could not only track our stock both in our own warehouses and those of our suppliers, but integrate inventory in a way that would give us real-time visibility into the pipeline. At the same time, we had moved from using third-party distributors to setting up our own operations in Europe. Our main support and administrative infrastructure is here in South Africa, however. So we wanted a single accounting system that would cater for all our operations and ensure everyone, wherever they were in the world, would be working with the same data.

Pastel Evolution gave us those capabilities with an absolute minimum of customisation. Using a terminal server, our international staff can now log in at any time and see exactly what we see on the system. And if they have any difficulties, our head office staff can go in and assist them without delay. What was particularly impressive was that all this was achieved in a very short space of time.

Pastel Evolution has serviced our requirement for reporting and improved system stability. It’s user-friendly and gives us instant access to customer information - what they’ve bought and how they’ve paid – while interacting with them telephonically. The sales reporting functionality has enabled us to run variations on our customer and product reports. From a management perspective, Pastel Evolution also ensures we can easily generate any report we want, such as budget and previous period comparisons without the added hassle of retyping data into Excel. Through Evolution, we have effectively eliminated one sided entries, and have experienced no downtime. We are saving hours every month. Human error has also been minimised through automating orders and deliveries, while stock and inventory processes have been streamlined. No other product delivers the same functionality and features for 20 users while being affordable. For any support calls, we are also always assured that the call centre agent knows Pastel Evolution intimately