This customer is a market leader in the financial services industry and sells products to individuals and corporate entities, through financial advisers in the UK and beyond. The organisation provides retirement, investment, and protection solutions to individuals, families, and companies across Europe. The company is the UK-based subsidiary of a larger group, which has operations in Canada, the US, and the EU. The business has operated in the UK and Ireland for over a century and currently employs over 1000 people.

Before Bluewave connected with this customer, they were using Salesforce to help their broker consultants to plan and drive sales with brokers. This FinTech organisation doesn’t sell insurance policies directly, instead they work with brokers, and it’s the brokers that sell insurance policies for them. The customer’s existing Salesforce org allowed broker consultants to log on and see information on clients, broker level, broker commission agreements, plans etc. This is so that a user can see the activity and needs of the brokers that they work with. For example, you could have a user who is looking after brokers in a part of Frankfurt, that user would log into Salesforce to see what all of those brokers are doing. 

In early 2020, the organisation identified a need to improve and update deployments to the org, modernise it, implement custom features, and expand user experience – but they didn’t have the Salesforce expertise internally to complete this. This is where Bluewave came in.

Barry Hughes – a Senior Developer and Architect at Bluewave, joined the customer in an expert placement position to carry out this initial engagement. In initial meetings with the organisation’s project managers and lead engineers, Bluewave became aware that the customer’s tech team was struggling to deploy things correctly into Salesforce, and implementations were taking weeks to complete. Barry’s first task was to fix the organisation’s delivery methodology. He worked alongside one of the organisation’s junior developers, contending with requirements coming in all the time, testing, at times working with outdated technologies, etc. It’s safe to say, there was a lot of work to do, which is why the placement continued.

Year one with the customer included writing a full integration with GoTo Webinar to facilitate broker training events. Barry crafted a system whereby users can access a public site to register the fact they want to access a particular event, such as training, a workshop, or anything else that’s relevant. Barry also built in integration so that users would go from this public site, straight to GoTo Webinar, so that they could log onto the webinar, and so that the customer could retrieve data from GoTo Webinar also. This would include how long a user is online, how many times they log in, if they had any questions, etc. Event management and lead management was a key focus throughout the first year of Bluewave’s placement within this organisation.

Following the success of the previous year’s projects, Barry, our expert placement, moved on to a new journey. This consisted of a Broker Account Consolidation (BAC) project for our client. The main issue here is that the majority of vital information in the organisation’s database is externally sourced – this includes accounts, contacts, and policies – specific elements could be edited, but the majority of this was Read Only. The problem with this is that a lot of brokers within the customer’s system would work collectively; one broker would produce an agreement to work with another. However, brokers move around – they’d collaborate with one broker, then split off again, then work with another. Salesforce technology was needed to facilitate this complicated way of working, but at the same time create a way that contracts and data could be easily tracked by individual broker. It took Barry five months to update and customise the customer’s system, so that it could effectively manage this complex broker activity. The resulting org could track a broker’s partnerships and collaborations, when those collaborations came to an end, what agreements and contracts had been made and signed, each individual broker’s activity, and more. Our customer was pleased with this result, as it simplified a previously very complex process and allowed for a better understanding of the broker data in the organisation’s system.

More recently, Barry has been working on a Service Cloud implementation for this customer as part of a continuation of our expert placement service. Previously, the organisation used Outlook and email systems to handle their customer service, but part of what they use (an integration with an external system) would have soon started to fail due to lack of Microsoft support. Due to a wider initiative where the customer is investing heavily in Salesforce, Bluewave was asked to come in and resolve this issue. Barry – acting not only as a placement within the customer’s organisation, but also as the liaison between Bluewave and our client, suggested a Salesforce-powered solution to this issue: a Service Cloud implementation.

Service Cloud has recently been deployed, with a full-scale integration into the customer’s internal policy system. Barry designed the vast majority of it, with final tests and setup only just being completed recently. The project has been an overwhelming success.

“One of the biggest challenges we have as Salesforce consultants is to design solutions that feel familiar to the user and yet better for the user to use. When User Acceptance Testing goes flawlessly it demonstrates a lot of user involvement, good design, solid testing and an agreed goal driving value to the business. This integration was the first that this client did from Salesforce to an internal secure system – but for the user it had to be natural – like it was always there.” – Barry Hughes, Senior Developer at Bluewave

The Bluewave Way is our agile implementation process, which has led to the delivery of over 250 successful Salesforce projects and engagements over the last decade – with our customer’s ongoing partnership being counted amongst them.

Part of our collaborative approach to working came in the form of our placement expert suggesting a new, agile way of working for the team – to streamline their approach, encourage communication, and improve efficiency. Our client took this new way of working on board and was very pleased with the results. An average of six week’s delivery period was shortened to two weeks, with full Continuous Integration – Continuous Delivery(CICD) in place. The team now works feature by feature, to deliver much faster. The customer’s management team were so impressed with the new structure that Barry helped to develop, that they’ve now implemented it in other teams in the organisation.

“The customer has a very strong team, but previously, they were set in quite a cyclical structure, which would hold back project delivery. The way I see it, if you’ve got something that’s ready to go, then allow it to go live so you can immediately start experiencing the benefits. That’s what I implemented and it has resulted in a lot of success.

We have routine meetings, for example we meet once a week to discuss DevOps, what we’re going live with, what we’re ready to push out. Last year we delivered over 25 different projects successfully, this year we’ve done 15, with many more to go.” – Barry Hughes, Senior Developer/Expert Placement Facilitator at Bluewave

While the majority of Bluewave’s engagements require multiple technical experts and project managers, with a beginning and end to the project, our placements take a slightly different shape. Instead, Barry works essentially as a member of the client’s team, with him touching base with Bluewave regularly to provide feedback and update senior leadership on the progress of the collaboration. There is no start or end date, as the partnership is ongoing.

“The Bluewave senior team know that when I work on a placement, I work for that organisation, rather than solely for Bluewave. I look out for the client’s best interests above all else. 

Sometimes, that means I welcome the Bluewave team in as a resource on a formal engagement for large scale projects – this has happened a few times – but I don’t sell in Bluewave’s services. Sometimes I work in an advisory capacity with the client, I keep them up to date with the latest Salesforce offerings, or sometimes I collaborate with Bluewave’s competitors if that’s what the customer requires.” – Barry Hughes, Senior Developer at Bluewave

What began as an initial engagement, over three years ago, has turned into a working partnership between Bluewave and our customer. As a result of this placement, our senior developer and technical expert has successfully been able to navigate relationships between our client and the wider Bluewave team, improve their internal processes, design and deploy advanced systems, share his expert knowledge of the Salesforce platform, and plan for more successful implementations in the future.

“It’s been a journey. My role has been basically to pick up a team that wasn’t functioning as well as it could be, and help them to deliver better, to document better, and to improve their way of working overall. I provide architectural expertise and advice to help guide the customer in the right direction for future success. Things that I inherited at the beginning of this engagement, that we never got a chance to reimagine at first, I’m now trusted with to improve. 

It has been a little slow at first, but as the organisation embraces the Salesforce platform in a big way, I’m there to advise and help with future plans. Bluewave has never had a history of going into a client and enforcing our ways of work. We prefer to work with the client, understand limitations and opportunities to improve how their team works and delivers value. I advise, I don’t enforce. Ultimately though, my main goal is to help them get the most out of their investment in Salesforce, and provide opportunities to improve as they go on. This customer has been great to work with so far – it’s very rewarding work.” – Barry Hughes, Senior Developer/Expert Placement Facilitator at Bluewave