Scan2CAD Case Study: saved time and improved customer happiness

August 15, 2016 11 min read

Even if some of your clients are well-known companies like Tesla, Nasa, GM and Intel, farsighted businessmen know they need to keep looking at how they can improve their product. That’s exactly what Luke Kennedy did with his company Scan2CAD. By focusing on addressing one major issue affecting the company’s core product, Luke ended up with a tailor-made custom solution allowing him to save lots of time and improve the overall happiness of his customers. As he told us, running a business is a matter of finding your “bottle openers”, reliable business partners able to provide what you specifically need, each time you’re in need.

The scenario

Luke Kennedy is the owner of Scan2CAD, a company based in Worcestershire, UK that provides a tool to convert raster graphic files into vectors with technical information embedded, required by many technical softwares. Among his clients, you could easily found some huge and famous companies such Tesla, GM, Intel, Nasa. Woah! As within any great company that’s always seeking to improve, he was looking to find a way to ultimately address a major issue some of his customers were experiencing.

This was an important issue to resolve because it created further problems: non-optimized executed workflows and, at the end of the day, wasted time that could be invested on something else. Fortunately, Luke isn’t just an experienced entrepreneur who’s been running the company for the past 6 years, doing sales, marketing, managing in-house developer. He’s also an old-time fan and user of WordPress! And that’s where this story begins.

The problem

When somebody lands on your website, you, as a business owner, have to do everything possible to make this visitor into a customer. This, of course, doesn’t happen overnight and it has to do with many activities you deploy. The important thing here to understand is that Luke and Scan2CAD are already good at this stage, so he focused his attention on optimizing what happens after a visitor, who became a customer, buys his product:

I needed some custom plugins made. Every time someone buys Scan2CAD, they’d need a license/user number in order to use our product. We used to manually email each customer their license in order for them to use the product.

Luke needed a more effective way to handle the activation on new customers. He needed to automate this crucial task in the workflow so that the customers would be able to receive their activation license immediately, hence start using the product in minutes. Even if he could count on 20 in-house developers, Luke’s farsighted management led him to look for a specific type of professional developer who could be able to provide his company with what they needed. Reason being:

When you have too many developers involved in the WordPress site, it usually creates needless errors. It’s better for one or two developers to have full ownership.

The leap

Given the importance of the issue to address, Luke was aware it wasn’t just a matter of finding a good WordPress developer, it had to be a great one:

I wanted someone that really knew their stuff, especially with WooCommerce, because it works in a unique way. From past experience, I knew that I needed a SUPER expert – not just someone with PHP, WordPress, plugin or themes experience.

And since Luke knows half of the job with getting someone external to do work is actually finding that right person, he happily found that Codeable stands apart from other outsourcing marketplaces. In his words:

I’ve used UpWork, I’ve used freelancer.com too. The fact that you have pre-vetted developers and you specialize in one thing and you do that one thing well, is what makes Codeable different. Although UpWork is its own brand, you feel like there’s no accountability within that community/marketplace.

Luke felt like he was talking to actual human beings, rather than just automated bots. But it was also a matter of feeling secure, like having a safe net, in the awful event things might go bad:

As soon as you sign up at Codeable, you get the personalized e-mail from Per. There’s a human behind, rather than just a bot. We know that if there is something that goes wrong, there’s always someone there to help you.

The end result

So, what tangible benefits were Luke and his company able to achieve? Well, something that many other businessmen are striving day in day out to reach. In the first place, thanks to the custom development provided by Codeable’s developer, Gabriel Reguly, Scan2CAD now saves a lot of time activating their new users because they automated the entire process.

And with this new feature in place, the buying experience became smoother for the customers, improving the overall customer happiness. Two birds with one stone.
But it’s not just about getting one “thing” done. Luke now is sure this working relationship is something he could leverage in the long run as well:

Between a bottle opener and a Swiss army knife, you’d think people would prefer the Swiss army knife, the multi-task product. But what if you need to specifically open a bottle? Then of course everyone not only wants, but needs, a bottle opener! Once you’ve found your bottle opener – a service that you trust, it will be for life.

There is a HUGE amount of hidden time in hiring (interviewing people, giving them access, making sure they know their stuff, all of which is scary enough! But it is also the time spent worrying about your developer – are they using best practices? Will they do a good job?) So yes, I’m always going to come back to Codeable, because I know I am in good hands.

Running a business all comes down to finding your “bottle openers”: reliable business partners able to provide you and your company with what you need, when you need it, and make your business pop.

Codeable

Editorial Team

About the author

The Codeable Editorial Team consists of WordPress experts and professionals with years of experience building, managing, and growing WordPress-powered websites.