How Teamwork fuels Seafoam Media’s 92% client retention rate

Seafoam Media is a full-service digital marketing consultancy and agency based in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), that supplies businesses with the expertise they need for growth and ongoing customer engagement.

Zach Laidlaw, Brand Manager at Seafoam Media, told us how after years of using project management and helpdesk software from Teamwork, they decided to do some comparison shopping. They were happy with Teamwork and Teamwork Desk, but they wanted to see if other software was as good as it claimed to be. Here’s what they discovered.

Not in Kansas anymore

Soon after Seafoam Media was founded in 2010, they chose Teamwork for their project management needs and Teamwork Desk to manage their helpdesk. Fast forward to 2018: after years of using the tools, they knew the market for new platforms had changed drastically. The team began to wonder if they were getting a little too comfortable, so they committed to a review of the leading helpdesk and project management solutions on the market to see if they were missing out on features.

(Spoiler alert: they weren’t.)

As Seafoam Media started their search, they quickly discovered that they could find reliable project management software or helpdesk software, but finding integrated solutions from a single provider wasn’t so easy.

The longer they worked with the new options, however, the more they realized that their workflows were becoming more complicated, not less. One system was so driven by micro-details that valuable time was being eaten up just interacting with it. Another seemed fine on the surface, but then team members discovered the platform couldn’t handle weekly or monthly recurring tasks properly, making these tasks vanish after their first completion. Team members had no idea this was happening until tasks had been dropped and they had to scramble to catch up.

The final straw was the lack of responsiveness with updates to these platforms. When Zach requested bug fixes or performance improvements, he was told that it would take at least a month. ”We couldn’t wait that long,” said Zach. “We spent six months and $8,000 during our research, and we ended up losing hours of productivity each week.”

At the end of 2018, Seafoam Media decided to cut their losses. It was clear that they needed to come back to Teamwork.

Templates and triggers and tasks, oh my!

Right away, the team at Seafoam Media was relieved to be back with familiar tools and more efficient, friction-free workflows. SEO audits, newsletter sends, and landing page designs returned to seamless processes instead of complex, time-consuming to-dos. They went straight back to using task list templates in Teamwork, which allowed them to visualize their processes and replicate them in new projects in just a few clicks.

Now, building new projects takes a fraction of the time, and they can use the reporting features in both Teamwork and Teamwork Desk to help them continuously optimize and adjust their workflows to allow for greater efficiency.

They traded the frustration of unaligned platforms for a single, central location for managing projects and overseeing individual workloads. Team leaders in Seafoam Media can assign tasks to individuals or roles and keep progress on track using milestones.

Conversations with clients are also more transparent in Teamwork Desk, where a common inbox makes it easy to see who’s responsible for tickets and which queries have been resolved. Triggers are used to to automatically match tickets from particular companies with their account managers, so messages don’t get bounced around or languish in the wrong inbox.

There’s no place like home

It can be hard to calculate actual metrics on tools that have a positive impact on business operations, but Zach thinks they’ve found one — a 92% client retention rate.

And it’s not just client satisfaction that’s been affected — team members are happier, too. With increased transparency and accountability around who’s doing what, as well as easy access to essential project information from one simple platform, everyone is kept in the loop and empowered to work the way that works for them and their clients. And with Collaborators, in-house team members have been able to add freelancers as needed, without needing to spend time getting them up to date on the project.

But the time and funds they spent researching their options wasn’t in vain. The experience gave their team the chance to get a more informed perspective on their best practices and the tools they need to achieve them. Now that their search is over, they realize exactly how satisfied they are with Teamwork. “Looking back, we know that we had been using the right platform all along. For us, Teamwork has the best ROI we’ve seen.”