As the telemarketing industry gets increasingly digitalized, contact center service provider Gradén Mattsson needed new tools and solutions to keep up. But with no in house software developers and a history of outsourced development, the company needed a new approach to move forward.
Gradén Mattsson turned to OutSystems to empower sales process experts to solve their own problems. Since then, a small team has completely rebuilt and significantly enhanced two business-critical sales applications, transforming user experience and agent efficiency.
“With OutSystems and a business-led approach, we combined existing knowledge in the organization and new digital skills, making us much more productive and innovative.”
Since 1997, Gradén Mattsson has had one mission: to offer high-quality premium class sales and service. As the digital landscape has evolved, customers expect more, so Gradén Mattsson has moved beyond just handling calls, emails, and chats for its clients. It now runs complete ‘Mission Centers’ to handle customer journeys, collect and analyze customer interaction data to help clients make more informed marketing and sales decisions.
Delivering these Missions Centers requires capable digital systems and processes. But without internal application development resources, and frustrated by dependence on external consultants, Jan Gapinski, COO at Gradén Mattsson, decided to investigate if they could enable a “DIY” business-led development approach.
“The world is going digital, and we knew if we didn’t keep up, we’d become uncompetitive,” says Jan. “Our old approach and apps weren’t fit for the digital future. We decided to investigate low-code. We had no formal coding experience, but we understood tables and fields and had used SQL and Tableau. We asked ourselves how hard can this be?”
Governed business-led development 
Comprehensive free training and documentation
OutSystems Customer Success servicesAfter assessing several low-code platform providers, Jan found OutSystems offered the functionality and training he and his team needed.
“We needed a low-code provider that offered detailed self-service training materials suited for business developers,” explains Jan.
Using free online guided learning paths provided by OutSystems, supplemented by hands-on training sessions with an OutSystems Customer Success Manager, three sales team members were able to start redeveloping Gradén Mattsson’s sales applications.
Jan and his team started off replacing the old applications that had been developed in Node.js. The team was able to easily integrate the new apps with Active Directory and an Azure-hosted database, as well as JavaScript and REST APIs that connect to the company’s auto-dialer software and other services. Jan estimates that these new apps have helped the team to improve conversion rates by 40% for this product line.
The team’s next project was to rebuild a Python-based application for another product line to support customer handling, including on and offboarding. “Our old way of working was extremely labor-intensive,” says Jan.
By taking matters into their own hands, Jan’s team was able to rebuild the customer handling application, complete with an eight-step automated process that has eliminated around 80 percent of the previous manual effort.
“The increased automation is saving us a lot of time. Just the other day, I saw lots of new customers appear in our dashboard, and it was great to realize what little effort was required to make that happen.”
Four members of the sales team, working part-time and with no previous professional development training, have transformed the sales application and customer handling applications at Gradén Mattsson.
For Jan, the benefits have been widespread for both the team and for him personally. Jan continues, “The increased automation is saving us a lot of time. Just the other day, I saw lots of new customers appear in our dashboard, and it was great to realize what little effort was required to make that happen.”
“As a business, we’re now able to have bolder business development discussions with clients, safe in the knowledge we won’t be held back by limited digital skills,” says Jan. “And on a personal level, I feel much less stressed. I feel like we have more control now that we can fix any problems that come up ourselves. We’re even A/B testing new ways of working. These are changes we can make in a few hours, without waiting on external consultants.”
Following these early successes, the sales team at Gradén Mattsson has more planned for OutSystems, using the same business-led development approach.
Whatever comes next, Jan and his team feel confident they’ll be able to handle it with OutSystems. “We expect to do more with the OutSystems platform in the future, and I don’t think we’ll be the only business taking this path,” says Jan. “Today, employers expect recruits to be familiar with desktop tools like Excel and Word. I think in the future, organizations will be looking for new-hires who can use platforms like OutSystems, to avoid spreadsheet kludges.”
