Sustainable Salons is a fast-growing, profit-for-purpose startup with a big hairy mission—make salon waste history. The social enterprise began with a recycling program for the hairdressing industry and now offers waste solutions for barber shops, beauty salons, dermal clinics, and pet-grooming salons. It also has more than 1,400+ members across Australia and New Zealand.
Sustainable Salons uses Salesforce across its operations to streamline the member experience and maximise its impact. And it credits a large part of its success with the platform to its long-term partnership with Arcturious—a consultative strategy and Salesforce implementation partner.
“Working in partnership with Arcturious, we have brought the immense power of the Salesforce platform to bear. This has allowed us to shift gears and focus on our vision; to make sustainability a reality,” Paul Frasca | Co-Founder | Sustainable Salons.
New approach and roadmap sets Sustainable Salons up for success
Prior to engaging Arcturious, Sustainable Salons had yet to experience the full value of Salesforce. The social enterprise had brought in previous consultants to help set up the CRM and streamline business processes. However, their lack of experience building on Salesforce led to an overly customised and complex deployment.
Sustainable Salons was on the brink of starting over with a new platform when it first met with Michael Diamond, Founder of Arcturious. Diamond offered to run a pro-bono technology strategy session to help Sustainable Salons map out a path forward. This led to a short remediation project during which Arcturious brought the existing Salesforce deployment into best practice.
The benefits of the remediation project were immediate and included a 40% increase in sales team efficiency through streamlined lead and opportunity management in Sales Cloud alongside contract automation powered by DocuSign. The project also involved the introduction of Service Cloud, which reduced case resolution time by 80%.
This led Sustainable Salons to engage Arcturious on the development of a wider Salesforce technology strategy that would empower employees to stay focused on the organisation’s core mission. Goals included removing siloed systems, standardising and streamlining workflow, increasing transparency, and creating a 360° view of members.
“Our challenge was how to resource, manage, and develop our technology stack in an iterative manner and transition multiple systems into a single platform that would help us realise our growth and revenue trajectory,” Anuj Dhawan | Innovations Lead | Sustainable Salons.
Arcturious helped Sustainable Salons define its technology strategy and roadmap through a human-centred design approach. Arcturious also leveraged the Double Diamond design methodology to support each phase of delivery. This involved a thorough period of discovery during which Arcturious met with various stakeholders to fully understand Sustainable Salons’ needs.
The Arcturious team brought a deep curiosity to these meetings and asked many questions to get to the heart of the organisation’s challenges and identify solutions that would really shift the dial.
“I found that a large part of the value in working with Arcturious came from their pillars of strategy, empathy, technology, and curiosity. We ourselves were going through a process of learning what a scalable model would look like for Sustainable Salons, and Michael and his team came in with empathy and understanding of where we were at and where we wanted to get to in the future,” said Dhawan.
Phased delivery provides iterative value and restores confidence in platform capabilities
After mapping out what Sustainable Salons’ future state with Salesforce could look like, Arcturious broke the program out into multiple phases of work—each of which involved adopting additional solutions from Salesforce to solve specific problems.
Each phase started with interrogating the problem from the perspective of the stakeholders most impacted. Arcturious then developed customer journey maps to understand touch points and ‘moments that matter’. The team evaluated related processes and jobs to be done as well as associated pain points. From there, they developed user stories and built fit-for purpose solutions based on an agreed set of design principles, including ‘clicks over code’.
Through this phased approach, Arcturious was able to deliver incremental value and build trust with Sustainable Salons while steadily restoring its confidence in the Salesforce platform.
“Arcturious, established our trust which was key considering where we started from. On top of that, they cared deeply about the same things we cared about, including sustainability, people, and profit. That alignment in values is important for an effective partnership,” said Frasca.
Connected ecosystem underpins growth and exceptional member experiences
Today, all of Sustainable Salons employees and stakeholders are unified on the Salesforce platform. This includes sales, operations, marketing, business support and customer success teams as well as members, conscious consumers, depot staff, and drivers.
Leveraging the data and automation provided by Customer 360, the profit-for-purpose organisation can better engage with members and work more efficiently to divert more waste away from landfill.
Just some of the specific outcomes delivered through this transformative multi-cloud program include:
302% increase in sales growth and the ability to rapidly onboard more members with less stress
314% increase in resource efficiency as a result of new processes enabled by Salesforce Field Service
91% decrease in manual data handling as a result of automated processes and centralised inventory management
20% increase in marketing productivity and 40% uplift in engagement supported by Marketing Cloud
282 days of effort saved as a result of automated pricing updates enabled by Salesforce CPQ and Billing, Salesforce Flow, integration with Xero via MuleSoft, and Asperato from the AppExchange
100% adoption of mobile app and online hub developed through Experience Cloud and Mobile Publisher
These results have not only had a positive impact on Sustainable Salons and its members, but have earned Arcturious recognition as the winner of the Salesforce’s 2022 Global Partner Innovations Award in the Connected Ecosystem category.
“Arcturious has been a key partner in establishing our growth trajectory in partnership with Salesforce. They were able to deeply understand our business and our objectives, and their knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem has given us the opportunity to get the most from our investment,” said Dhawan.
Sustainable Salons continues to work with Arcturious to scale its impact and provide an exceptional experience for members and consumers.
Future plans include standardisation of business operations and the development of interlinking ecosystem experiences. These include a new e-commerce site on StoreConnect from the AppExchange where people can purchase items made from recycled salon waste.
In addition to supporting these projects, Arcturious helps maintain the health of Sustainable Salons' Salesforce ecosystem through a managed services agreement.
Drawing on its in-depth knowledge of the social enterprise, Arcturious is able to quickly triage and priortise cases that matter most. This includes issues impacting member touch points like billing.
Rosie Day, Business Administration Manager at Sustainable Salons, shared that Arcturious ' understanding of the organisation, together with its communication skills, contributed to a successful partnership.
“Arcturious have taken the time to do thorough discovery and have very quickly picked up on our terminology and way of operating. They are also very good at communicating and translating technical solutions in a way that non-technical people can understand. These are things that we have not necessarily experienced when working with other consultants,” “Another great thing about working with Michael and the team is that no matter what problem you have, they can always find a solution.” Rosie Day | Business Administration Manager | Sustainable Salons