Case Study
Beauty chain giant, GS Beauty Group becomes more beautiful with Google Apps for Work
GS Beauty Group is proudly Canadian, with new franchises consistently targeting premier retail locations across North America. Due to ageing business technologies, GS Beauty had difficulty with reliable corporate communication, as well as dependable business solutions systems.
Details
Company Name: GS Beauty Group
Date: Sep 2015
Website: www.gsbeautygroup.com
GS Beauty Group is one of Canada’s largest beauty salon operators and franchises. With over 80 different locations across Canada and the United States GS Beauty Group has created a one of a kind beauty empire; with their creation of four main brands: Trade Secrets, Glam-N-Glow, Taylor & Colt and Glamour Secrets.
Why We Chose Business Cloud Inc.
Before their shift to Google Apps for Work, GS Beauty was experiencing a multitude of problems throughout the entire scope of their Business Technologies corporate wide. These problems consisted of an array of communication and mobility issues within the organization which hindered their ability to communicate effectively with franchisees and staff across Canada.
Business Challenge
The dated communication technology before GS beauty’s transition to Google Apps was Microsoft Exchange, through Outlook. This system proved to be flawed, with a great deal of clients and employees not receiving emails on a day to day basis, while offering no alternative for internal communication besides formal email. Another limitation to GS Beauty’s Microsoft legacy program was its failure to transfer email and data to new users, which provides business continuity to new employees.
Their previous traditional file server made it increasingly difficult to impose a corporate document structure, which seeked to transition away from attachments and progress towards sending links in its place. Their file server configuration was problematic for locating and sharing files within the corporation and externally. This was a result of version control issues, and having a multitude of different software versions of Microsoft Office for their employees. There were also problems syncing documents to mobile devices and tablets for employees constantly on the go.
GS Beauty’s legacy calendar left minimal options to manage individual calendars on a corporate scale. They believed that a new option of calendar would enable more effective time use of its overall staff. The employees of GS Beauty, specifically district managers and operations specialist’s, found it difficult to sync and properly use calendars out of the office. Upon deployment it became evident that contact management was a problem throughout the enterprise, with many versions of redundant contacts littering the system.
Another facet of GS Beauty’s old business technology configuration that did not work well was their high frequency of hard drive failures. As a result of this, combined with limited backups being performed, there was data being lost across the entire company. Consistent travel for a large portion of their employees also posed a security risk around losing notebook computers, tablets and mobile devices. This lost data on these devices could not be terminated, and so the need for remote device management was emphasized.
Solution
The combination of underperforming legacy programs, and general business technology heavily influenced GS Beauty’s transition to Google Apps for Work. Our team at Business Cloud teamed up with executive sponsor Paul D’elia, General Manager of GS Beauty to create a custom Business technology solution. Business Cloud’s business technology program placed great emphasis on increased mobility, communication and collaboration.
Google Apps for Work single handedly solved a majority of problems experienced at GS Beauty.. The 99.9% service level agreement uptime of Gmail and corresponding Google apps alleviate the issue of emails not being received by staff. Google Hangouts introduce a new way of communication,making each team member more accessible. Google Drive incited further collaboration among staff from different departments and made sharing files internally and externally a much simpler task. Google Calendar enabled effortless meeting booking, and real time calendar sharing and viewing. The Google Apps suite welcomed ease of use when being mobile and out of the office.
Business Cloud included a data protection program to ensure redundancy and eliminate the worry of lost data. Contact management issues were resolved with the application of Solve360 CRM, as we like to call it “one version of the truth” This contact managing application absolved any prior contact issues GS Beauty had encountered beforehand. Solve 360’s integration with the rest of the Google Apps for Work ecosystem harmonized their new business technology system. Our team provided a seamless transition into a cloud-based ecosystem, backboned on Google Apps for Work
Contact management issues were resolved with the application of Solve360 CRM, one version of the truth contact managing system which absolved any prior contact issues GS Beauty had encountered beforehand. Solve 360’s integration with the rest of the Google Apps for Work ecosystem harmonized their new business technology system.