ERA Environmental Management Solutions, Montreal, Quebec, Canada: ERA Customer Service Success

Total 200 words used.

ERA develops web-based environmental management software for manufacturers that need to monitor air, water, and waste emissions and generate reports for compliance with federal and state regulations. It is an all-in-one SaaS that offers complete coverage of EHS needs for businesses of any size in any industry.

Following its inception as a small consulting firm, ERA transformed into one of the first environmental management software developers on the market, and has grown for the past 27 years to become the trusted provider for automotive powerhouses like General Motors, Toyota, and Stellantis, and countless Fortune 500/100 companies.

ERA owes its success in part to its commitment to human connection. By virtue of being privately held, it has always been able to offer its clients personalized support, bringing its regulatory experts together with executives and EHS managers for immediate problem resolution. In the words of co-founder Sarah Sajedi: “Everyone’s on tech support. Our clients know our scientists by name, and we know each member of their team closely”.

ERA has been recognized as one of Canada’s top 40 SME employers, a top 10 automotive solution provider (MyTechMag), and one of the 30 most admired companies to watch (Insights Success), among other awards.

Total 250 words used.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, ERA’s approach to customer service, while intimate, was marked by certain inefficiencies that could’ve been improved. Given that support was provided verbally or via email, clients would reach out to scientists for clarification multiple times. Moreover, the quality of the support depended on the scientist responding to the request at that moment, who may not have been the expert on the subject or software module in question. Consequently, ERA spent an undue amount of time hand-holding clients through everything from user setups to data entry. This inefficiency was most prominent during implementation; ERA scientists spent weeks teaching new users, in a classroom-style setting, how to operate the software, and it would take months before they felt comfortable using it by themselves. The number of tech support tickets increased as clients began to work from home. In response, ERA introduced two radical changes.

First, it hired a team of technical writers to compose help files for the most common issues, most of which were easy fixes. It also asked its scientists to set up dedicated support hours and record training videos that covered the data entry process. Clients could now get high-quality support that was guaranteed to originate from experts, and get it faster too, without depending on the scientists’ availability.

Second, ERA redefined the way it got clients set up. Thanks to the new Tandem Implementation process, users tackled real-life scenarios with real data from their facilities, receiving personalized support only when they deemed necessary.

Written answers to the questions

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Total 241 words used.

Over time, the improvements described in the previous question grew into an automated customer service system in their own right. With every help file, instructional video, and training course, clients had more resources they could tap into. Even though they retained the impression that they could always talk to an ERA employee, they began to exhibit more independence, going as far as claiming they felt the software was their own. As a result, the volume of support requests and the time taken to address them decreased significantly, in some teams by as much as 50%.

Similarly, the implementation process became easier to execute. Fewer team members were needed on site: with as little as two senior ERA trainers and six trainees (executives and managers from the client’s side), ERA could implement the software across three manufacturing facilities, some of them the size of a small town, in as little as two weeks (see the PowerPoint presentation attached). Not only can scientists now spend more time improving the software, but they are also able to tackle implementation for multiple clients simultaneously, thus broadening the reach of ERA’s varied modules (in that a large portion of annual revenue is comprised of sales of different modules to existing clients).

This COVID-induced transition to a more self-sufficient software is the latest example of ERA’s tireless search for new and improved ways of automating its customer service (while always providing a direct line to our scientists).