Founded in 1996, Santa Cruz, California, based Stella Media is dedicated to helping maximize the marketing potential of electronic media for its small business and real estate clients. The company develops a wide variety of marketing programs, from brochures to branding, integrating web, print and video to get client messages out as effectively as possible.
Teresa Marlow, Principal, indicates that as the business grew and clients were increasingly taking advantage of multiple communications channels, the company's paper-based workflow was becoming unwieldy. She says, "We would create a paper file for each client job, and that needed to circulate among multiple people in the course of accomplishing the project. We had people running around looking for the file, writing notes on a sticky but forgetting to put it on a folder, illegible handwriting and other inefficiencies that I could see were really impacting our productivity. In the worst cases, a client would call to cancel a flyer or other project, and if the designer was not available to take the call, he or she might not get the message before commencing the work. We knew there had to be a better way."
After researching various options, Marlow chose Virtual Ticket from MetaCommunications. She says, "We have an unusual workflow and product mix, with a lot of our time spent on developing web and video applications. We liked the fact that Virtual Ticket could be customized to meet our specific needs. It is important to us that a workflow solution conform to our workflow, and not the other way around. Virtual Ticket has made a huge difference in our productivity, proving itself over and over.
Stella Media has a diverse workforce, including copywriters, graphic designers, photographers, web developers and more. Most of the projects the company produces leverage multiple disciplines and meeting tight deadlines requires close coordination. Marlow says, "With Virtual Ticket, information is entered at the time the order is placed, often by the client. We are able to add all sorts of client-specific information to the ticket as well as link photographs, videos and other content, so that everything is easily accessible in one place. And because it is electronic, it can be accessed and used by multiple people at the same time, eliminating the somewhat linear workflow we had in place before."
It is important to us that a workflow solution conform to our workflow, and not the other way around. Virtual Ticket has made a huge difference in our productivity.
Teresa Marlow, Principal
With the customized Virtual Ticket interface, as each portion of the project is completed, operators simply click a button to generate email notifications that automatically contain all necessary information for the next step, whether that be client notifications or internal hand-offs. "Another feature we really like," adds Marlow, "is appointment confirmations. We use this to make sure everyone is on the same page and has all of the information they need to do their job." As an example, she cites the Virtual Tours that the company produces for its real estate clients, saying, "The photographer will receive an appointment confirmation that not only includes the time to be on-site, but all the other required information. For example, the client may want still shots as well as the video. And the photographer needs instructions about how to access the property. Because everything is stored in Virtual Ticket, a single click of the mouse gets those instructions on their way. Things simply don't fall through the cracks anymore."
The company also makes a large number of files available for client download. When a client needs to be notified to download an image or file, Virtual Ticket contains a button that composes the email notification and contains all instructions for downloading. "This is a fabulous feature that saves us a huge amount of time," Marlow says.
Finding files is also much easier. According to Marlow, before Virtual Ticket, anyone searching for a file had to navigate multiple levels within the file system to get to the file. Now, she says, all of the files are associated with the job ticket and can be accessed with a single click. "This has also made it more convenient for our clients," she says. "If they wanted materials from old photo shoots in the past, we had to dig them out and forward them. Now, with Virtual Ticket's Web interface, clients can search through their old photo shoots whenever and wherever they want."
While Stella Media doesn't use Virtual Ticket for invoicing, it plays an important role in billing. Marlow reports, "During the course of a project, there are almost always a number of changes — additions, deletions, modifications — and it was difficult to track those. We probably left a lot of money on the table. But now we have implemented a coding system in Virtual Ticket that aligns with our Quickbooks coding. So, for example, 'P1' might represent still photography, and 'V1' might represent a virtual tour. When a change is made, the operator simply clicks the 'calculate' button and the file is updated. Then in Quickbooks, we simply enter the code and the description auto-populates." Marlow is looking forward to integrating Virtual Ticket and Quickbooks sometime in the future for even more efficiencies.
Marlow concludes, "We looked to a lot of different companies to solve our productivity issues, and MetaCommunications was the most robust. We now have a solution that we can continually adjust as we go. Not only is it helping our business to grow, but it is growing with us. We are delighted with the huge time savings and the flexibility it has brought into our business."
