Customer Q & A: RentGrow
The ongoing Customer Q & A blog series highlights a wide range of Jitterbit customers to find out what business needs drove their integration requirements and what their reasons for selecting Jitterbit as their integration solution.
In this week's hot seat is Pam Morrison, Manager of Business Analytics at RentGrow.
Can you tell me a little about RentGrow?
RentGrow provides online resident screening services for property management firms across the country. We’ve been in business since 1989 and focus primarily on the multi-family industry. Our clients are property management companies that represent about 700,000 units across the United States. We offer a software product called TotalScreen which delivers user-friendly resident screening to let property managers manage their risk through control and compliances, while maximizing their operating income.
How did you find out about Jitterbit and what were some of the reasons you chose it as your integration solution?
I was attending various Salesforce conferences and I discovered a number of products that could automate a lot of the things that my team was doing manually. We were pretty budget sensitive at the time so we went almost a year using a manual “dual entry” method between Salesforce and our TotalScreen in-house system. We got to the point where we planned to grow the company and increase sales so we went back and re-evaluated where we could become more efficient –integration became a key initiative.
We looked at a few options including Cast Iron and Pervasive but they were really cost prohibitive. A consultant of ours recommended Jitterbit and I was able to download and try it out myself. The price was right, but what really sold me was that I was able to easily create integrations myself. I work on the business analytics side of our business now but Jitterbit is a tool that I can use on my own without having to rely on our IT department.
Bringing in Jitterbit allowed us to rely on an automated integration system rather than hiring new employees to manually manage the same processes.
How do you currently use Jitterbit?
We have product called TotalScreen that allows property managers to screen residents. When we implemented Salesforce to track our sales, support, and call center data there was no connectivity with our in-house system. This meant we needed duplicate all contacts, property information, etc. between our system and Salesforce. For a while we did this manually, entering the same information into both systems. As you can imagine this was time consuming and data quality wasn’t guaranteed because of human error.
With Jitterbit this is now an automated process. For example, when we get a new customer such as an apartment manager, their information needs to be set up in Salesforce for our sales people to access and their information also needs to be validated and screened before it is entered into our TotalScreen system. This includes background checks such as credit scores, sex offender records, drugs, arrests, etc. Jitterbit transforms and moves all of this data into Salesfore. Jitterbit is the key making sure our information is updated and mirrored in both systems. One of the great things about Jitterbit is that I can throw just about anything at it, whether it’s a database or Excel spreadsheet. Our finance department uses NetSuite, and although we haven’t integrated it with our other systems yet, I really like knowing that Jitterbit will be able to handle it.
From a business perspective, how has Jitterbit helped RentGrow?
Even though I work in Operations, I have a technical background so I could tell right away after deploying Jitterbit that I would be able to handle it. You don’t have to be an IT expert to run Jitterbit. I wasn’t going to have IT help so we needed a tool that I could run on my own and Jitterbit fit the bill.
From a business standpoint this means a number of things for RentGrow. Our data is accurate and our employees have access to the same information in whichever system they work out of. Jitterbit has eliminated our reliance on employees manually entering data, which combined with my ability to manage Jitterbit on my own, means that we have freed up people to focus on other important work.
I like Jitterbit. It’s great software that has a lot of functionality. I would like to use it more actually. Eventually I would like to double my use of it by connecting more of our systems and automating more of our processes.
Thanks Pam! If you want to learn more about RentGrow's integration, be sure to check out their Customer Success Story.
Do you have a Jitterbit success story you would like to share? Drop us a line at customersuccess [at] jitterbit.com or @jitterbit on twitter.
