Clients
Our clients trust us. We work late so you don't have to. We step into messy and delayed projects and we get things back on track. We put tools and processes in place that integrate with your team and we communicate with you to make sure our collaboration goes smoothly. Then we transfer knowledge and practices so that you can do it yourself the next time around.
Telstar serves a broad range of clients and is a woman-owned business. When not saving the day at work, our consultants use their skills and experience to volunteer in their communities.
Some of our recent successes
Project and Community Management
The challenge: Telstar was asked to help reduce customer confusion and lower costs of customer support while increasing customer satisfaction and community participation. The solution needed to include planning for the evolution of older products as well as releasing and sustaining the client’s new product.
The solution:Telstar consultants enlivened customer forums, collaborated with business teams, and wrote consumer-friendly announcements and answers to customer questions.
Telstar also helped re-energize the client’s relationship with its community enthusiasts, also known as MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals, technology professionals outside of the company who voluntarily share their expertise with customers). We developed and implemented a program to make sure MVPs received timely newsletters, updates, and virtual conferences to answer questions and use the features in the customer forums in a way that reduced the need for customers to contact technical support. This also increased effectiveness and usefulness of forums for users. The MVP moderators are now highly active, and the community is healthy as evidenced by the high participation rate, positive customer feedback, and the high rate of questions successfully answered.
In the same project, Telstar also managed the transition from one customer forum platform to another, working with multiple internal teams and MVPs. The transition management team rated Telstar’s contributions as having been key for the smooth changeover.
Impact: We created a connected system between online community and customer support. The online community reduces overall burden on customer support and there are clear escalation paths when online community is not sufficient in helping the customer. Issues that surface in forums can now also be used as a predictor for top support issues and in generating resource materials for the customer support team.
Partner Marketing and Financial Analysis
The challenge: Our client’s unified communications partner marketing team has business investment funds that can be offered to partners building new voicemail and e-mail tools on top of their technology. Salespeople nominate partners to receive funding, but the amount of paperwork and accounting necessary to secure funds made it onerous and took time away from actual selling.
The solution: Rather than adding more administrators to manage the workload, Telstar consultants substantially streamlined the business process. We created a monthly invoicing system that works with a single PO per partner. Approvers view a single report that notes the status of each request. The new process follows the established accounting rules, but salespeople can check in once a month rather than daily or weekly.
Impact: The initial project started with six top partner accounts. With the success of the first program and the dramatic reduction in administrative time, we were approached by the partner team to help streamline a co-investing program. Telstar was quickly able to roll out the same process to all 95 partners.
Business Event Management
The challenge: One of our clients is involved in a number of annual events and marketing programs, including key industry forums, developer conferences, and large worldwide events. The business group was looking for a consulting team who could take over the events, act like an owner, and bring order into the many moving parts, handling not just logistics but overall program management.
The solution: Telstar consultants stepped in and worked to make it easy for the client. For one event, our team had just six weeks to handle all device management, project management, multi-vendor management, strategy, and messaging, all while the client was also trying to implement a new brand. The event was a success.
Telstar now provides overall program management for a number of our client’s events, including coordination of logistics vendors, collateral and agency vendors, and site registration vendors.
Impact: We help the business connect with the right people, help them build strategy (understanding the organization, the product, and the people), and help them connect with their customers in a meaningful way. Telstar consultants are recognized for excellence within the team and, as one consultant noted, “we know what the client needs even before they need it.”
Sales Associate Dashboard Business Analysis
The challenge: The more than 200,000 associates within one client’s stores must use many different software systems which do not share or gather information usefully. Associates must log into a tool, then log out and log into another, to perform work on the same task or job. The client’s business team commissioned the design of a single web application to provide better sales resources and customer service, but they didn’t have a project roadmap. Their mockups were not detailed enough to use as a specification or statement of work for a development team.
The solution: Telstar consultants studied the proposal and html demo and provided documentation for features and requirements that could be used to begin their development process. Telstar also provided several hours of consulting on approach, risk analysis, and design best practices. Finally, we provided a recommended project plan and milestones for completion of their v1 release.
Impact: Business decision makers came away with a much clearer idea of the scope and impact of their proposed project, as well as the desired feature documentation they required to begin development of their application. Telstar helped the business leaders nail down specifics of functionality. The scope, functionality, dependencies, application design, and project timeline were clearly understood.
Enterprise Marketing Team Communications Management
The challenge: One client had hundreds of internal e-mail distribution lists and the marketing team did not feel that they were in control of the messages. E-mail communications flooded the inboxes of the external sales team, so much so that it was generally perceived as “spam” and not read. E-mail messages did not have a consistent look, feel, or voice, and as much as 90% of the broadcast messages did not support stated business goals. The marketing team wanted a communications strategy that supported business goals and allowed for effective announcements to the broader team.
The solution: Telstar consultants examined the situation and determined that e-mail messages needed to address a business objective before being allowed to be sent out and that all newsletters and communications should conform to a standard banner and template so that recipients would understand that it come through an approved channel.
We then built a self-maintaining, web-based SharePoint tool that allowed business owners to approve or reject submissions and then post those submissions to the SharePoint site if approved.
Impact: Important communications and resources are much better targeted to personnel based on roles and accountabilities and we dramatically reduced ongoing costs of maintaining outdated content. This effectively “works us out of a job” in terms of sustained web development work but meets our client’s budget needs.
Internal Technology Review and Planning
The challenge: One client was ready to upgrade its technology systems, but the IT team wanted to better understand the needs of its staff members and key community members before embarking on a big project. They use a broad base of technologies, including software for event planning and management, document management, communications, donor tracking and management, financial management, and external websites and other social media.
The solution: Telstar consultants conducted extensive interviews with staff, volunteers, and constituents to understand current processes and to determine what was working and where systems might be breaking down or where needs could be better met. We also surveyed and inventoried the software and technology in place and did research to determine what open-source or free solutions might be available and useful. Once the interviews and research were complete, Telstar provided the client with a comprehensive and plain-language overview of its software and web-based technology needs and future requirements, as well as high-level recommendations and a roadmap for budgeting and development. We also showed the IT team how various existing solutions could be more effective with simple process changes.
Impact: The client was able to review information written in a way that allowed both technical and non-technical staff to understand and evaluate each technology solution. Going forward, the team will be able to make plans with a complete understanding of how technology and processes affect both staff and constituents.
Find out how we can help you
Marketing Consulting & Services
- End-to-end Product Marketing
- Event Strategy and Planning
- Technology and Tools support for marketing programs
Business Leadership Consulting & Tools
- Organizational Effectiveness Tools and Processes
- Change Management Strategies and Consulting
- Social Media Integration Strategies
Program Management & Tool Development
- User Centered Design Services
- Tools and Services for Business Optimization
- End-to-end Program Management