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