Harcastle Environmental / BB-Demo – Onboarding
Callcompleted
Harcastle Environmental · 2025-05-27 16:30
Follow-up onboarding call with Imran Hussain on the Growth build. Routing passed his read test, the id mapping sheet is unfinished, and he worries about mapping accuracy and finance timing at month end.
What was said
What this says
Current to 13 Oct 26Follow-up onboarding call with Imran Hussain on the Growth build. Routing passed his read test, the id mapping sheet is unfinished, and he worries about mapping accuracy and finance timing at month end.
What happened: Imran and Laura Penhaligon confirmed routing, helpdesk and finance as the first three connectors, one at a time with a few days to settle. Imran ran a read test on routing during the call.
Customer view: Imran's concern is the customer id mapping. He is flagging duplicates in a column rather than deleting anything, and wants a small pilot group first, not forty users.
Commercial: Laura quoted the Growth order form at £40k a year, with a customer start of 11 Apr 2025. Dashboards and quarterly reviews with Marcus Bell come after the pilot.
Watch: the helpdesk category is only about half filled in, and finance is busy at month end. Laura agreed to keep the finance connector last so the pilot still works if it slips.
Themes
Current to 9 Oct 26Theme
Connector order, id mapping
Importance
neutral
Sentiment
mixed
Voice
champion
Who was there
BB-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
Current to 9 Oct 26- Laura Penhaligon to send the connector checklist, the finance read-only note and a mapping reference table template.
- Imran Hussain to send the mapping sheet by the end of the following week and report when the routing test is done.
- Laura Penhaligon to book the pilot training once routing has been live for a few days.
Risks
Current to 9 Oct 26- A wrong customer id mapping would make answers look wrong and erode trust in the brain.
- The finance connector could slip because the finance team are busy at month end.
- The missed-collection category is only about half filled in, so ticket reporting will be incomplete.
Opportunities
Current to 9 Oct 26- The Growth dashboards builder is planned once the pilot group trusts the answers.
- Quarterly reviews with Marcus Bell are a place to review what people ask.
- Only a handful of users start, so seats up to forty remain to widen into after the pilot.
Transcript
Laura Penhaligon NoneHi Imran, can you hear me alright? I can see you on video.
Imran Hussain NoneYes, loud and clear. Good afternoon, Laura. Give me a second, I've just got the admin console open on the other screen.- Laura Penhaligon NoneNo rush at all. How's the week been? Anything on fire at your end?
- Imran Hussain NoneNot on fire. A couple of missed-collection tickets this morning from the same depot, but that's a normal Tuesday. We've had a lot of rain across Yorkshire, so the rounds run late.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneRight, I can imagine. Well, hopefully this is a calmer forty minutes. I'll keep an eye on the clock so we finish on time.
- Imran Hussain NoneThanks. So, to open with what I've changed since last time. I've created a role in our Snowflake account for the brain to read from, and I've given it only the access we agreed. I tested it with a read on one table and it came back cleanly. I haven't switched any source on yet, because I want to test each one before we turn it on.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's perfect, and exactly the order I'd want. So the shape of today is: first we confirm the sources and the order we bring them in, then who owns what on your side, then what your account managers will actually see at the start. Does that sit right?
- Imran Hussain NoneYes, that's fine. Go on.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneGreat. So you've been a customer since 11 Apr 2025, you're on Growth with forty users, and that's £39,600 a year under the order form. Growth gives you eight connectors and the implementation runs about eight weeks, so there's a fair amount of room but not infinite. From the sales conversations I have the routing system, the helpdesk and the accounting system as the first three. Is that still the plan?
- Imran Hussain NoneThat's still the plan. Routing is the big one, because that's where the rounds and the sites live. Then the helpdesk, where the missed-collection tickets are. Then finance, for the invoices. How many connectors have we got left after those three?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneFive. So that leaves room for the CRM, the call recorder and a couple spare. I'd keep at least one spare for something you don't know about yet.
- Imran Hussain NoneSensible. I'd rather not use them all in the first month. I've seen a new feed break an older one and I don't want to be untangling that.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneYeah, fair. And that's why I'd go one at a time anyway. Routing first, test it, let it settle for a few days, then helpdesk, then finance. Does a few days feel about right to you?
- Imran Hussain NoneMm, a few days is right. I'd like to watch at least a couple of nightly refreshes before I'm happy. I'll test it before we switch it on for anyone else.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneGood. Which brings me to the thing I most want to get right, which is customer ids. Your account managers think in customers and sites. What's the key that joins a customer across routing, helpdesk and finance?
- Imran Hussain NoneRight, this is the bit I've been looking at. Which customer id is that is always the question. Routing has a site id, the helpdesk has an organisation, and finance has an account code. A customer with three sites might be one account code and three site ids, and sometimes the helpdesk has them under a different name altogether. So I've started a mapping sheet. What I'd like is one customer record per site, rolled up to the account, so nobody gets two answers for the same business.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneYes, that's exactly the model I'd choose. Could you share the sheet, even unfinished? We'd load it as a reference table inside your Snowflake account, and the brain would use it to resolve the ids rather than guess.
- Imran Hussain NoneI can share it, but it's not finished. We've got about thirty thousand business customers and I know some are duplicated from an old migration. I'm not going to delete anything I can't restore, so I'll flag the duplicates in a column and leave them where they are.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's the right call. A flag is all we need. We can exclude flagged rows from answers for now and bring them back in once you've cleaned them up, so nothing is lost.
- Imran Hussain NoneGood. And if the sheet changes, does the brain pick that up?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneIt does. The refresh runs overnight and should be complete by 07:00 your time on business days, so if you change the sheet in the afternoon, people see it the next morning.
- Imran Hussain NoneOkay. That's useful, because the account managers start early. Some of them are on the road before seven.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThen they'll have the data complete when they sit down. Let's talk about them. Who's going to be using the brain first, and how many?
- Imran Hussain NoneNot forty on day one, I'll be honest. I'd like a small group of account managers first, a handful, and my own team. I want them to try it against customers they know well, so they can tell me if an answer's wrong. Then we widen it out.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's the pattern that works best. People who know the customers catch the odd answer straight away. I'd suggest they each pick two or three accounts they know inside out and ask the brain about collections, tickets and invoices together.
- Imran Hussain NoneRight, that's the whole reason we bought it. Today they open three systems to answer one question about one customer.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneExactly. So a good first test is a missed collection. What happened with this customer's collections, did they call, and have they been invoiced for it?
- Imran Hussain NoneMm. That one is a good test, actually, because the ticket sits in the helpdesk, the call sits in the recorder, and the invoice sits in finance. Hang on, let me pull one up. Give me a minute, I'm just finding a customer I know.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneTake your time. I'm noting down the id question while you look.
- Imran Hussain NoneNearly there. It's filed under a different name in the helpdesk, which is rather the point.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneNo worries. Is it one of the bigger ones?
- Imran Hussain NoneRight. Sorry, that took a while, the console's slow today. So I've got one here, a customer with four sites, and two of them have missed-collection tickets in the last month. Which is the kind of thing we'd want to see side by side.
- Laura Penhaligon NonePerfect. Keep that one as your first test. Once routing and the helpdesk are both loaded, ask it about that customer and compare with what you see yourself.
- Imran Hussain NoneI will. And I'll check the answer against the helpdesk by hand first, so I know what right looks like before anyone else sees it.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneSince you've got the console open, do you want to run your read test on the routing source now, while I'm here?
- Imran Hussain NoneYes, why not. Let me share the screen. Right, I'm selecting the role we created and I'll run a count on the routing table first, then a few rows.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneMm, I can see it. Go ahead.
- Imran Hussain NoneOkay, the count has come back. It's a big number, as you'd expect. And the site id is populated on every row I've looked at. The account code is blank on a few, which is the legacy ones I mentioned.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneGood, that's what the flag column is for. And the role can only see the routing schema, is that right? Nothing else?
- Imran Hussain NoneCorrect. Only that schema. I'll add the others one at a time, as each source passes its own test.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneGood. Then routing is basically ready from your side.
- Imran Hussain NoneFrom the data side, yes. I'd still like to watch the first refresh before I say it's switched on. Not before.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneCompletely agree. Can we go through the helpdesk side? Is there anything special about how your missed-collection tickets are categorised?
- Imran Hussain NoneThere is, yes. We have a category for missed collections, but it's only filled in about half the time, because the agents are busy. The depot is a free-text field. So I'd want to be careful that the brain doesn't treat a blank category as meaning something. I can tidy the category field, but not before the connector is live.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneUnderstood. Blank is blank, we won't read anything into it. And please don't hold the connector for the tidy-up. Bring it in as it is, and we'll show you which tickets arrive without a category so you can see the scale of it.
- Imran Hussain NoneThat's actually helpful. A picture I can show my manager. Fine, we'll do that.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneGreat. Finance next. Who on your side needs to approve read access to invoices, because that tends to be the slow one.
- Imran Hussain NoneThat'd be our finance team. It isn't me. I'll ask them for a read-only account on the accounting system, and I'll tell them it's invoices and customer accounts only, nothing about payroll or suppliers. I expect they'll want it in writing.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneIf someone's around, asking now would save us a week.
- Imran Hussain NoneI'll message them now. Give me a moment, bear with me.
- Imran Hussain NoneRight. They're in a meeting until later, but the reply is that read-only on invoices and customer accounts is fine in principle. They just want it in writing, as I said.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneI'll send you a short note you can forward to them, setting out exactly what the connector reads and that it's read-only. That usually saves a round of questions.
- Imran Hussain NonePlease. That would save me an afternoon.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneNow the owners. For the connectors, I have you as the owner of all three. Is there someone who covers when you're away, because we find that's where things get stuck.
- Imran Hussain NoneHm. Honestly, it's me and one analyst in my team. She could cover the routing one, but I wouldn't want her switching anything on without me. So name her as the backup, but changes go through me.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat works. I'll note a second admin for the brain itself so you're not on your own. Is that okay with you?
- Imran Hussain NoneYes, that's fine. I'll sort out the access after this call.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneGood. And on our side, Lewis Kerr is your account owner for anything commercial, and Marcus Bell is your customer success manager, so once you're live he'll take over the day-to-day and set up the review calls. I stay with you through the implementation.
- Imran Hussain NoneRight, okay. Good to know who to go to. Does Marcus run the training as well, or is that you?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's me for the first session. I'd suggest an hour with the pilot group once routing's loaded and they've had a couple of refreshes, so they're asking against real data rather than half-empty pages.
- Imran Hussain NoneGrowth has the dashboards builder, doesn't it? Is that something I'd set up, or something the account managers would do themselves?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneEither. It's in the plan, but I'd hold off until the data's settled. Dashboards built on a half-trusted mapping tend to get abandoned. Once the pilot group trusts the answers, one dashboard per team, built by someone who actually uses it, is plenty.
- Imran Hussain NoneFair. I'll note that for after the pilot. Marcus can cover that in the quarterly review, I assume?
- Laura Penhaligon NoneYes, quarterly reviews come with Growth, and Marcus runs those. It's a good place to look at what people are actually asking.
- Imran Hussain NoneOne more thing on training. Can I record it? Some of the account managers won't be able to make it and I'd like to send them the replay.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneOf course. Record it and keep it somewhere your team can find. I'll share the slides as well.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneBefore we wrap up, is anything worrying you about the plan? Anything you think will go wrong?
- Imran Hussain NoneThe ids, mostly. If the mapping is wrong the whole thing looks wrong, and people stop trusting it. And I'm slightly worried about timing, because the finance team are busy at month end. If it slips a week, I'd rather you knew now than found out later.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's helpful, thank you. Then we'll keep the finance connector last and not tie it to the first training. If it slips, the pilot still works with routing and the helpdesk.
- Imran Hussain NoneGood. That takes the pressure off.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneLet me read back the actions. I'll send you three things: the connector checklist, the note for your finance team about read-only access, and a template for the mapping reference table. You'll send me the mapping sheet, even unfinished, and tell me when the routing connector has passed your own test. Then we switch it on, and let it settle for a few days.
- Imran Hussain NoneYes. I'll aim to have the sheet to you by the end of next week, and the routing test done in the same week if the access comes through.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneThat's fine. I'll book the training session once routing has been live for a few days, and I'll email you the date.
- Imran Hussain NoneBrilliant. Anything else from you? Otherwise I'll get back to the tickets.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneNothing from me. Thanks, Imran, that was really useful. Good to see the test run properly.
- Imran Hussain NoneThanks, Laura. I'll get the sheet over as soon as I can. Speak soon.
- Laura Penhaligon NoneSpeak soon. Cheers, Imran, bye.
- Imran Hussain NoneBye.
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