Conveya builds trusted apps for world’s largest employers

Conveya was established in 2017 to help employers manage training and retention of early learners. Founder and CEO Nathan Gralton was working with apprentices and trainees at the time and sought to address the high attrition rates associated with this group. 

“The aim was to use technology to proactively address all those red flags that are raised before someone leaves. Our first app was a basic algorithm built on the Salesforce Platform and it was designed for mum and dad-owned businesses. However, we quickly found that the issues faced by these businesses were the same as those faced by larger employers,” said Gralton. 

Conveya signed its first corporate customer soon after and, with the help of Salesforce, the company is now scaling globally.

As Conveya has signed on new and bigger clients, it’s had to enhance its products and build new ones to meet different requirements. This has led to the development of a specialist people management system which includes apps for logging and reporting on employee activities, collecting employee feedback, and managing internal rotations. The system also provides reporting on training and development activities. This reporting has been game changing for customers who previously spent a considerable amount of time consolidating reports from different training providers. In addition, it provides customers with a continuous feedback loop so that they can refine their training and development activities in line with employee needs. This is particularly important with the pandemic causing people to re-think their careers and the skills needed to thrive in the future of work. 

All of these apps were initially built using Salesforce Platform which equipped Conveya to develop new apps in just days. As a result, Conveya has been able to grow its portfolio and customer base quickly, with a more than 100% year-on-year increase in new users. 

Gralton also credited Salesforce Platform with helping the company gain the trust of early customers. These have included customers in banking and finance requiring high levels of security and reliability.

“We have been able to acquire these large, multinational customers almost from day one. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without Salesforce and the security it provides,” said Gralton.

As Conveya entered new markets, it needed an easier way to scale and manage customer concerns like data residency. This led the company to reassess its technology requirements. 

“Our approach to development was a bit like renovating a house. We kept adding extensions and our infrastructure became harder and more expensive to manage,” said Gralton. 

Conveya decided to start over and rebuild its apps on Heroku. This switch enabled it to retain the speed and flexibility offered by Salesforce Platform while benefiting from Heroku’s scalable infrastructure.

“The scalability of Heroku means that if we want to add 50,000 people onto a new product tomorrow, we can. It’s just a phone call, two-clicks, and problem solved,” said Gralton. 

Conveya has also been able to leverage Heroku’s flexibility to support customers like Amazon across regions. For example, the company was able to get a solution up and running for Amazon in the US within days of being introduced by their team in the UK. It was also able to quickly update the languages in its app to launch them for Amazon in Europe. 

Conveya is now continuing to grow quickly, with customers in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Portugal, United Kingdom, and United States. Using Heroku, it’s able to store app data in customers’ preferred locations and navigate security requirements with ease.

The company has also adopted Shield and Salesforce Privacy Centre to provide customers with another layer of data protection. Shield is specifically  used for encryption and event monitoring while Salesforce Privacy Centre helps ensure apps comply with region-specific concerns like GDPR.

Gralton shared that the ability to provide this level of protection and assurance continues to open doors, with the company currently working with one of Australia’s largest banks on a solution to manage rotations. 

“For a young company looking to grow globally, trust is a huge thing and Salesforce has helped us provide customers that extra level of assurance,” said Gralton.

Conveya is now getting set for its next wave of growth which will include new sales teams in the US and Europe. The company is using Sales Cloud to streamline processes for capturing leads and moving them through the sales cycle. It has also implemented CPQ to automate quoting and invoicing. 

The structure and efficiency provided by both solutions will help Conveya onboard new sales reps globally and equip them to be productive right away. The company will also be able to ensure consistency in how opportunities are managed and control pricing globally. 

Conveya ultimately plans to offer customers a self-service option as well, enabling them to make purchases directly and start using new products in minutes. 

Jordan Smith, Global Sales Director, is leading the company’s sales transformation and anticipates one of the biggest benefits will be more unified customer engagement. 

“For the first time, everyone will have complete visibility of the customer so whether they speak to an account executive or someone from our customer success team, that person will be able to jump right in and help them straight away,” said Smith.