Memento Floral Designs

We are a very busy florist on the Ormeau Road in Belfast. Our previous system no longer met the needs of our growing business. We found it slow for our needs, difficult to customise, and the user experience felt dated. The delivery module didn't work the way we needed it to and the reporting output needed so much manual work that we couldn't rely on it for business decisions.

I'm trying to run a smooth, process-led business efficiently and the key to that is software that works and is agile enough to meet the needs of your business. Our previous system wasn't giving us that. I searched high and low for alternatives and even considered building something myself - you got there first.

We spent a long time looking for alternative platforms and after extensive comparisons we felt that Digital Florists ticked every box for us. It is user-friendly, the onboarding and migration were straightforward, the online training material is easy to follow, and it does not over-complicate a simple order process. It meets the demands of all aspects of our business needs.

Routing was the big one. On the last two peak days I felt very redundant - one of my few jobs on peak evenings was the massive headache of organising and planning routes with a third-party tool, dragging stops one by one. With Digital Florists, routes were done in 10 minutes. I actually caught up on some Netflix instead.

We are working on Tasks at the minute and it will save us paying for Monday.com to manage projects. The analytics have been a big one too - real-time performance views, ability to measure against previous years, revenue and product performance at the click of a button. Previously this was multiple Excel downloads, hours spent cleaning the data, organising into a useable structure, then creating pivot tables - and by the time I was done it was already out of date.

Order delegation on peak days used to involve playing 'order bingo' at 8pm - going through orders line by line to check if any printed worksheets were missing. There were always orders missing, so the team ended up working late. This year, I filtered by product, it was done in 20 minutes, and the team used the app to manage their workload. No bingo.

Delivery tracking and customer updates in real-time have made a big difference. There has been a real reduction in those 'when can I expect my order?' calls. We can also monitor driver performance and see where they are in real-time without having to text, call, or have them post updates to a WhatsApp group - which was adding additional paid time to each delivery.

At the time, just going on previous experiences, it felt a bit too easy and relaxed and I was slightly concerned that perhaps there wasn't a complete understanding of our entire business operations and the sheer reliability we had on our previous system for managing day-to-day workload.