Basatin is a landscaping service provider based in the United Arab Emirates. Established in January 2013, Basatin fills a gap in the UAE market for a specialist landscaping company that offers professional landscaping services as a core business and not as a complementary maintenance package or an ad-hoc service.
At the heart of Basatin’s values lies their unique partnership with clients, which enables them to tailor their comprehensive and sustainable solutions to each client’s needs and requirements – enriching the environment and its natural beauty in the process.
Despite being relatively new to the market, Basatin has managed to acquire a large list of well-established property developers, community managers and real estate owners as clients. With a reputation for delivery and customer service, Basatin now counts some of the most iconic communities and property developers in the UAE as a regular clientele. In the short space of 4 years, Basatin has experienced stellar growth, going from 4 employees in 2013 to 300 employees, 106 active customers and 40 projects in 2017.
The Challenges of a Flourishing Business
Excellence in service delivery cannot by itself sustain growth over long periods of time and in spite of the high demand for its services, Basatin soon faced operational difficulties that would have proved challenging to its growth.
Rami Tarazi, the General Manager at Basatin Landscaping explained that as the company grew in size, so did the level of logistical and administrative complexity. ‘With 4 employees, it is very easy to keep track of their whereabouts, jobs delivered, scheduled and planned as well as reporting and invoicing. However, without the appropriate tools, it is extremely challenging to do so with a mobile workforce of 300 and a growing number of clients.’
The rising number of clients created a large number of enquiries and support requests, which soon overwhelmed the small helpdesk logging emails and phone calls on excel spreadsheets manually. At its peak, Basatin was receiving up to a hundred emails, phone calls and support requests a day – all of which were being dealt with and logged manually. Not only was this process time-consuming, there was also a risk of mistakes and no direct control of the senior management in regards to accuracy or outcome.
A similar scenario that became problematic was the management of the fast growing workforce. Over 200 gardeners were required to fill out a paper-based work checklist for each individual client on a daily basis. Data from the checklist was then manually entered into an excel file by the helpdesk to track work done and benchmark against requirements. Not only did this time-consuming process rely too heavily on the good faith of the mobile workforce to provide accurate information in a timely manner, but it also failed to provide senior management visibility or control over the process.
The management team quickly realised that despite being small, these operational challenges would eventually affect the excellence in service delivery their customer loyalty was based upon. They consequently started looking for an innovative software that could help them streamline their operations, gain visibility of their work orders, improve their client satisfaction and track customer requests and complaints.
Not only did the Urbanise Platform fit the bill perfectly but the Urbanise team were also willing to customise their service delivery and operations Platform to Basatin’s specific needs and requirements – providing them with a cutting edge cloud platform, fit for their growing business.
Entering a new lucrative Market
With the Urbanise Platform, the Basatin help desk now logs incoming requests into the cloud platform directly and all jobs – whether scheduled or delivered – are visible in real-time to the help desk, mobile workforce and senior management alike. This has had important implications, with the time spent on support request decreasing by up to 40%.
Additionally, the gardeners have access to their work schedule for the day on their smartphones and tablets, all wirelessly connected to the cloud platform and updated in real-time. They fill out their job checklists directly on their devices, thereby eliminating all risks of information manipulation and reducing the help desk workload substantially.
The operational functionalities of the Urbanise Cloud Platform solved Basatin’s day-to-day challenges, but that proved to be just the tip of the iceberg. Rami Tarazi explains that having complete visibility and flexibility over their operations created an opportunity to enter the residential landscaping market. This was a territory they could not have operated in previously, due to the logistical challenges linked to substantially increasing the number of individual clients, jobs and requests and the hassle of payment collection. With the Urbanise Platform, they knew that they only had to focus on service delivery and the underpinning cloud solution would take care of the rest.
New revenue streams with lower costs
Since launching its residential landscaping service offering, Basatin has not only seen an increase in their revenues generated from an entirely new sector, but they have also opened a Dubai-based office to focus on the local residential landscaping market. Basatin now promotes their residential landscaping packages on the custom Urbanise e-services web portal (https://store.basatinlandscaping.com). This means that clients can select the landscaping package that best suits their needs and purchase it with a credit card from the comfort of their home. With Basatin’s quality service delivery and the option for customers to order and pay for services online, they offer a differentiated service in the competitive residential landscaping market.
Since launching the new service a short time ago, Basatin has already sold over 100 Residential Annual Maintenance Packages online and their expected revenue from this market for 2018 is set to grow substantially. But what is most significant is their ability to tap into this completely new market with their existing ‘back office’ resources– creating a new revenue stream.
Conclusion
Basatin Landscaping is a true success story. In the short span of 4 years, they have managed to identify and fill a gap in the UAE commercial landscaping market, establishing themselves as a reliable service partner. They proactively solved operational challenges associated with their rapid expansion and discovered new opportunities in the process. By choosing the right tools for their needs and prioritising innovation and quality, they have managed to pierce the competitive residential market thereby increasing their revenue, expanding their geographic reach and growing their business.
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