Case study / CX transformation & service design
The CRM worked perfectly in one country. Eleven others were guessing.
Redesigning the showroom sales process, and the system underneath it, across twelve markets in six countries.
Redesign a CRM and showroom service that had been built around Ecuador but was difficult to use in international markets
Project lead for customer research, service design, process definition, testing, and cross-functional implementation
CEO, commercial and production directors, distributor owners, showroom teams, project managers, executives, and the technology team
Twelve markets in six countries, from lead capture through production, installation, handover, and warranty
Interviews, company-wide survey, workshops, service blueprints, factory and jobsite observation, staged testing
A redesigned pipeline, ERP connection, project tracking, reporting, and enablement program. Training and clean-data collection are still underway.
01 / Context
Fifty years of process, in markets with very different histories.
Madeval manufactures and installs custom millwork through a network of showrooms across twelve markets in six countries. Ecuador is the origin market, with fifty years of operating history behind it. The oldest international distributor has fifteen. Several are considerably newer.
The CRM had been built around Ecuador.
02 / The problem
The gap showed up in three places.
The platform reflected the process maturity of a fifty-year-old operation. Teams in younger markets were starting from a different place, without onboarding or localization, and a showroom in a fifteen-year-old market runs a very different sales motion.
Over time, international showrooms stopped using the system the way it was designed.
The system was disconnected
The CRM and the ERP were not linked, so a project's real status, product, price, and dates were never visible in one place.
Decisions were not data led
Less a tooling gap than an operating habit. There was limited visibility into what showrooms were doing day to day.
Some journeys were undefined
There was no project tracking sequence and no promotional communication journey, so those interactions were handled case by case.
Everyone in the ecosystem felt it. Showrooms could not work the way the tool expected. HQ had little visibility. Executives were funding a platform that was difficult to use outside Ecuador. And customers had no window into projects they had already paid for.
03 / The constraint
A first technology project, on a first timeline.
Senior leadership had not worked with a technology team before, and the expectation was diagnosis and iteration inside a couple of months.
That expectation made sense from where they were sitting. Across LATAM, companies tend to adopt technology on a different rhythm than their US counterparts, and software timelines are unfamiliar ground for teams whose expertise is manufacturing and craft. Setting a realistic pace was part of the work, and it was going to take evidence rather than argument.
04 / Discovery
I looked at the whole service, not only the software.
- Depth interviews with every distributor owner across all twelve markets
- Process mapping and ideation workshops with showroom teams: sales designers, showroom managers, project managers
- More than ten factory visits to map production handoffs firsthand
- Jobsite observation, shadowing project managers during installation stage visits
- Executive interviews, workshops, and feedback sessions
- A company wide survey on what it was actually like to work with HQ
I mapped the full service across frontstage, backstage, support, logistics, and installation, from lead capture through project completion and warranty.
Diagnosis took five to six months.
05 / The reframe
A CRM. A sales pipeline for showroom teams working leads and closing designs.
A project management tool. Production status, dates, handoffs, installation tracking.
The company was asking one platform to be two products.
They needed both, in the same system, at the same time. That is why the mandatory fields felt heavy, why the stages did not match how anyone worked, and why no market could adapt it to their own reality.
The issue was not how showrooms were using the CRM. It was that the CRM had never been scoped for the job it was being asked to do.
06 / Building the case
I moved from recommendations to evidence.
I brought the CEO the service blueprints, the workshop outputs, and the distributor owner interviews. Not summarized, but in their own words, so he could hear directly from the people running the international markets.
That changed the timeline. Once the distinction between a CRM and a project management tool was clear, the project got the runway it needed.
The condition was weekly progress, so I set a standing cadence with the CEO, the commercial director, and the production director. That cadence ended up mattering more than the runway. Working week over week with both directors, the project stopped being mine. We were redesigning both of their processes, and together those processes are the Madeval showroom sales journey. By the end they owned it as much as I did.
07 / Design and testing
The recurring conversation was mandatory fields.
We built the new pipeline in stages, testing each one before advancing, with sales designers, showroom managers, project managers, and executives, across both Ecuadorian and international showrooms.
To move a project to the next stage, sales designers had to complete a set of required inputs. Leadership needed those fields to measure the business. The people filling them in experienced them as friction.
Both needs were legitimate, so we worked through them together: which KPIs genuinely required manual entry, which could be captured another way or derived from data we already had, and which stage each field truly belonged to. The result is a pipeline where sales designers enter meaningfully less, and leadership still gets what it needs to run the business.
Reaching that agreement was the design work. The interface came after.
Kitchen millwork during installation. Cabinetry, stone counters, and island assembly on site.
08 / What we shipped
A pipeline that fits its markets.
- A redesigned end to end pipeline, from lead capture through project completion and warranty, adapted to each market's reality rather than Ecuador's
- A custom API connecting HubSpot to the ERP, giving HQ real time project data
- Project tracking visible to showrooms as jobs enter production and leave the factory
- A rebuilt reporting layer covering every showroom
- An ongoing enablement program, with continuous training across all twelve markets
09 / Outcome
All twelve showrooms now run their projects in the system
And the process fits the market each one operates in.
Leadership has real time visibility
Projects carry actual product, pricing, dates, and contact information. For the first time, performance is visible across every showroom.
Showroom teams work more proactively
With direct tracking into production and out of the factory, ordering issues with the plant have dropped noticeably.
Training is still underway, and the first full quarter of clean data is still being collected, so the numbers are not in yet. What exists now that did not a year ago is a pipeline that fits its markets, a reporting layer for every showroom, and an organization that can make decisions from data.
10 / Reflection
The technology was never the hard part.
A system carrying fifty years of institutional process had been introduced to teams who did not share that history, in markets still building their own. The tool was the visible problem, but what sat underneath it was cultural and operational.
If I ran it again, I would put the distributor owner interviews in front of executives in month one instead of month four. The evidence was what moved the conversation, and I did not yet know how much.
I would also start the measurement framework alongside the pipeline rather than after it. We built something that works. Showing how well would be easier if I had instrumented it from the beginning.