Case study
HGEM: Delivering Better Hospitality Experiences With Zoho One
HGEM helps hospitality brands like Pret a Manger, Pizza Express, Dishoom and Wagamama understand and improve the guest experience. When their own internal systems started working against them, they turned to Zoho, and later to us, to fix it properly.
The Challenge
By early 2017, HGEM's back office had quietly become a patchwork: Capsule CRM for customers, KashFlow for finance, a shared inbox for support, and a handful of in-house tools bolted on top. Nothing talked to anything else. Managing Director Steven Pike remembers the result plainly:
"Before Zoho, we had one version of the client in our CRM, and another version of the client in our accounting system."
Steven Pike, Managing Director, HGEMSalesforce was on the shortlist but ruled out on cost. Zoho CRM won on configurability and price, and in October 2017 HGEM made the switch.
The Solution
Zoho CRM became HGEM's single source of truth, tightly integrated with their three proprietary platforms so client data never drifts out of sync. In 2025, HGEM went further and adopted the full Zoho One suite, now running CRM, Desk, SalesIQ, Campaigns, Books and MCP across 50 employees from one connected platform, one user directory, and one bill.
Desk and SalesIQ now work together on the front line: support tickets sit against the right client record, and a chatbot answers routine questions straight from HGEM's own knowledge base before a human ever needs to get involved. Campaigns pulls its mailing lists directly from CRM, automatically keeping enrolled clients, prospects and HGEM's mystery diner community separated and correctly targeted.
The Results
- Productivity up by around 50% across the business
- Around 30% of support tickets now resolved automatically via SalesIQ, with no human involved
- One user directory and one simplified billing process, instead of managing licences app by app
"Zoho solved the problems we needed it to, so it was easy to see adoption across the business."
Steven Pike, Managing Director, HGEMDownload the full case study (PDF) →
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