139% ROI & 40X Faster Salesforce Releases for UK Property Firm
by the Numbers
330,000
Homes Managed in the UK
5,800
Property Developments
3,800
National Employees
1,600+
Resident Management Companies
About the company
Founded in 1986, FirstPort cares for 330,000 properties across England, Scotland and Wales — from city centre flats to housing estates to assisted living facilities. Since 2016, the residential property services provider has earned a five-star rating in the British Safety Council’s Occupational Health and Safety Audit.
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FirstPort implemented Salesforce in 2019 to extend their first-class customer service to the digital realm. However, FirstPort’s IT team struggled to marshal the full power of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and MuleSoft due to the organisation’s legacy systems and tangled infrastructure.
To make matters worse, an external partner charged a high rate to build and release Salesforce applications — but the software still often broke on release day and required last-minute hotfixes. Enter Copado.
Head of Salesforce and Enterprise Architecture, FirstPort
Results with Copado
139%
10X Faster
Return on Investment
80%
9X Faster
Reduction in Costs
40X
Faster Salesforce Releases
ROI
Realised Within 6 Months
The Challenge
Salesforce furnishes FirstPort with the mission-critical data their customer service agents need to support both landlords and tenants in real time. The company’s customer portal makes it easy to raise issues, request repairs and resolve financial inquiries around the clock.
Salesforce spearheads FirstPort’s end-to-end change program designed to bring its vision for customer service to life. However, the managed service provider (MSP) that handled builds and releases threatened to jeopardize the organization’s sterling reputation of customer success.
Frequent Code Overwriting Led to Last-Minute Fixes
Because of the way this MSP wrote the code, it would often get overwritten in another release. When overwrites happened, Firstport’s IT team would have to tell the MSP what to build and deploy with Salesforce Change Sets — or copy-and-paste code snippets and send it to them. The partner didn’t always include the fixed branch when they built out releases, which led to last-minute hotfixes.
KeyChallenges
The Solution
FirstPort implemented Copado CI/CD in 2021 to put the Salesforce deployment process in the hands of the internal IT team. Initially, FirstPort took a look at GearSet’s DevOps solution but decided to go with Copado due to its Salesforce-native functionality and integrations with GitHub, Jira and Slack.
The end-to-end visibility provided by Copado CI/CD enables FirstPort to quickly discover the root of the problem if anything goes wrong. Instead of going back and forth with the MSP and dealing with uncertain delays, FirstPort immediately realizes what needs to be fixed and how long it will take.
The Future
Beyond Copado CI/CD, FirstPort leverages Copado Robotic Testing to automate Salesforce regression tests. With AI-powered test automation, FirstPort can cut through the complexity of their system architecture and better support landlords, tenants and solicitors.
Integrating Copado CI/CD with their MuleSoft pipelines allows FirstPort to accelerate continuous integration and enable more people to authorize the final push into production.
Today, with Copado and Salesforce working together hand-in-hand, FirstPort has the firepower to be efficient and adaptable and deliver innovation.
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