Centurion Systems uses Zoho Flow to cut certification turnaround from five days to seconds

About the company

Centurion Systems is a South African manufacturer of gate motors and access-automation equipment, including sliding gates, swing gates, garage doors, traffic barriers, and access control. Part of the global FAAC group since 2016, the company has been making access automation since 1986 and exports to over 70 countries.

Centurion certifies the installers who fit its products through an internal program called Certified Trained SMART Installers. Installers register, go through theory and tests, submit evidence of their practical work, and are then certified and listed on Centurion's website as a trusted professional. Across roughly 10 branches running 2 training sessions a week at around 20 people each, that comes to about 800 installers a month.

Automating the installer certification process

Their certification program ran entirely by humans, manually. An installer would register through a form, and then someone from the team typed their personal details into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had no proper module or system to store the data, which resulted in challenges when following up. All the data just lived in an Excel sheet maintained by one person from the training team.

That created two more problems. The first was speed: With limited people on it, an installer waited at least five days for their results, and in the worst cases around three weeks. The second was data quality. Often times, contact numbers and email addresses were inconsistent, since the data was manually moved, a contact's details were sometimes merged into another's.

They rebuilt the process in Zoho Flow to automate it. Now when they receive a registration form in Zoho Forms, the data is fed into a custom Zoho CRM module they built called Certified Trained SMART Installers. This module maintains and manages all certification related data. The flow also creates a contact record in Zoho CRM for the support team, because two teams need the same installer for different reasons. The training team needs it for certifying and they work in their custom module, and the technical support team works from the Contacts module to offer support and solutions as needed.

They use ClassMarker to conduct their tests and assessments. They have three assessments covering sliding gates, swing gates, and garage doors, plus a refresher course for installers renewing an existing certification. When a test is completed and meets the configured criteria, ClassMarker fires a webhook to Zoho Flow. The flow reads the payload, works out which assessment was taken, finds the matching installer record in the certification module in Zoho CRM, and updates the certification fields against the scoring bands: a score under 31 is fail, 31 to 50 earns a rewrite, and 51 and above is an automatic pass. CRM workflows then send the installer the right email for their outcome. They can then log into Centurion's CRM portal to submit further applications.

Results that took up to five days now land in seconds, with nobody checking or re-keying anything, and records are created once in one place rather than merging into each other.

Logging every chat rating separately

Centurion's support team uses Zoho SalesIQ across four brands, and their rating analytics were not telling them the truth. Because a chat had no unique identifier, a new rating from a returning customer overwrote the previous one. Two conversations a day apart left one rating on record instead of two, so the team could not see how ratings moved over time.

A flow now captures each one. When a chat is complete, it detects which of the four brands it belongs to, captures the rating separately so nothing is overwritten, and, where a rating needs attention, sends a ticket in Zoho Desk with the operator's name and the context to the customer experience team carrying the department. Someone can then go back to the actual conversation and deal with it.

A second flow covers the chats nobody picked up. When a chat is missed in any SalesIQ department, it sends a Microsoft Teams message to that team's channel and follows it with an email to the relevant distribution group, so a missed conversation reaches someone who can act on it rather than disappearing.

Managing installer complaints without losing the thread

Certification is not the end of Centurion's relationship with an installer. Once certified, an installer gets to fit equipment for customers on behalf of Centurion System, and sometimes customers complain.

They have a flow that handles customer complaints. When a complaint comes in against a certified installer, it changes their status in Zoho CRM from verified to pending, then opens a case in the Cases module for the customer experience team to work. Two emails go out: the first to the customer experience team so someone owns it, and the second to the customer acknowledging the complaint and confirming it will be dealt with. The installer's listing reflects their status immediately, and no complaint sits unacknowledged while someone works out who should handle it.

Automating distributor repairs

Beyond certification and support, Centurion runs a distributor repair management process on Zoho Desk, where repair tickets are logged, tracked, and monitored centrally. Their courier service is integrated into it, so status changes on a ticket, such as a repair being approved, completed, or ready for collection, trigger the matching courier request automatically rather than someone arranging each movement separately.

Benefits and ROI

Zoho Flow turned a program that was executed manually in a spreadsheet into one that runs itself. Around 800 installers a month now move through certification without manual handling, certification data is now clean, with no duplicate or merged records. What used to take at least 15 days now happens in a few seconds and it's all automatic.

"Zoho Flow has reduced our certification time from at least 15 days to a few seconds. It has not only helped us certify faster but also ensure our data is maintained correctly without any manual work or human intervention."

Ntsakisi Makhubela, Software Engineer, Centurion Systems

The change the team values most is what happened to the people. Their team of five that overlooked the certification program manually, have been moved to newer roles where they are able to add more value to the company and their customers.

"The team that was used to doing repetitive work have been reassigned and they are enjoying their new role. This has improved the overall job satisfaction and productivity."

Ntsakisi Makhubela, Software Engineer, Centurion Systems

Alongside the connectors and webhooks, the feature the team singles out is Zoho Flow's debugging and error tracking. Being able to see a failed execution and find the cause quickly is what keeps a set of flows this central to the business running without long investigations.

Moving forward

Centurion is extending the same approach to other departments, and has a repair intake flow in development. That one will let a customer submit a fault through a form, confirm the packaging size from the product and accessories they describe, check whether the unit is within its two-year warranty, generate a quotation if it is not, run an approval, then use a custom function to geocode the customer's address and pass the coordinates to a third-party delivery service for collection.