In 2020, Supportas received the Claris Excellence Award for Growth, recognized as the North Asia Pacific Growth Partner of the Year for contributing the most revenue in the region the previous year. The company has discovered a winning combination of creating happy customers, retaining happy employees, and embracing a supportive Claris Community to help new clients benefit from Claris FileMaker and custom applications.
What’s in a name?
Founded in 2010, Supportas Inc. got its start as a three-person company. The name, Supportas, holds great meaning, a combination of the word “support” with the Japanese word “足す,” or “tasu” which means, “to add.” This speaks to the company’s commitment to help its clients, many of whom are call centers and CRM providers that deliver stellar customer service and support.
Masaya Nagase, one of the company’s three founders and now vice president of sales, reflects on the last decade. “In engaging with clients, we realized many were using outdated data systems, which were hindering operations and the value they could deliver to customers. We stepped in to help them improve processes on the ground level to introduce much-needed efficiency.”
Custom apps to grow clients’ businesses — and their own.
Masaya was well-versed on Claris FileMaker having used the low-code platform in a previous position, making it an obvious choice for client projects.
“FileMaker allows us to develop custom apps to fit the customer’s needs, instead of asking the customer to adjust its requirements to fit the platform,” Masaya says. “Many of our clients were using manual processes to support accounting, finance, and CRM. Once we began using FileMaker to create applications to introduce automation, their businesses grew and so did ours.”
Big-picture data on a low-code platform.
One area where Supportas shines is helping customers improve call center operations by building custom apps to streamline back-end processes for call center agents, and in turn, elevate the customer experience. Using FileMaker, Supportas enables customers to incorporate features, such as recorded data playback, key performance indicator displays, call distribution management, and performance reports to deliver an aerial view of big-picture operational data.
The company also helped The Japanese Alpine Club, the first mountaineering club in the country founded in 1905, reach new heights. With FileMaker at the core, Supportas built a new information management system for the club, streamlining processes to better manage activities across its 4,800 members. As a result, the customer introduced efficiency to membership sign-up and renewal processes, providing visibility membership trends to further improve the user experience.
Global recognition for record revenue.
In 2020, Supportas received the Claris Excellence Award for Growth, recognized as the North Asia Pacific Growth Partner of the Year for contributing the most revenue in the region in 2019. Fast forward to today and the company continues to innovate and evolve, laser-focused on maintaining customer satisfaction during the pandemic.
“Within our world’s current environment needing to work remotely, we must enable the smooth sharing of business information and support effective collaboration,” adds Akira Sasaki, general manager of marketing with Supportas. “Companies that have prioritized agility have maintained customer confidence and revenue growth throughout the last year.”
A focus on happy clients and happy employees.
Today Supportas has approximately 160 employees and six offices (with more on the way in Australia and Southeast Asia). While the growth has been fast, the company has stayed true to its commitment to customer and employee satisfaction, building a culture of positivity and trust along the way.
“When it comes to keeping clients happy, we have a philosophy of never giving up, and we have many clients who have been with us since the beginning,” Masaya adds.
Supportas actively recruits from populations of skilled workers who face underemployment in Japan’s tech industry. For instance, the company hires new mothers for development opportunities, as well as individuals from communities climbing back from natural disasters, such as the Tōhoku region in Japan, which was hit with a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
“We understand that enthusiastic and fulfilled employees are motivated to deliver better client service,” Masaya shares. “We found that by giving a chance to people who need it most, we end up with employees who are happy to be at work every day— many of whom recruit others to work at our company.”
Let’s make a difference together.
Supportas leans on members of the global Claris Community — another key element of the company’s ongoing business success. “Becoming a certified Claris Partner has increased the trust of our existing customers, while increasing the volume of new customer requests. Let’s all actively connect and support each other as Claris developers and partners to get the word out about the benefits of low code and the power of using FileMaker to change businesses for the better,” Akira ends.
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