Case study · Yeppe B.V., Netherlands
From months of manual data work to a database that updates itself
Yeppe is a Dutch education company that sells programmes to schools. Its contact database was updated manually a few times a year by an outsourced team, so it was always out of date: prospects were missed, contacts were wrong and emails bounced. ShiftedLabs replaced that process with a platform that continuously discovers prospects, identifies and verifies the right contacts and replaces outdated records. Contacts with email addresses rose from 14,805 to 35,464 (2.4×), the average school went from about 2 contacts to 4.5, 700 more schools became reachable, and the email bounce rate fell from 11.8% to 3.8%.
- Client
- Yeppe B.V., Netherlands
- Sector
- Education services
- What we built
- Self-updating school and contact database with automated discovery and verification, plus CRM, campaign and finance tools
- Replaced
- Manual database updates by an outsourced team, an off-the-shelf CRM and spreadsheet workarounds
Results · Before vs after the automated platform
- contacts with email addresses 14,805 → 35,464
- 2.4×
- email bounce rate 11.8% → 3.8%
- 68% lower
- additional schools reachable
- +700
- contacts per school, on average More than twice as many
- 2 → 4.5
Contacts with an email address before and after the platform replaced manual updates. Addresses are verified before campaigns are sent; not every stored address has been independently verified.
The business challenge
Yeppe sells to schools, and schools change staff constantly. Its contact database was updated manually, a few times a year, by an outsourced team that checked school websites and directories one by one and typed the results back in. Between rounds the data simply aged.
The cost showed up everywhere: prospects the team never knew about, emails to people who had left, and a high bounce rate that made every campaign less effective. Around that sat the usual workarounds — an off-the-shelf CRM that didn’t fit how Yeppe sells, and spreadsheets for forecasting.
What ShiftedLabs delivered
A platform that treats the database as something to maintain continuously, not clean occasionally:
- Continuous prospect discovery. Every school and school board in the Netherlands is loaded from government open data and refreshed on a schedule, so the team starts from the whole market.
- Automatic contact identification. The platform reads schools’ own team pages and directories to find the people Yeppe needs to reach, using AI for pages too messy for ordinary rules.
- Verification before sending. Email addresses are worked out from each school’s pattern and checked before anyone sends to them.
- Outdated records replaced, not just flagged. When a contact leaves or an email bounces, the platform identifies the change and replaces the record automatically.
How it works, in business terms
Instead of a clean-up project a few times a year, accuracy is a continuous job that runs on its own. Every record carries the date it was last confirmed, and every bounce feeds back into the database, so it gets better each time it is used.
The same platform also runs Yeppe’s sales operation: filtered lists by region, role and school type, campaign tracking, a sales pipeline, email capture that files correspondence against the right school, subsidy-scheme matching and finance exports — one system instead of a CRM plus spreadsheets.
The results
The database is bigger and better at the same time. Contacts with email addresses rose from 14,805 to 35,464 — 2.4× as many. The average school went from about 2 contacts to 4.5, and 700 more schools are now reachable. The email bounce rate fell from 11.8% to 3.8%, roughly a third of what it was.
Commercially, that means more prospects, more relevant contacts, fewer wasted emails and far less manual work. Not every stored address has been independently verified; addresses are verified before campaigns are sent.
What changed for the business
-
More prospects
Contacts with email addresses grew from 14,805 to 35,464, and 700 more schools are now reachable.
-
More of the right people
The average school went from about 2 contacts to about 4.5, so the team reaches the people who actually make decisions.
-
Fewer bounced emails
The email bounce rate fell from 11.8% to 3.8% — about two-thirds lower — because addresses are checked before sending and outdated records are replaced automatically.
-
Less manual work
The outsourced clean-up rounds are no longer needed: the database maintains itself continuously instead of a few times a year.
Before and after
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Contact data updated manually, a few times a year, by an outsourced team | Prospects and contacts discovered and refreshed continuously, automatically |
| 14,805 contacts with email addresses | 35,464 contacts with email addresses (2.4×) |
| About 2 contacts per school | About 4.5 contacts per school, and 700 more schools reachable |
| 11.8% email bounce rate | 3.8% email bounce rate |
| A bounce meant another line on a list for later | Outdated records are identified and replaced automatically |
In the client’s words
ShiftedLabs built a platform around how our business actually works. Our data stays current, the team works from one system, and processes that used to rely on spreadsheets and manual checking are now built in.
Koen Keesmaat Yeppe Capabilities delivered
- Automated prospect discovery
- Contact identification and verification
- Self-updating database
- Government open-data integration
- AI-assisted data extraction
- Custom CRM and sales pipeline
- Campaign tools
- Finance exports
- Secure cloud hosting with role-based access
Related services
- Business process automation Businesses whose contact or product data goes stale, or who employ people to research, check and re-key information that exists somewhere already.
- Custom CRM development Teams whose CRM fights them, or who run the business on spreadsheets and copy-paste because the CRM never matched how they sell.
Related guides
- How to keep CRM contact data automatically up to date Why contact data goes stale, what it costs you, and how to build a process that finds, verifies and refreshes contacts continuously instead of in occasional clean-ups.
- Should you build a custom CRM? A straight test for whether your business needs a custom CRM or should stay on an off-the-shelf one, with the three signals that actually predict it.
- How to know whether a spreadsheet should become software Five signals that a business-critical spreadsheet has outgrown itself, and the ones that mean you should leave it exactly where it is.
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