Just like the basic ideas of processes and the division of labor, business process modeling was born in the mechanical industry.

In the winter of 1921, Frank Gilbreth presented a paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers entitled “Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work” — an excellent title by any standards, and something that turned a lot of businesses onto the idea of modeling their processes so they can optimize them.

Gilbreth, the paper’s author, is probably better known as the author and central character of the 1950s novel Cheaper by the Dozen. While I’ve never read it, it amused me to find it that an industrial engineer-turned-management consultant wrote a novel with time and motion study as an underlying theme.

Gilbreth was an interesting character, but also a man laser-focused on exactly what processes are for: finding the one best way to do work.

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The following is a guest post from Robin Singh. Robin is a Technical Support Executive with a combined experience of 6 years. He currently works with Live2Support – a live customer and sales chat software by ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.

Creating a great customer experience has never been more important, especially if you’re a SaaS company.

Your customers deserve a great experience and this is why it is important to support them with every tool in your arsenal. SaaS tools aren’t always perfectly self explanatory, and to ease the amount of support tickets and provide a self-serve option, you should be providing a knowledge base.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is used by companies to reduce support tickets and bring down customer support costs.

At the basic level, it’s the FAQ in your website that helps customers find instant answers, on their own without calling your support or raising a ticket.

Using knowledge base software, companies can create not just FAQs, but all kinds of help content from user guides, software manuals, online wikis and more.

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If there ever was a three-word phrase that sounded dull enough to be a sedative, it’s business process management. 

It’s probably the vagueness that’s so off-putting. Which process? Managed how? Who’s business? In the last chapter, I went deep into what a process is and then why processes are important. I’ll recap so you don’t have to skip around.

A process is “a collection of interrelated work tasks initiated in response to an event that achieves a specific result”.

But what happens if that process isn’t achieving the result, or if it’s not achieving it very effectively? Every business has goals, but the interesting part — and what business process management actually is — is the exact steps a business will take to achieve those goals.

These goals could be anything from sending a newsletter on time every week to hitting $1,000,000 in revenue. Whatever the goals, your business processes are the roadmap for getting there. Not so boring, right?

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Let’s start off with something lighter than outright, embarrassing failure…

What’s your general feeling about assembling flat-packed furniture?

After putting together a desk and a couple of chairs yesterday, I’m still irked. Every hole is drilled about half an inch wrong so you have to have some kind of vice to align the damn thing, but that’s not the main problem…

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The essential customer success book to boost MRR at your SaaS company

A SaaS company without a customer success system is like a lion without teeth. You can chase customers all you like, but when you catch them you’re thinking “now what?”.

If you haven’t got a customer success team or set of processes in place at your SaaS company, it’s bad but not the end of the world.

Some SaaS companies are more self-serve than others, but all need a way to retain important customers and start exponentially compounding revenue.

This book for putting the systems in place to retain customers, whether that’s by learning about their problems or by properly onboarding them.

Better yet, it’s completely free.

What’s in the ebook?

• What is Customer Success?
• Why is Customer Success Important?
• What is Churn?
• How to Calculate NPS with the Perfect Customer Happiness Survey
• How to Shape Customer Retention Strategies That Beat Churn
• A Smart Way to Manage SaaS Customer Support
• Enhance Your SaaS User Experience
• How (and When) to Automate Your Customer Success Process
• What Customer Success Managers Actually Do All Day

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When we say ‘thank you’, it’s often at the end of a conversation.

In the marketing world, there’s no reason to see it that way. In fact, if you’re using your thank you page to signal the end of your customer’s path on your site, you’re doing it wrong.

First of all, let’s look at when to use thank you pages.

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Recently, we launched our first ebook, “The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation with Zapier”.

After searching around for tips on launching and promoting an ebook, I came up a bit short, stumbling mostly across 90s-style sales pages for trashy looking products.

So, we decided we’d have better luck coming up with our own strategy. And, of course, documenting the process so others can learn how we got the results we did.

In this post I’m going to walk you through the steps we took to launch and promote our first ebook (…a great lead magnet, by the way).

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If images are the snacks of the internet, and articles are the main course, then infographics are somewhere in between. A light brunch, if you will. Packed with sustenance, but digestible enough to get down in a short period of time.

I’m not going to waste time talking about how important infographics are because that’s been done to death over the period of several years. Instead, I’m going to go through some common mistakes, basic design principles and processes that teach you how to make infographics that don’t look terrible.

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This post was written by Mauricio Prinzlau. Mauricio is the CEO of Cloudwards.net, a data and user feedback driven comparison engine for cloud apps and services. He enjoys writing and producing educational videos around the cloud to help people find the best cloud service for their needs.

From an early part of my life, I always had an entrepreneurial drive and was focused on starting up on my own somewhere down the line in my career.

A few years on, I started working as an online community manager for a poker school. The poker school I was working with made money through the affiliate model whereby we earned a commission whenever players were referred to online poker rooms.

My colleagues and I were primarily involved with creating high-quality content and social media posts in order to attract leads and interest to the poker school’s website. It was during that time that I learnt the importance of creating high-quality content (video tutorials, guides, walk-throughs etc.) which would capture user interest and also be good from a search engine point of view.

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Thinking of starting a side project?

A month back, I realized I was getting to the point where I wasn’t bothering to take lunch breaks. I read as a big part of my job, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything heavier than reading articles. Frankly, I was bored during my lunch breaks and I got annoyed I wasn’t doing anything productive.

The solution?

After brainstorming several side project ideas, I started making a personal website.

This was the perfect amount of work because I had (very) basic HTML skills and needed to learn only CSS and how to deploy the code.

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