“Imitation is the sincerest [form] of flattery” – Charles Caleb Colton

There’s nothing wrong with looking at example processes and learning from what they do – if anything it’s the best way to improve your own business practices.

Plus, after learning the basic and advanced features of Process Street from the first two chapters of our consultant’s guide, looking at how others use the app is a great way to see those features in action.

After all, anyone can run a customer support checklist, but we want to make even creating processes more efficient.

To get your own processes kickstarted, I’m going to highlight 8 example processes (with ready-to-use templates) to boost consistency and efficiency in your business with Process Street. These include:

• Scheduling a recurring daily routine
• Tracking your employee onboarding
• Surveying your email list or clients
• Automatically managing customer data in Salesforce

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Your current team can’t handle any extra work. You’ve exhausted your process automation opportunities. You’ve got no choice but to bring in a fresh face.

You could hire a specialist, but they can be expensive and limited in the work you can hand off. You need to hire a virtual assistant.

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Introducing new policies to ensure a safe and productive workplace makes sense on all sides.

Unfortunately, if your employees don’t know about your policies, it won’t do a damn thing to solve your company’s problems. In other words, if your employee handbook doesn’t get read, you’re fresh out of luck.

There are two ways to all but guarantee your employees will never read your employee handbook.

• Use a cut-and-paste employee handbook template
• Never write one in the first place

Think of the copy-and-paste template as the cookie cutter cold emails we all love to hate – there’s no feeling of a person behind it, so we tune out, ignore it, and get on with our day.

Unlike cold emails, however, if your employees ignore your handbook they’re inevitably going to fall victim to a rule they didn’t know about.

Sure, you’re still covered for the aftermath (as long as it was in the handbook to begin with), but if you want to prevent these costly blunders from happening your employee handbook needs to be interesting and engaging.

After all, wouldn’t you rather read a document that talks to you as a person, rather than another cog in some merciless corporate machine?

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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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The most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to retaining your best employees is the onboarding process.

Why?

Because first impressions count for everything. If you give your new employee an awful first day, they’re going to regret their choice to accept your offer instantly and have their formative time at your company tainted with bad feelings.

In this quick reference guide, I’m going to outline the 3 most fatal mistakes you can make while onboarding new employees, and give you solutions.

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The following post is a guest contribution from Steve Klein the co-founder of StatusPage.io.

How long does engineer onboarding last at your company? 1 week? 2 weeks? A couple months? Regardless, it’s a process you think about in the short term, right when a new employee starts. Once it’s done, it’s done, and you can go on to thinking about the million other things that are going on in your company. Right?

Wrong.

The effects of employee onboarding last way beyond when a new person starts working and impact your whole company. If your onboarding isn’t effective, in just 1 or 2 generations of hiring you’re dealing with a team that’s shockingly less productive than it could be — and costing you a lot of money.

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I’ve talked at length in the past about the user onboarding process, the difficulties of first-time use and how empty states can solve some of these problems.

While this is all well and good when you’re trying to tackle user drop-off after the first session, what about the later stages?

Assuming that everything else has clicked into place for your user and they’ve made it all the way up to the purchase, you must have made a good first impression! Unfortunately, it’ll be all for nothing if your app is hard to use, awkward, inflexible or disappointing over the long term, or if your premium plan’s onboarding isn’t tight.

Post-sale UX optimization isn’t something I’ve looked at before, or even heard about. But writing a guide about SaaS customer success is not a small task and UX is definitely a big deal, especially because good UX makes it easy for Customer Success to do their job.

In fact, a good SaaS user experience takes the weight off customer support, too. Overall, you don’t want to put a barrier between your users and your app and most importantly for revenue, you don’t want to put a barrier between your paying users and your app.

Here are some SaaS user experience optimization pointers to think about which will make the lives of your Customer Sucess team easier.
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What happens if you make software too difficult to use? Probably the same thing that happens if you never made it at all — no one uses it.

It’s easy to get users to adapt to familiar concepts like drag-and-drop, but what if you made something totally new? You need a creative user onboarding process, like the one Microsoft used back in 1992 and the others I’m going to look at in this post.

The Software User Onboarding Process

I already talked about concierge onboarding, so this time I’m going to look at the total opposite — a style known as low-touch user onboarding. It’s not always possible to work with every customer, especially if you’re distributing software on a massive scale like Microsoft Windows, so writing onboarding into your product is a necessity.

James Hunt‘s excellent article on Mental Floss reveals the true purpose of Minesweeper, Microsoft Solitaire, FreeCell and Hearts: a gamified way to teach users concepts vital to success using Windows 3.1.

Let’s take a look at exactly how they did it.
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Megatrends — A Technological Prophet

The 1980s was the dawn of technology as we know it. It was also the dawn of hilarious technological hyperbole — you could hear the excitement in the voices of companies declaring they had built ‘the only computer you’ll need for years to come‘. Although laughable in the present day, commercial home computers like the Commodore 64 were a huge improvement on the monstrous machines of past eras so unwieldy they had to be built into rooms. In fact, for the first time in history, you could buy your own computer.

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Why You Should Care About Workflow Automation

The majority of companies in the world now rely on software-as-a-service; cloud-based apps like Salesforce, Google Apps and Zendesk, also known as SaaS.

In 2013 Forbes reported over 50% of businesses use cloud computing, which has risen to 77% as of May 2015. As SaaS gains popularity, companies are finding innovative ways to integrate apps and automate as much as possible, leaving businesses more time to spend on strategies requiring human input instead of repetitive admin work.

Connecting apps to automate workflows is becoming increasingly more important as companies move away from Outlook and Excel to cloud-based SaaS apps. A major benefit of using SaaS is that apps have the ability to talk to each other via APIs and automatically trigger different functions and events between apps.

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