It’s thought that a high-touch approach to customer success does not scale.
Here are the common objections:
- There aren’t enough hours in the day to personally oversee 10,000 users.
- Even if there were enough hours in the day, there aren’t enough of us to do it and still be profitable.
- Even if there were enough of us, there’d be no way to keep track of it all effectively.
Zapier, a SaaS middleman for app integration, thinks differently.
The idea is simple: connect your SaaS app to Zapier, and Zapier will connect it to over 1,000 apps. The formula is one programmers will be intimately familiar with since it’s basically an if/then statement. For example: if a user submits a Zendesk ticket, then post the ticket to a Slack channel.
Apps can create actions and triggers, controlling each other and automating frustrating admin work behind the scenes so you don’t have to bother with it.
A great thing about Zapier is that it affords us a huge choice when it comes to picking the ideal SaaS apps for customer success. Before Zapier, it was a problem choosing between two similar apps with exclusive functionality. But now you can link the two (or way more) together and create a superapp, if you will.
Find out more about workflow automation and access 50 ways to slot Process Street into your workflow using our Zapier integration. If you’re looking for inspiration on the kinds of processes you use out at your company, we’ve put together a list of client onboarding checklists available here.
The overwhelming amount of app activity and conversations customer success teams have to cope with, especially in larger companies, can be cut significantly with automation and by using one app-to-rule-them-all as a trigger for the rest.
By being able to take more time on each customer, your customer success team can scale, increase retention, and make users happier.
Here are some cool ideas you should try to save time and streamline your customer success process.
1. Create Help Scout conversations from Wufoo forms
This zap has huge potential as a way to follow-up with users who left feedback. If you get your NPS from Wufoo, all responses will show up in Help Scout alongside the results the user entered in Wufoo, giving you an easy way to talk to anyone unhappy with your service.
How it works:
- Someone fills your Wufoo form
- Zapier automatically creates a new conversation in Help Scout
You could do the same by getting the data out of Wufoo, manually entering email addresses and then scrambling to keep track of your responses… but it doesn’t scale. If all goes well, you’ll have more users than you know how to manage. For customer success teams looking to boost customer happiness, this zap is a great preventative.
2. Tag Intercom users when Process Street tasks are checked off
Great onboarding is founded on great processes that involve engaging with users as individuals. That kind of high-touch approach can be difficult to track, but by using Process Street to manage your sales and customer success processes, you can always be sure you and your team know what’s happened, and what to do next. Here’s how integrating Process Street and Intercom works:
- A task is checked off in Process Street (maybe to mark the end of the sales process, or start of a free trial).
- A user is automatically tagged in Intercom (to easily group customers by stage)
By combining Process Street and Intercom you can also trigger comprehensive onboarding checklists each time a user signs up.
Great for complex SaaS products and high touch onboarding, Process Street checklists will make sure you never miss an event that could lead your user towards a life-changing Aha! Moment. This works by making your team accountable to certain tasks and allowing you to track overall progress from the main dashboard, and inside Yammer.
3. Post new Zendesk tickets to Slack
Slack is an amazing notification hub and the perfect candidate as the basis of one of those cool-sounding superapps I mentioned earlier.
At Process Street we have channels fed by activity from different places on the internet, including a channel for Process Street mentions on Twitter and one fed by Intercom that displays all automated emails sent from Process Street to our lovely users.
Slack’s versatility and potential for integration make it fantastic for customer success teams using Zendesk. How it works:
- A new ticket is filed on Zendesk
- Zapier posts the contents of that ticket to a Slack channel of your choosing
By integrating Slack with Zendesk you can create an event feed as a Slack channel and set it up to notify the right people when it happens. This makes Slack a one-stop app to check way more activity than just private messages.
The way this zap saves time and helps Customer Success teams is by keeping everything in one place. There’s no need to open 10 different tabs in the morning to get a picture of the overnight events — if you set it up right, everything will be visible at a glance on Slack and easy to flick through with the Quick Switcher (Ctrl+K).
4. Add Promoter.io score and feedback as attributes on Intercom
Promoter.io is a SaaS implementation of that time-tested indication of customer happiness, the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The idea behind NPS is simple. You ask your users one question: ‘On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends or family members?’ What you do with the answers, however, could make or break your customer happiness efforts. How it works:
- A contact responds to your survey
- Zapier adds their NPS Score and Feedback as additional attributes into Intercom
As if Promoter.io didn’t offer enough features, you can supercharge your feedback gathering efforts with Zapier and Intercom to add individual NPS to customer profiles on Intercom. This data could be used to better understand customer activity and work out what exactly your promoters do with your app that gives them so much success and why your passives and detractors are failing.
5. Turn Your Trello Cards into Google Calendar Events
Running customer success is a lot about scheduling times to talk to customers, giving demos, and teaching users about your software to help them get the best results. This means that customer success teams often have a lot of dates, times, people and places to remember.
If you share a Trello board with the rest of your team where you keep track of important customers and upcoming events, save time by automatically updating Google Calendar with Trello card due dates. How it works:
- Zapier watches your Trello account for new cards with due dates
- When you add a card with a due date to Trello, Zapier creates a Google Calendar event for the same day your card is due
The power of Google Calendar is obvious — from inside the app you can invite your team to join you at events, share information and timetable your customer interactions to avoid clashing. The most convenient part is that it all syncs to your phone that can take feeds from multiple calendars.
6. Post Process Street Task Check-offs in Slack
Too many places to check up on in the morning? Slack to the rescue (again)! Process Street activity, like comments, attachments and @mentions, can be fed to its own Slack channel for Customer Success team leaders to see and get a picture of exactly what everyone’s doing. How it works:
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- A user checks off a task inside Process Street
- Zapier posts the details (who, what, when, where) to a Slack channel of your choosing
Here you can see my very own genius creation, the Onboard-o-Matic 5000, reporting onboarding activity like its life depended on it.
7. Add Process Street checklists for new Totango users
Manage your customer success operations with perfect precision by integrating Process Street with Totango. Create new checklists from your customer success processes inside Process Street, automatically add your team and track progress as it happens. Here’s how it works:
- A new user is added to Totango
- Zapier creates a checklist in Process Street
For app integrations that trigger Process Street checklist creation, remember that it can be a checklist from any template you choose. For example, Totango could trigger a customer success checklist containing the standard operating procedure for onboarding new users.
If you haven’t got a Process Street account yet, I’d really recommend it. Not just because I work here but because I use it in my everyday life for work and personal processes.
Click here to create an account.
Have you had success with any creative time-saving zaps? Let me know in the comments. 🙂
Benjamin Brandall
Benjamin Brandall is a content marketer at Process Street.