Automation Examples
Example 1: Business Process
Appointment Scheduling & Reminders
Scenario: Let’s say you run a music store and also provide lessons. You have clients who want to book music lessons.
How can we streamline the booking process and cut down on missed appointments?
Solution: We set up an online appointment scheduler for your music lessons department. This can talk directly to other calendar applications like Office 365 or Google Calendars. When someone books an appointment, the process might look similar to this:
The customer books an appointment for their lesson through your online appointment scheduler we have setup. This appointment is sent right to your Google calendar or Office 365 calendar.
Time slots and appointment lengths are all pre-configured on the appointment scheduler and always reference the availability on your Office 365 or Google calendar.
Upon booking the appointment, the customer will receive an email that confirms their appointment has been booked and it will provide the appointment details.
The calendar owner will also receive an email notification with the details of who booked the appointment and when it is.
24 hours before the scheduled appointment, the system will send an email and/or text message to the customer reminding them of the appointment tomorrow. It will also have a link to rebook the appointment if they need to.
If the customer rebooks, you will get a notification of the cancellation and the appointment will be removed from your Google/Office 365 calendar.
One hour before the appointment, the system will send another email and/or text message to the contact reminding them of their appointment in one hour.
Once again, this reminder will contain a link for the customer to rebook if they need to. If the customer rebooks, you will get a notification of the cancellation and the appointment will be removed from your Google/Office 365 calendar.
More Examples
Example 2: Business Process
Phone Call Follow Up
Scenario: A prospective client (or lead) fills out a form on your website. When this happens you need staff to call the lead, and you need the lead entered into your CRM. If staff is unable to reach the client on the first attempt, we want to schedule another attempt 3 days later.
How can we get the lead into my CRM and ensure the follow up calls are made, all in a timely fashion?
Solution: Using one or several applications communicating with each other, the automated process might look something like this:
When the lead fills out the form, the automation is triggered and sends the details to your CRM. It also creates a new “deal” in the CRM associated with this lead.
Once the system creates the contact, it will now schedule a manual task or send a notification email to the staff member(s) that they need to call this lead.
When the staff member completes the call, they tell the system the outcome of the call – which in turn also tells the system the manual task was completed. For the sake of simplicity, we will assume the staff member either spoke to the lead, or they did not get a hold of them:
If the staff member indicates they did speak to the lead, then we can assume the lead is either interested or not interested in your product/services. In either case we need to update the CRM to either push the lead further down the sales pipeline, or mark the lead as lost.
If the staff member indicates they did NOT speak to the contact, the system will send a follow-up email to the contact letting them know you tried to reach out. The system will also schedule a second call in 3 days by automatically creating a new task or email notification to staff.
More Examples
Example 3: Marketing Process
Post Purchase Follow Up
Scenario: Let’s pretend you are a music store and someone purchased their first guitar from you.
How can we keep the customer engaged, inspire them to keep playing their guitar, and earn more business from them?
Solution: We work with you to develop a sequence of emails that are automatically sent to the contact over various periods of time. It might look similar to this:
At the time of purchase, we will trigger the automation. This can be done several different ways depending on what works for you. It could be a webform that either you or the customer fills out. Or perhaps its a status change in your CRM. Either way there are options on what would work best for you or your customer.
Tell the system to wait a few hours, then send a thank you email or text message to the customer. This is just a simple “Thank you for your business” type of message. You can also simply invite them to contact you if they need anything else.
After a week or two, the system sends an email with a few handy tips about guitar maintenance and care. Perhaps it’s worth showing a few products in the email that are related to guitar care and maintenance.
After another week or two, the system sends an email with some resources on learning or improving the customer’s guitar skills. Perhaps you mention that you provide lessons in your store.
After a few months, say 3 to 6 months, the system sends another email asking them if they have changed their strings since they bought their guitar. Provide some links to strings your store offers.
At this point in this particular example, we could choose to end this process now, or continue sending a few emails every so often. As long as these emails provide some kind of value to your customer, we can keep this going indefinitely.
More Examples
Example 4: Marketing Process
Download & Conditional Follow Up
Scenario: We want to send out an email to a list of contacts encouraging them to download a brochure. For those who did not download the brochure the first time, we want to send one more email to try an encourage them to download the brochure, ignoring anyone who already downloaded it the first time.
How can I send a follow up email to contacts that did not download my brochure the first time?
Solution: We use a trackable email system and landing page with a tracking script. The solution might look like this:
Schedule your first email to go out to a list of contacts you have. The email communicates your value proposition and why someone should download your brochure.
The email contains a trackable link to a landing page with your brochure for them to download. This is what will tell us who downloaded the brochure and who did not.
Thanks to the trackable link and the tracking script on the landing page, we will know which of your contacts from your first email downloaded the brochure.
The system automatically filters out the contacts who downloaded the brochure and sends a second email to the remaining contacts who did not download it. The email will be worded differently yet still communicate the value proposition with the goal of encouraging some of the remaining contacts to download your brochure.