Do you spend hours each day manually moving information from one app to another? When you're doing these things regularly, why not consider automating them?
Zapier, one of the most reliable integration software, is here to help make our daily work life easier and more efficient. In this video, I'm sharing some of the best automation that you can do with Zapier to save hours every day.
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Transcription:
If you're a business owner and you're interested in using Zapier to save time, well, we've got some great tips here on specific zaps, that you can use for remote teams. Now, if you're working remotely right now, or you've got a flexible workforce, these are some of the best that we've seen in working with many business owners all over the world to get Zapier running nice and swimmingly for their business. Now, if you're new to the channel, my name is Pete Moriarty, and I'm the founder of business called it genius. We help businesses all over the world with Google workspace and other technology tools to help you and your teams work remotely, work productively, wherever you are. Now, we've been in business for over 15 years. And we are the number one partner for Google in Australia and New Zealand, which is pretty cool. But we help businesses all over the world with their tech and making sure that teams are productive.
Now today, we're talking about Zapier, and this is one of my favorite tools for getting business technology connected and for helping you and your processes run smoothly inside the business. We take bits of data from one place and we put them in another place, and have them all automated and running swimmingly together. Now, if you're interested in some help, as well, our team can actually help with that. We help small business owners in integrating their tech and making sure that all of their processes are matched by the technology in their business. So if that's something you need help with, I've got some options at the end of the video for professional help. So let's jump into our first tip here. And this is moving emails to task management. Now, you may be using a CRM system, you may be using a task system like Asana or Trello. And some of those actually have the ability to forward an email and create a task. But what about systems that don't what about if you've got a CRM customer management system or a database system or website perhaps, and you're not able to email in? Well, there's an amazing feature inside of Zapier called the email inbox and you can actually have data grabbed from that email and actually placed into a different system. So if that's creating a task in your task management system, if that is actually adding a new record to a database, if that is taking something like an order from an order system, and automatically creating a task inside of a task system, anything that's on email, can go straight into Zapier via their Zapier mailbox pick up now, one of the things I used to use this for is when we had an ordering system that would spit out email orders, but we didn't actually have a way of interfacing from that system into our task management. And so we used to pick up those emails and automatically create a task in Asana, meaning that anytime an order came through automatically from the website, a team would pick it up and process it and never miss anything. Number two on my favorites apps is getting notifications inside chat. Now, whether you're using slack, still I don't know who is or you're using something like Google Chat, well, you can actually set up for any third party tools to actually place chat messages inside the chat via a bot. Or you can actually do it just by the integrations feature right inside of chat. Now, I'm really happy that Google launched this when they launched Google Chat, because this is one of the best features that you can use a public chat room for. This is the kind of thing where if you make a sale and your sales system, or maybe if a customer puts in negative feedback using one of your customer satisfaction rating tools, you can automatically have that go to the right person inside your chat application. Now, how we use that is that anytime a sale goes through from the sales team, we can all celebrate and you don't give them a good cheer. But if an escalation comes through, and a customer hasn't had a good experience with our help desk, that goes automatically to the leaders room inside of our chat. Now, of course, we want to celebrate when we do a great job. And so anytime a customer gives us a thumbs up on our support desk, that goes to the whole team. And we can all give a high five to the person who helped out that customer and encourage them to keep doing great work. Number three is a basic one, but super useful if you've not already set up. And that's sharing your blog posts across to your social channels. Now, for many platforms, it probably makes sense that you're posting native content, but with the number of platforms that are out there, right now, if there's a platform that is not particularly your primary platform, like maybe Twitter is not the primary place for you to create a blog, but you do at least want a notification to go out that way. We're using Zapier to actually connect different platforms from maybe your WordPress site or your LinkedIn page or your Facebook to different platforms makes a lot of sense. You can also do things similar to another tool called If This Then That and actually grab content and grab posts as they are created and create an archive out of them. Maybe you want to take information and take data from your social profiles, and automatically paste those into your Google Drive for safekeeping or into a Google document. Well, they're all options between your creation for your content, and your social channels. Number four is collecting client feedback, super important in a business. Now, there's a couple of ways of doing that, whether you're grabbing it via a customer satisfaction score in a tool such as Heiva, which is one of the tools that we recommend for Google workspace. Or maybe you're just connecting from a Google form. And you know, people can just fill out a Google form at any time, but you want to move that data into different apps. Some of the examples of why you might want to do that is if you've got an E commerce business, and a customer has created a feedback response and I've shared some feedback in one of your products, you might want to make sure that that customer is automatically added to your mailing list, or you might want to tag them in your customer database. So you know that this is a customer that's provided feedback. If it's great feedback, then you might want to add them to a sub list or a tag list inside perhaps your active campaign or your other CRM system. And maybe you want to send them special offers in the future as a thank you. Or maybe you want to even fire off some automation. Once someone has given that feedback, maybe you want to check in in 14 days or in 30 days by firing off another automated email using Zapier if you'd like to ask them, hey, was this resolved properly for you. And so what that does is it gives you the opportunity to architect the perfect customer experience, and have that customer experience, completely automated and completely managed for you. And not every business system in the world integrates with the Google ecosystem, and specifically with Google Calendar. So one thing that we've seen customers do quite often is whether using a job management, or a task management system or something in the way of workflow automation that doesn't yet integrate with the Google world is using Zapier and the API of that system to actually talk to Google Calendar. And what that might look like is if you have a job management system, and you want to make sure that any job that is approved or created automatically gets plugged into the calendar of you or your team members who are actually delivering that job, connecting the two via Zapier might be the way to do that. And I love doing this. Because when you have one single source of information, makes your whole life a whole lot easier. And so for your team members, just having one calendar where they can see all of their internal meetings, but also external jobs, if it's something that they're needing to do outside the business, having them all in one place makes it nice and simple. And also, they've got access on their mobile phone as well. Next up is a great one for anyone who works in the design industry, whether you're an architect, graphic designer, or someone who's working with large and important files that are coming through into your email inbox. And that is to automatically save your email attachments into your Google Drive, or potentially into a different system. One of the things that customers often find working in these industries is that attachment management can turn into a little bit of a nightmare. And if so if you have one Dropbox, where attachments are placed into, and then someone's job to move those files into the right folders and into the right project files, it means that everyone on your team working in Google Drive, or using Google File Stream on their computer can much easily access anything rather than having to dig through each other's inboxes or forward emails constantly between your different team members. One of the biggest requests that we get from customers is recording data into Google Sheets. And this could be any kind of data. But the important thing to understand is making sure that you have the right data for you to be able to actually gain insights from there. Now this may be something as simple as getting leads from your website and automatically having them entered into a Google Sheet. It might be tracking things that happen online, like maybe on your LinkedIn, or maybe invoices going out in your Xero or even records happening in your CRM system. Now the reason why we might be using Zapier for that, instead of doing that manually, is I'm always a fan of using automated data controls. Rather than doing things manually, it removes the issue of human error. And it makes sure that your data set is going to be cleaner when it comes time for analysis. Now, for example, you might want to dump every single invoice that goes out on a particular week or a particular month, and have that automatically going into a sheet on a batch file. And that would be the kind of thing where you could run graphs or reports or create charts from. But when you know that that's happening on an automated basis, and no one has to spend the labor time doing it manually, you're not only going to have accuracy, but you're going to have much more efficiency as well. And so if you think about the way that Google work as a business, and as an organization and us working very closely with Google, this is how we know that they work, they collect a lot of data, more data usually than is needed. And that data then has the opportunity to gain insights from and that's when the AI and machine learning features start to really come to life. When you have large data sets of lots of data. And you let Google's automated tools start to look for insights from that data. You can check out one of our other videos, we recorded recently on the best tools of Google's AI features, and their machine learning features right inside Google spreadsheets to get a feel for that. My final tip. And tip number eight is helping to automate the onboarding of new team members. Or it might even be automating the onboarding of a new client. Now, we would trigger this with something like a task inside of a sauna. Or maybe we even send an email to a particular email address to trigger this task. But this is the kind of thing where you have a complex task or a complex set of tasks, and you want them to all happen in sequence, you might be creating a folder inside of Google Drive, and simultaneously creating a new task inside of a salary or other task management system. You might create a record somewhere in your customer database, and if all of these things need to happen in sequence and together at the same time, and maybe you want to make sure that all the data is entered correctly across your different systems. Well, this is a great way for you to automate it using Zapier. because there'll be a can have multi step processes and even you know, filters and conditional logic and some of the steps as well. That means that once you set this up once, each time you onboard a new customer, a whole lot of the manual work can be done automatically. And it saves someone having to go through a manual checklist to make those things happen when it's automated. I hope you enjoy these tips. And I'd love to know, what are your favorites. And also, if you have any suggestions of a killer tip for using Zapier in a business that we didn't cover in this video, drop them in the comments below. And if you have any questions, we'll do our best to answer them.
If you're already a customer who's using Google workspace, we might be interested in our transfer in offer doesn't cost you anything extra. But it does give you access to amazing training videos, some light professional support from our team, and the opportunity to become a concierge member for even more benefits. If you're interested in getting more from the Google workspace ecosystem. I thoroughly recommend you check out our transfer in offer job on the link below. There's nothing that you need to do to pay more or for it to be any extra effort on your past. Pay the same only a couple of minutes to get set up and our team will be able to help you and your team get more out of your investment and Google workspace. Now if you'd like some help getting Zapier set up for your business, or implementing any of the recommendations that I've shared here in this video, you might be interested in considering becoming a part of our concierge membership. Our team will help create and craft these apps for you. They'll implement them so you don't spend your time doing that as a business owner. If you're interested in getting access to a professional team to implement these for you, we can make it much easier than you spending hours of your time getting this done. And we do it all for one fixed yearly fee and your membership. If you're interested in that, click the link below jump on a console with our team and we'll be happy to help out scoping out what you might need in the Zapier world and seeing if we're a good fit to work together till the next video. Take care and if you like this, please hit the thumbs up and subscribe to our channel for more videos just like this.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
