Customer Creation Automation

What problem did you tackle?

A handyman and renovation contractor felt bogged down by the process of translating new leads into QuickBooks once they were confirmed booked on the calendar. With projects booked out for months, it was easy to let some details slip through the cracks. If gone unnoticed, by the time the work was done and invoicing ready to go, a gap in customer setup could result in a lot of back office headache and a less-than-ideal experience for the customer.

What the client needed was some way to make the customer creation process easy, including a process for the right people to be informed if there were pieces of missing information. It was a repetitive, data-entry driven process that consumed a lot of time from company managers and was prone to potential manual error.

How did Norman Professional Services craft a solution?

Using Zapier, NPS sought to connect their lead and project management system, PipeDrive, with their QuickBooks Online account. By defining a specific step within their lead management process when a lead truly becomes a customer with a project that will occur, the stage was set for a clear and clean trigger to check for complete information in the lead profile and project information.

If anything was missing, the trigger allowed for a polite email to be automatically sent out internally to remind people to collect the information from the customer to ensure a smooth experience to provide them services. And if all was good, the trigger would then prompt the customer and project information to be translated into QuickBooks in a way that made it easy to track both by customer as well as by project – including seeing which customers kept coming back to them for more and more work, just like in their lead management system PipeDrive.

What was the positive impact?

After a thorough amount of testing, the automation streamlined a complete and consistent process of getting customer information into QuickBooks, opening up time for their team to be focused on more important things. The team no longer needed to be worried about missing project classifications or customer info. This helped promote a clean path to timely billing with complete customer information.

Eventually, the business evolved to split its operations more deliberately between handyman time and material jobs versus larger projects. Using Zapier’s versatility, NPS was able to swiftly address the customer’s request to adjust and replicate the automation the team had worked hard with the client to refine.

In time, the client sought to own the automation, and through a simple screenshare, the step-by-step automation was just as easily replicated client-side.

What’s next?

With the knowledge and tools transitioned over to the client, they are now equipped with the tools necessary to find other ways to automate other back-office items to get their team more focused on helping their community and each other. As Zapier continues to evolve and add more to its menu of capabilities, the possibilities remain endless for the customer to explore further.