7 Examples of How Automation Helps Small Businesses Thrive
If you’re wondering how to automate your small business, this article is for you.
Real stories are the best proof of Make, and show how automation helps small businesses grow and scale seamlessly and without any overhead.
We are aware that there are many things to automate in business, so we’ll take this opportunity to show what different companies from around the world achieved with Make.
From marketing to customer support and sales, there’s a lot to get inspired by out there, so let’s not waste another minute and jump right into the examples.
1. Customer support automation: Chronext’s magic pass
Chronext is one of the top online marketplaces for luxury watches, featuring brands like Patek Philippe, Hublot, and Rolex.
In order to provide the kind of support their customers expect, they onboarded Zendesk but soon realized that writing code to automate customer service processes was consuming too much time and resources.
By adding Make, they were able to reduce implementation times by a wide margin, which eventually led to a solutions-first mindset.
Or, as the company’s founder puts it: “It’s the difference between walking and riding a bicycle, you are just more efficient when you automate.”
Summing up:
Problem: Traditional, code-based integrations consume too much time and resources.
Solution: Switch from code to Make, and take advantage of conditional logic and batch processing capabilities.
Tools involved: Zendesk, Make.
2. Order fulfillment automation: The story of Wildner
Wildner is the rare case of a successful B2B2C fashion company, providing on-demand textile printing services to B2B customers, and apparel items to end customers.
A good part of its success comes from having automated some of its most challenging processes, such as printing, order fulfillment, and reporting.
The results were quite staggering: After automation, they saw output increases of 190% in their printing stations.
Order fulfillment was also improved by significant margins.
They went from manually collecting and sorting out orders to using Make to take care of it all - from picking up orders to assigning them to printing stations, printing labels, and determining what needs to be shipped where (and when).
To conclude, they have dedicated scenarios that collect order and revenue data, generate a brief report, and send it over Slack to management for review.
Summing up:
Problem: Too much time and money spent on manual processes.
Solution: Automate processes to speed up production; scenarios were created in-house with Make.
Tools involved: Shopify, Airtable, Dropbox, Sendcloud, Slack, email, Make.
3. Automated lead nurturing: How HomeBiogas provides instant, relevant answers to incoming leads
HomeBiogas is one of the most innovative companies in the household biogas systems vertical.
The company serves thousands of customers around the world from its headquarters in Israel and a global network of distributors.
As the company grew, it saw an increase in the number of inquiries sent by leads from across the globe and noticed that standard automated replies weren’t cutting it.
By leveraging Make, they were able to create an automated system that classifies incoming leads (depending on the country and needs of the lead), places them in the right pipeline (sales or business development), and assigns them to the right stakeholder.
Before automation, it took an average of 24 hours to do all of this. After using Make, the whole process was reduced to a couple of minutes.
Summing up:
Problem: Prospects and customers were waiting too long for an appropriate response.
Solution: Automated lead nurturing to qualify leads and provide a valuable answer on the spot.
Tools involved: Airtable, Pipedrive, email, Make.
4. Automated order processing: Habitium’s lightning-fast solution
Habitium is a Spanish ecommerce company that sells building materials, accessories, and appliances across Europe, doing so straight from manufacturers.
Their high-volume, low-margin business model allowed them to scale fast but also introduced a series of challenges.
Soon enough, they identified order processing as the most important one, with each order taking 15 minutes to process on average.
With Make, they automated the whole process.
Now, order data is automatically processed and sent to manufacturers, and only a quick review by logistic managers is required.
As a result, order processing went from 15 minutes to just 1 minute on average.
Summing up:
Problem: Order processing took up too much time.
Solution: Automate order processing by connecting apps and automating processes with Make.
Tools involved: Google Sheets, Trello, Slack, email, Make.
5. Recruitment automation: The story of Flexiple
Flexiple is a recruiting company that prides itself on finding the right candidates startups need these days.
Finding top tech talent for other companies is a lucrative business, but more often than not, success is measured by the ability to match professionals with companies in as little time as possible.
Before automating its processes, the Flexiple team would manually shortlist candidates for a position, engage over email with each of the candidates, and eventually come up with a recommendation for the client.
To improve this, they switched to a “self-serve” dashboard containing all the available positions for the freelancers to see and apply and used Make to capture details and automate communications with candidates.
The results were quite impressive: By using Make, Flexiple was able to drastically reduce the time it took to recommend a candidate - from two weeks to two days.
Summing up:
Problem: Recommending candidates took up too much time and involved too many people.
Solution: Switch to a self-serve platform, and automate data gathering and monitoring.
Tools involved: Webflow, Airtable, Gmail, Make.
6. Automated web creation: Verb’s life-changing solution
Verb is an SMS-based fitness coaching service that provides personalized instruction through its app. The app helps users to identify their goals and reflect on their progress on a daily basis.
Customers get to pick their coach, and here’s where the main problem surfaced, as this required Verb to create a profile page for each new coach.
Creating a single web page took two hours on average. This may not sound like a lot, but quickly adds up when you’re dealing with dozens of new coaches every year.
To solve this, they connected a few apps together and came up with a process that automatically generates the web pages for each coach.
As a result, they transformed this 2-hour task into a 5-minute one.
For any business that has to publish new website pages involving dynamic content on the regular, this can be a table-turning possibility.
Summing up:
Problem: Creating new web pages on Webflow consumed too much time, and involved too many back-and-forths.
Solution: Use digital forms to gather information, collect data, and create new web pages with that data automatically.
Tools involved: Typeform, Airtable, Webflow, Make.
7. Customer onboarding automation: How Scentia makes it easy for its customers
Scentia helps working professionals who want to advance their career through a doctorate find a suitable partner university for their Ph.D.
This usually involves lots of communication and bureaucratic work.
When a new candidate shows interest, there’s a lot of paperwork involved, and communications can easily get messy and lengthy.
Before automation, Scentia relied on web forms, a CRM, and email to keep track of everything. This process proved itself inefficient: Everyone was spending too much time gathering information and communicating updates.
To solve this, they added automated rules for just about everything: Follow-up emails, lead qualification, and data gathering.
The improvements were palpable: Faster onboarding, higher levels of satisfaction among candidates, and a reduction of 10 hours of work per week.
Summing up:
Problem: Customer onboarding was messy and took too much time.
Solution: Automate key processes of data gathering, communications, and assigning candidates to the right person.
Tools involved: WordPress, Pipedrive, Airtable, Outlook, Make.
Conclusion: Reasons to be excited about automation
As you can see, the benefits of automation are not reserved for large companies with big budgets and extensive dev resources.
This is what sets Make apart from other automation tools.
Giants like Spotify, Zalando, and Meta automate with Make, but so do small companies, professionals, and freelancers that want to transform their business operations.
Make allows anyone to innovate without limits, and the results are for everyone to see.
If you’re a small business owner who wants to be less dependent on human resources to grow and scale your business, don’t pass on Make.
Get started today, and results will materialize faster than you ever imagined!
