5 SIMPLE Automations To Improve Your Company

What's going on everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here, the blue collar nerd. Today I'm going to show you five simple automations that you can implement to improve your business. The first one I've got here, this one's real simple and hey, by the way, all of these require some sort of team chat platform. I use Slack. If you're not really sure what that is, check out my video on that. But you are going to need something, Slack or something like it to run these automations through. First one I've got for you here, this is Birthday Bot. This one's the simplest because it is built in, you just have to download the app in Slack. So Slack has apps, they have integrations, little extensions that you can get and Birthdaybot is one of them. So you just find it and say add to Slack. And what Birthday Bot does is anytime somebody's added to Slack, so any new team member or whatever comes into Slack, it's going to ask them, hey, welcome, what's your birthday? They're going to tell them and then when that day is approaching, it's going to let the whole team know through a private message to just that team member. Hey, by the way, just so you know, so and so's birthday's coming up so if you want to do anything internally, you know, special for them, you've, you've got that heads up and then on the day on their birthday it's going to send to the channel of your choosing a birthday message with a little birthday gif and everything. And that prompts everybody to say hey, it's your birthday, Happy birthday. You know, it's just a great culture thing. It's, it's really nice. It just, you know, it really sucks to be a part of a company and, and your birthday comes and goes and nobody knew, nobody says anything. Just really makes you feel like you're, you're not really part of something like, like you're just a number, like people don't know you. So having something like this just to make sure that never happens, nobody ever falls through the cracks. Really great. So this next one, this is my wow worthy reviews channel. And in this channel I have an automation that pushes all of our company reviews into, so that everybody can see the reviews that they got, mention their name, everybody can congratulate each other again, just a great culture thing. So you can see here I've got them coming in from different sources. There's a Google review we also use nearby now and I've got nearby now reviews Coming in too. So basically how this works is you can do it a couple of ways. The most basic way is just through an email filter. So basically whenever you get a review, usually any platform has the option of get a review. I'll send you an email about it. Google definitely does for sure. So you can say, hey, email, I'm gonna set up this filter, these rules. So if it comes from this address and it has this subject, forward it into Slack. And to get it to go into Slack, I'm using something called Zapier. Zapier is an automation program. It's fantastic. It's web based automation platform and they have a free tier. It's very simple, there's no coding or anything. You can get very complex with it if you want to get really into it. Like I like to get really into it, but you don't have to. It's a graphic interface. You just move things around and you can make something that's two steps like this. One thing happens, review comes in, meets filter and then B happens. I'm going to send it to Slack. And Slack is just a much better place for your reviews than your email inbox because everybody can see them and talk about them. Nobody's really going to be checking daily for reviews. And it just doesn't during your email a conversation can't be started. So this is a great culture builder as well and a great opportunity for if a not so great review comes out and to have that conversation with the whole team about what happened, how can we make it better and that sort of thing. So this is another great one, real simple. You can set it up in Zapier. I'll probably do a video on Zapier in the near future to kind of show you how to set simple things like this up in there. Okay, this one, similar concept, web requests. So I have a channel for web requests because as we get more and more into, you know, web chat and you know, different platforms, Yelp and whatever, all these different places that people can request service online or ask you a question. It gets confusing, it gets hard to keep track of. And so I put them all in this one central place. Same basic concept, I'm just using email. On the paid version of Slack, you can send an email to a channel directly. So you don't even need something like Zapier. That's what I'm doing here. So this web request channel has its own email address and I can just set up a filter. Hey, when these emails come in that meet these requirements, just send it straight to this Slack email and it's just going to show up in Slack. I kind of prefer that to doing it through Zapier, honestly, because. Especially for stuff like the web request, because I. Some of them are long, like transcripts of conversations and when you do it this way, it condenses them down until you click on it and it will expand out the whole email and you can compress it again so you don't get such a messy long transcript that you have to scroll through always to get to the next thing. Also, it's just great to have this all in one place. Email is a terrible place for this guys, because you don't. It's not a team effort in email. It's one person and you don't know if it's been replied to yet. If you're also just sharing an email or whatever here you can have a conversation. You can send replies under it. You can use things like reactions. Like I can see this one here got booked. They use a little book emoji for that. This one, they've at least seen it. This is an eyeball emoji so you can keep track of it. It just helps with management anxiety to be able to look and say, okay, these are getting handled. And I can see that. Okay, this one's great too. This is Grannybot. So I set up an email called noemailycompany.com and I just told everybody, hey, if a customer tells you they don't have an email, we do everything electronically. We send invoices, estimates through email. If they tell you they don't have one, just put noemailcompany.com as their email address. And whenever an email gets sent there, it makes this alert happen. Invoice was sent to no email. Please mail a hard copy, react with a check mark when this has been completed and it gives you a little link to their invoice. I'm also doing this one with Zapier, but it is pretty simple. It's just email matches requirements, get sent to the no email address and then we're going to send this message. Okay, this one's pretty handy. Has it ever happened to you and your company where, you know, comes the weekend rolls around or nine, 9:30pm rolls around and a call comes in and you or the manager, whoever calls up the on call guy and they're like, you won't take this call, right? And they're like, what? I'm not on call. What are you talking about? I'm not even on call. I didn't know I was on call, nobody ever told me I was on call. This takes care of that little issue. So every time the on call is coming up for a particular person, it's going to put in the service department channel. Hey, I've got so and so down as the on call technician this day, to this day, please confirm. We want to see that confirmation so that we know that they know that they are in fact on call. And if anything is going to be screwy, we get it out of the way ahead of time. So this is a really handy way to make sure that gets taken care of and it happens automatically. You don't have to worry about remembering to make sure you confirm with them and everything when your day gets busy. And that's the great thing about automation, you don't have to worry about it, it just happens. So what I'm doing for this one, it's Zapier again and a Google Calendar. So I have my on call on a Google Calendar and I've told through Zapier, hey, when this event is coming up, when we're one day away from this event, send this message in the channel to make sure that we get a confirmation. Pretty simple. So anyways, that is all I've got. That is five pretty simple automations that you can implement fairly easily to improve your company. Till next time. Hey, thank you so much for watching. If you liked this video, be sure to click like and subscribe. Leave a comment, those types of things. Just let the YouTube algorithm know. Hey, people like you like this video and I should show this video to more people like you. If you got anything you'd like to see, anything you might have got a glimpse of in the video that you want to know more about, let me know down below in the comments and I will work on it. Thank you so much.