TextExpander for Agencies: Use Cases & Examples from ZenPilot

Hello, my name is Gray MacKenzie. I'm one of the co founders at Zenpilot, and today I'm excited to take you behind the scenes, show you some of the use cases for one of our favorite tools for internal productivity. That tool is textexpander. I won't bury the lead there. You can see it right in front of you on the screen here. I'm gonna give you the quick overview of what textexpander is. We're not gonna spend a ton of time there. I think if you're watching this, there's a good chance that you're somewhat familiar with the. The tool or the text expansion space already. But it's basically one of those tools where you type in some type of shortcut on your keyboard and it automatically, wherever you are in your computer automatically expands. So if I type qem, it'll give me my email, or if I'm typing Q zoom, I use Q as my prefix. It'll give me my zoom link or, you know, any kind of simple text expansion. And you can see there's some benefits there in terms of efficiency. Over the last 30 days, I've expanded 294 snippets. It saved me about an hour worth of time. It's about half of my usual stats that's coming off of. I'm recording this in January of 2022. We've got Christmas mixed in there and then Covid on the back half, but it'll save me a couple hours a month based on estimates off of typing time. I actually think the efficiency side and for context, I switched to Text Expander just over a year ago, and I switched from a tool called a text. And the primary driver for that was I wanted to be able to use the text expansion tool across the team. And so that's what I want to focus on today is, yeah, there's the basic stuff. I think you can go get that anywhere. But specifically, how are agencies using it? And is there if you're using it already, are there some examples that I can share to help you use it better if you're not using it? Can I help you think through whether it makes sense or not to start using a tool like Text Expander? Okay, so where I was going with the efficiency ones, that's actually the secondary benefit that we've seen, where the first one is really consistency, standardizing the way that we communicate with prospects and with clients and with partners in our engagements. And I'm going to show some of those examples, but making sure that we have consistent messaging across the board and we're not accidentally making typos as we're sending stuff out to clients. Let's go ahead and dive into what some of these examples look like. We talked a little bit about efficiency and consistency, the two main benefits. Now let's look at some of what textexpander actually looks like and some of the ways that we're using it right now. So I'm going to go to first, the basic ones and we'll go to to our email one first. Here's what the text expander interface looks like. We've got just a plain text formatted expansion. Here's the any label, custom label, so we can, you know, categorize or quickly search through things a little bit easier and then what our abbreviation actually looks like. So that's a really simple one. Let's go to one. We're actually doing like a fill in here. So I'm going to go to our leadership agenda and this is just a really simple agenda for a small weekly sync that happens here. And so I'm just going to type that out here so you can see what it looks like. L agenda. And it gives us this little. What's cool about this is it automatically plugged the data in. It's got our scorecard already linked up. It's got all our formatting right. And now I've got a chance where I can type in. Hey, what are the review notes? We had six client referrals last week and what are the issues? We need to get more efficient with text expander. Whatever we wanted to put in, I hit. Okay. And it's automatically going to populate all that here. So it's a real quick and easy way to build out agendas or any type of standard communication that you're going to use. What we're using there, if we jump back over here, is we're using. I call these fill ins. I don't know what textexpander technically calls them. I should know. But these are just both single line fields. I can make it multi line. I probably should make it multi line here. I'm using these fields where I'm plugging in. Hey, I want the the month and then I want the day and then I want the year. Then I'm plugging it in. Now I could use some of the coolest features that textexpander has. I'm using this in a couple other ones. I'm actually not using it in this one and I probably should be. You can add days. This happens on a weekly Basis it's happening on Monday. So I could say, hey, right after the meeting, I'm just going to add the new agenda in for next week. So it's already there. And then, you know, we can add stuff as it comes up over the course of the week. I should really do, hey, I want to take this day and I want to add a week to it from there and then plug it in. But I'm not currently doing that, so I've got room to, to get more efficient here with this as well. But anyways, so we've got that and then we're plugging in. You've got all these different options, but we're plugging in a single line fields that it gives us that little window and interface when we use it to plug in whatever our issues are, customize the snippet and then deploy it. All right, so that part's cool. Now, obviously, I would recommend, especially if you're producing any content anywhere, doing any partnerships, you're used to filling in your bio and your social links and all that stuff all the time. A hundred percent. I just go through and use a tool like this to quickly build out whatever those links are. My LinkedIn. There you go. Or my Twitter, just quickly type that stuff in and put it in. And I could shorten those expansion snippets up even more. Think of somebody like Jimmy Rose, who has spent a lot more time in textexpander, probably even has a more efficient prefix than I have. But that's some of the things that I use it for my zoom, my around, my Twitter, my LinkedIn, my whatever those profiles are website. So that's helpful from a personal side. But we use it in a handful of other places as well. So internally we use it for all of our standard meeting links. So if someone wants my calendar, they type M dot. That's our abbreviation for meeting link. M Gray. There's Gray's calendar or you know, someone else on the team M their name and there's their meeting link if they've got to share it with somebody externally. For Intake form, someone signs up to work with us in the blueprint process, we type flash. It just means hit this link in for intake and blueprint and we can shorten that to bp. But right now it's a blueprint. So that's the intake. If we're sending somebody the checkout page, you know, sp, the sales page, blueprint, same exact format again, they need the, the overview of what that service looks like. And here we go. Here's the, the Deck link to get any of that. So we use that to standardize a lot of links. If they want to look at our brand links, we'll pull up text expander here again and we're going to search for brand. Here's our brand assets and this links to a ClickUp doc that has, you know, all the versions of our logo and our icon and our favicon and our colors and our headshots and all of that kind of stuff. So it's super handy. Anybody on the team can grab that stuff really quickly and they can use on Mac it's just command and the backslash to go search through textexpander to find whatever they need if they don't remember the shortcut off the top of their head. Okay, let me give you a couple other use cases depending on. So I'm just going to show you an example here. Let's just say em.pod1 and it's going to give us this whole overview. Hi, this is an invitation. So we're inviting somebody to come on our podcast and we're going to say, you know, hi Sheila, hope you're doing well. Saw your LinkedIn post about culture and then I should have tabbed and hit the next ones over there. But here's just. I have a handful of topic ideas. I want to talk about culture, I want to talk about sales, whatever. And I've got the, the booking link already formatted up what the podcast link is. There's kind of a real quick way to invite somebody on in a podcast scenario. I probably don't have any info about them in the CRM already. So if we just look at, let's see, we've got a rescheduling template. So this is one that that Ayla on our team uses. And here's a couple fill ins. Here's the next steps. So just a very quick, efficient way to, to send out email that's standardized. It's got the right links, you don't have to hunt around and you can shoot something out in two seconds instead of two minutes to type it all up. Okay, so let's talk about some of the super cool things that you can do internally and from a client services perspective. So one thing that we encourage any agency to do if they don't already have a standardized system for this is, is a weekly depending on the size of clients that you're working with and the nature of those relationships, but a regular update from your project lead so that the whole team can know where things go. Your director of client success or your COO or your. If you're in a small enough agency, the agency owner themselves, there's a centralized recap and log of where the account is at that given point in time. And we're monitoring what changes have happened as that relationship's gone on. Let's see, we're going to do our weekly update here and I'm just gonna walk you through that. We'll look at it on the front end here. Let me pull this over so you can see this a little bit. It's just a standardized weekly update. Why would the customer be unhappy? We're asking some kind of prompting questions or digging questions to try to get our account managers or strategists thinking about where does the account actually sit. And they're providing a quick update. This is going into the account dashboard and ClickUp. So why would the customer be unhappy? I can't think of a reason, honestly. Or we were late on that blog post or whatever it was. Are you happy with the account? Actually things are strained or I'm not getting buy in from, you know, whoever. Have there been any changes in strategy or the timeline? No, nothing's changed. What do you need help with? Relationship improvements with CEO at client or whatever. And then they're also verifying the things that we need them to do. Hey, have you also made the rest of the updates correctly? Do we have the right people enrolled so that we're getting that feedback loop? Have we taken care of all their support requests? And you're committing that they're going to be resolved in a timely manner. Great, go ahead and and plug that in. And it sense this is a really simple way to keep that line of communication between the frontline client contact and whoever's leading that client services department to keep that in a tight loop without taking up a ton of time on the part of the person who's on that front line. So we don't want our account managers spending four hours a week filling out and telling us about all the work that they've done. We're gonna make that as simple and easy as possible. For things like meeting recaps. We communicate with all of our clients in Slack and each week there's the end of the meeting. We're gonna get over a recap to them with all the action items, recap of what we talked about. We do the same thing. We use the text expander stipit for finance. I don't necessarily want to pull this up with all of our details, but internally, if we've got clients who are paying via a wire transfer. We'll pull that up and and they'll be able to see it if we're recommending a specific tool. Hey, how do we explain what retently does. Guess what? Here's our recommended tool. Here's why. Here's a special discount that you get if you're working with us. The way that happens is through an intro and that's all already there and built out for a number of those tools. So anyways, those are some of the ways that that we're using textexpander to get more efficient. Obviously the friction to getting those outcomes is, is the cost. So you've got the cost of actually paying for textexpander and then you've got the time to set it up. The cost is pretty minimal. It's all priced on a per user basis if you're using it at a team, super inexpensive couple bucks a month if you're using it personally. And the team's plan is is a little bit more per user. The time to get this stuff set up is the piece that takes a little bit longer. So you want to think about from a departmental area. Obviously you've got all the personal things that you'll plug in. I used to use this back when we were building websites. Not text expander specifically. I was text at that time and I would use it for the silliest stuff. That actually was super helpful. So I had to snip it, test HTML and so let me just go back here and pull it up. Just a whole bunch of different formatting levels so that I could quickly say hey, did we skip something with our formatting somewhere along the way? So really simple stuff like that was actually really helpful for me. But you just want to map out hey, what do I have personally from a growth side of the business, what belongs there versus what belongs somewhere else. And. And can I help our team get more efficient with a lot of those pieces? From a client services perspective, how can I help our team get more efficient? And then from an operations perspective, back end things like sending your wire transfer details. Are we wasting time doing that in the interview and hiring process? You know, are there templates that we should have there? And so that's what I would just map out and then pick whatever the best tool is for you in terms of deciding whether to invest in TexExpander or not. They've got an awesome deal set up amazing enough to sponsor our podcast as well. So we're working with them on the podcast front. And that link should be live right now. Texexpander.com Zenpilot so there's a discount available. I think, like most of these tools, textexpander for sure is the best one out there. I went through and did all the tech research. I was looking at moving from a text over and Text Expander was the leader in the marketplace. Who knows if they'll stay the leader or where that space goes. But there's a lot of tools out there that are trying to do the same thing, and there's Chrome, extensions and all this different stuff. I think it really comes down how much value can we get if we get everybody operating with really consistent messaging and making sure that we're eliminating, you know, those typos or hey, we forgot to send this, or hey, you know, we forgot that the one link that should be in there. Textexpander has helped us a ton with that. So there's a lot nerdier stuff we could do and get into in terms of the actual features. But I just wanted to show you some of the actual examples of how we're using it right now and how it's been super helpful for us and our team at zenpilot.