Day 18: importance of creating flow charts and documenting processes

What up guys, it's Ryan Shank from PhoneWagon. We are on day 18 of our morning updates. Guess what? We're back. We got blue bottle coming at ya, coming at ya hard with the blue bottle consistency. I know we like to mix it up a bit, but let's dive right into it. So today, one thing, here, let me adjust this a little bit. I know you guys want more in the frame, which I totally get. So one thing that I want to talk about today is the importance of creating creating documentation, the importance of just laying things out. I'm specifically referring to flowcharts right now, and this actually relates to a couple different aspects of the business. One thing that I was going over yesterday with one of my buddies who owns a business, like a remodeling company, and you know, the importance of creating flowcharts. So he uses Lucidchart, I've used that in the past. You can literally even do it by hand and just draw it out, but, and actually that's what my designer, Michael, does, is he draws it, and he doesn't initially, but he basically will draw it out by hand, and if you think about it, it actually helps you really think through the process of, and when you're drawing things, you know, obviously once it gets kind of big, you're gonna wanna be able to do it in a digital format, so you can kinda copy different shapes and stuff, and drag lines connecting them and things like that, but for the initial prototype, especially in design, So I'm gonna go to design now and then I'm gonna talk about business process in just a second. But when you're doing design, you know, you wanna map it out because you don't wanna go right into design ever, right? You wanna create a wireframe that's gonna sort of go over the flow of everything because the customer experience is actually really important. If you have the functionality there, which yeah, that's hard to build, but at the end of the day, typically functionality is going to be a commodity. People are gonna be able to build it, not that big of a deal, but I think, you know, really, critically thinking through the flow of everything, through the entire customer experience, all the different touchpoints. How can we, you know, drive the customer from, you know, point A to point B down a certain path that makes sense to them where they're really starting to understand the story, they're understanding the product that you're doing without, you know, overwhelming them with, you know, feature dump and things like that. So it's really important to outline the flow, and now I'm gonna go back to business process flow, okay? And a lot of times, especially when it comes to your lead gen funnel, for instance, but not even just to get the leads, like what happens after a lead comes in? I'm talking about the exact touchpoints, okay? And the timing between the touchpoints and the messaging that you're gonna have at each touchpoint, and maybe there's a different message depending on the channel that the customer came in. So it's incredibly important to flow this all out, that's one thing that I'm actually working on today, you know, as we think about ramping up certain channels and we're saying, hey, you know, we think we're acquiring customers at this rate from this channel, let's crank the knob a bit, you know, we want to make sure that everything is airtight and just to be open and honest with you guys, one thing that was kind of messed up on PhoneWagon's website was I had a first call to action as just an email address on the homepage, okay, so you submit your email address, you click submit and then it takes you to another landing page where then I asked for company name, phone, and email again. So one, that's weird that you would type in your email twice, totally get it, and then two, the second form was broken when you enter the same email address on the second form as the first form, for some reason it wasn't allowing it to get a duplicate entry the way that it was posting, so it wasn't even letting people submit the second form, so completely broken, luckily we caught it and now we're fixing it, and having a better flow, but you know, one thing that really brings this to your attention is when you start to map it out and then you can visually see, okay, this is exactly, you know, the stages that we're gonna take the customer through in the funnel or the flow, right, these are the exact touchpoints, and then you can start to really process out every little thing, every little piece of that funnel, and then from there you can start to optimize the different stages of it, you can say, hey, this is the email that we're sending, do we really wanna send it, looking like this? Do we really want it to be from this person? Do we really need an email, a phone call, and a text message all within, you know, 60 seconds of each other? Maybe we should delay them so the customer is not overwhelmed, right? So all of these things you really start to, start to think through. And maybe, you know, you're sending one email, but then your MailChimp is sending an automated email as well, and they're still getting overloaded by all these different communications. Okay. So anyway, point is, being able to map everything out, whether it's, you know, just how your customers are finding you. So for instance, he has a remodeling company, right? And with his business, the leads will come in. He's generating a pretty good amount of leads. And then from there, what happens is they have their, like, receptionist is what you can call it. But in software terms, it'd be like almost like an SDR or someone that qualifies the lead. So anyway, they call the lead, they start to qualify the lead, then they send them a questionnaire. And that really starts to qualify the leads, see if they you know, have a budget that they can actually work with, you know, for doing remodeling in new homes, obviously they have to be able to spend money, so then this kind of weeds them out, but anyway, the first touchpoint of the phone call that creates, you know, a sense of personal relationship, send them the questionnaire to then further qualify them, after the questionnaire gets filled out, then they schedule a call for a consultation from like a senior partner at the company who can then walk them through exactly what they're looking to build, and then from there, they, you know, they schedule an in-person meeting for the the entire company, especially when it's a new house, right? You wanna kinda like meet the team and the family or whatever comes in and they talk about, you know, they're building their dream house and things like that. It's kind of a, it's a different experience, larger ticket, longer sales cycle, but there's a lot of commonalities with businesses, right? Whether you're a painter, a chiropractor, a plastic surgeon, whether, you know, you still, you know, are getting leads coming in, you're talking to them, doing a consultation, you're booking an appointment, you're having an appointment, especially if you're a a plastic surgeon or a surgeon, cosmetic surgeon I guess is what they call them, veneers, whatever you want, you're still doing, you're probably doing a personal appointment, you're probably making the customer or the client, patient, whatever you call them, feel comfortable, you know, we do this all the time and you know you're gonna look great and all that stuff, right, you're gonna wanna have that personal, I guess consultation is what you can call it, meeting anyway and then from there then you book the actual job to be, or for instance with his business, remodeling company, then they book or they send an estimate and then after the estimate they sign a contract. So that's kind of their flow, but if you're a surgeon or whatever, you probably talk to them, you do your initial meeting, and then after your initial meeting, then you, you know, I don't know if you send a contract, but then you kind of like book the actual surgery, I guess, and then post-surgery there's gonna be even more follow-up comms. But I think, not that I think, I know mapping this all out, creating visual documentation is gonna really help you think through what makes the most sense and what is the best experience for a customer. So that's what we're doing today. It's Wednesday, we're also working with our current clients, we're shipping new features, and doing a lot of cool stuff. I'll go over, we're already at 7 minutes, so I'll go over some additional stuff that we're shipping tomorrow, but just thinking about mapping out flows and visualizing different aspects of the business and each different touchpoint. So it's super important, hope you guys are doing it, and have a great Wednesday.