Streamlining Workflow and Enhancing Collaboration with IoT: A Case Study on Customer.io

Customer.io is an app engagement platform that helps marketing and growth teams automate messages to their customers, ranging from lifecycle emails to SMS. The company operates with a small team, where members often share responsibilities across diverse projects. This structure, while fostering collaboration, often led to redundancy and duplication of tasks. The team uses multiple apps for their day-to-day sales, marketing, and people operations tasks, including Slack, Livestorm, Clearbit, Close.io, FormKeep, and Customer.io. The company needed a solution to manage these apps, eliminate duplicate work, and continue fostering collaboration.

Customer.io, an app engagement platform, faced a significant challenge due to its small team size and shared responsibilities. The team members often found themselves working on diverse projects, ranging from marketing to sales and support. The shared responsibilities often led to redundancy and duplication of tasks, which not only wasted time but also disrupted their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and skewed analytics. The team needed a solution to manage the multiple apps used across different departments and to foster collaboration. They also faced the challenge of standardizing data from different applications used for sales, marketing, and people operations tasks. The data from these apps came in different formats, making it difficult to standardize and analyze.

To address these challenges, Customer.io turned to Zapier for Teams and its Shared Folders. Zapier is an app automation tool that allows users to create automated workflows, known as Zaps, that bridge two or more apps. With Zapier, every member of Customer.io could build their own Zaps and share them with their teammates, fostering collaboration and eliminating redundancy. To standardize data from different apps, Customer.io used Zapier's homegrown tools, Formatter and Webhooks. Formatter transformed and split text, while Webhooks simplified data sending. These tools, paired with Customer.io's business apps, provided the flexibility needed to standardize information. Specific workflows were built for sales, marketing, and people operations departments to increase productivity. For instance, they automated round-robin lead assignment for sales reps and standardized form entries for data analysis.

• The implementation of Zapier for Teams and its Shared Folders significantly improved the operational efficiency at Customer.io. The tool allowed team members to create their own automated workflows, fostering collaboration and eliminating redundancy. The use of Formatter and Webhooks tools helped standardize data from different apps, making it easier to analyze and report. The automation of tasks such as lead assignment and form entry standardization increased productivity and fairness. Furthermore, the shared responsibility in using Zapier for Teams enhanced understanding among team members about how different processes work, promoting transparency and accountability. The team could easily trace the business and human logic back to a goal, making it easier to understand why something works a certain way.

• Elimination of duplicate work, saving time and resources

• Standardization of data from multiple apps, facilitating analysis and reporting

• Automation of tasks such as lead assignment and form entry standardization, increasing productivity