It’s a privilege to be able to share our latest case study showing how this one service-based business has utilised Keap Max Classic (formerly Infusionsoft) to transform their business. Their main service delivery process was very manual. We implemented a range of automation to help them improve on their efficiency and create a consistent customer and booking experience. It’s been one year since the automation went live, and we’re delighted to report the life-changing results they have experienced so far. The business has saved over 1k hours, saved on labour costs, plus they have reclaimed their weekends to themselves and just had their first Christmas holiday EVER!
Can you imagine that? Being able to fully relax and be present with your family over the holiday period for the first time? That’s got to be a game changer, right?!?! It sure has been for this business and their team.
Ok, here is the official summary of the results 🙂
Case Study Snapshot Results
3k+ booking transactions in the first 12 Months
1,400+ hours saved in the first 12 Months
1.5 full-time equivalent ongoing labour cost savings
Reduced working hours – shut on Saturdays now every week and stopped working late nights and weekends to manage bookings
70% reduction in amendments & cancellations (due to new process & policy (excluding covid impacted bookings))
After 20 years, the business had its FIRST EVER Christmas holiday off!
It’s been a pleasure to work with Lisa, the business owner of Cherished Cherubs and her team. When we sat down and went through the results, we were both blown away by the impact that this automation has made on the business and the entire team’s lives.
This is truly why we do what we do!
Have you got a manual process that you want to automate and save hours too?
Curious to find out if it’s worth automating? Book in a call today to chat further.
Here's what we're going to cover:
Ok, let’s get stuck into the details of the business and the case study 🙂
The Business
Cherished Cherubs is a personalised babysitting agency operating in Perth offering at home, hotel, corporate and events babysitting. They find the best babysitters and match them with Perth families for single and regular bookings. The business has been running for over 20 years, with Lisa, the business owner, taking over in 2019.
- Target Market – Perth families, hotels & corporate that have parents with kids
- Product/Service – one – off babysitting, multi day babysitting, VIP babysitting services, hotel babysitting, corporate creches and events babysitting
The Problem
The team had a very manual babysitter booking process. They were manually sending out email and SMS confirmations to confirm babysitter bookings for clients. They would also do the same for the babysitter – sending a confirmation email and SMS with critical details of the babysitting job. It would take 30 minutes on average to complete this activity manually for every booking.
Any changes to the original booking would also need to be communicated to all parties. This included location changes, babysitter changes, time/date changes and other details. Processing amendments would also take approximately 30 minutes. If a booking needed to be cancelled, this would take approximately 5 minutes to communicate to relevant parties via SMS only.
Overall, the team was bogged down in administration work. This would also result in them working nights and weekends to keep up with the volume because of the manual nature of the booking process.
The Opportunity
The majority of clients, booking information, as well as babysitter details were already being provided and stored in Keap. Now Keap may be known as an email marketing and marketing automation tool, but it’s also a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool and can be used to automate service delivery workflows as well. As this data was in the CRM, we knew it would be possible to automate this process, but we wanted to do it in a smart way. We wanted to let the team have the least amount of work to do as possible. This meant leveraging the data already in the system, plus ideally setting it up in a way that the team could complete ONE action to notify both parties – the client and the babysitter. For those more advanced Keap Max Classic users may know, actions are usually based on one contact only at a time (e.g. client, then another action for the babysitter). So, we knew we needed to get creative to work out how we could get the system to communicate with two contact records based on one action…
Ok… Challenge accepted!! 😀
Campaign Purpose
The purpose of this campaign was to automate babysitting transactions so staff could easily fill out one form to notify both a client and babysitter for a booking, amendment or cancellation. In addition to this, a master booking spreadsheet was to also be updated so the history of all booking transactions could be captured for easy reference and booking management.
Here are the specific outcomes:
- Send a client an email & SMS for a booking confirmation
- Send a client an email & SMS for a booking amendment
- Send a client an email & SMS for a booking cancellation
- Send a babysitter an email & SMS for a job confirmation
- Send a babysitter an email & SMS for a job amendment
- Send a babysitter an email & SMS for a job cancellation
Record all booking transactions in a master spreadsheet
The Tools
- Keap – we used Keap Max Classic (formerly Infusionsoft – the more advanced edition) to build most of the automation for this process, sending emails and triggering integrations. Specific functionality that we used in this software platform included:
- Webforms
- Internal forms
- Tags
- Set Field Values
- Decision Nodes
- Actions Sets
- HTTP posts for third party integrations
- Google Sheets – we created a master spreadsheet for all entries to be automatically recorded centrally for easy reference for the team to view all booking types.
- SMS Broadcast – we used text messaging to notify clients and babysitters of bookings, amendments and cancellations – all triggered automatically from Keap.
- Zapier – we used Zapier to perform three core functions:
- Integrate to pass each booking transaction into a new row into a master Google Sheets
- Automatically create unique IDs to be able to reference back to all booking transactions
- Humanised dates for easier reference in emails (instead of showing a date as 23-11-2022 in an email, it would display Wednesday 23rd November, 2022)
The Work
Due to the level of customisation needed and to prove the approach would work, the automation was split into three phases for this project.
Phase 1
Booking Confirmations
Phase 2
Booking Amendments & Cancellations
Phase 3
Campaign Efficiencies & Updates
Phase 1 - Booking Confirmations
The first phase was focused on automating the booking confirmation process. This is where an enquiry would come in to book a babysitter for a set date/time by a family via an online form (webform). This was the logical place to start and where the majority of transactions come from – so it was worthwhile to prove the concept and also get the biggest wins for the Cherished Cherubs team in terms of time savings.
Phase 2 – Amendments & Cancellations
After the successful launch of the booking confirmation process, we leveraged a lot of the setup to introduce the amendments and cancellation to those original bookings. Amendments included where details of the booking changes – date, time, location, babysitter selected or other details. This would cover the situation of a mistake in bookings, or just when details change. Cancellations – whether initiated by the client or by the staff, were to notify both parties again that the booking was no longer going ahead.
Phase 3 – Campaign Efficiencies & Updates
After go live, as with most automation, the setup did go through further updates. This included improving the efficiencies of the campaign, that meant splitting out components of the automation into separate campaigns for better performance. Also, as internal changes were made to processes, policies and general updates, campaign assets, including emails and SMS’s were also updated to reflect current practices.
The Build
We follow the same 6-step process for all of our campaign setups. Here is the breakdown of what we did in phase 1 of this implementation project.
- Step 1 – Campaign Scoping – We worked with Lisa to understand the challenges she was experiencing with her booking process, including how she was currently managing it and how we could potentially address those pain points through automation.
- Step 2 – Campaign Structure – we documented what was needed, then built the campaign structure, including the goals, sequences, emails, tagging and other elements for the campaign to function
- Step 3 – Campaign Set Up – We obtained and loaded the email & SMS copy provided by Lisa and setup all the relevant 3rd party tools that we needed to integrate, including Zapier, SMS Broadcast and Google Sheets
- Step 4 – Campaign Publishing – We published and tested the campaign to ensure that it worked for both the clients, babysitters and of course users/team members.
- Step 5 – Campaign Launch – we officially launched the campaign which meant the staff could use the internal forms to kick off babysitting bookings for clients and babysitters to receive confirmation notifications via email and SMS, and the master google sheet was being updated.
- Step 6 – Campaign Optimisation – We reviewed the setup with Lisa, got feedback from the staff, to then make improvements to make it easier for staff to complete the relevant forms, and made updates to the emails for babysitters and clients.
Campaign Structure
Now, this setup is very customised and not for the faint-hearted, that’s for sure! But the real lesson here is, to make life simple for the team, there was a lot of power setup in the backend to streamline their business processes, so they don’t need to worry about anything. This reliable setup has successfully processed over 3,000 booking transactions, just by the completion of one online form :). It’s given the admin team peace of mind that bookings are taken care of and follow-up emails and text messages are being sent out to their clients.
There are 4 campaigns involved in this setup (excluding the one we didn’t touch as part of this campaign that submitted the online booking request). This is a high-level view of what’s happening and where the campaigns sit to support the overall processing of these transactions.
Here’s what’s happening in a bit more detail in each campaign.
Campaign 1 - Master Babysitter Booking Campaign
This is where the magic happens! We use this campaign as basically the control centre to perform critical core functions and kick off the other campaigns. It starts with the completion of an internal form by the team depending on what they want to do – book, amend or cancel a booking. The automation then performs updates on the backend and triggers the 3 other campaigns from this one. We also use this campaign to update the master Google Sheet.
Campaign 2 - Location Campaign
Babysitters are regularly booked at hotels throughout Perth. Instead of the team having to manually find and type out the address for every hotel booking, the system has been set up with all the regular hotel addresses. This means that the team just needs to select the hotel name from a dropdown list, then this campaign automatically updates the contact record to provide all the address details of that hotel. If of course, the booking isn’t at a hotel, the team member completing the form can type can select the home address (with no need to type it out), or type out if there is an alternative address.
Campaign 3 - Babysitter Campaign
The purpose of this campaign, is to populate the client’s record with the babysitter details that’s been selected for that specific job. This will allow the Keap system to send client and job information for bookings, amendments and cancellations to the babysitter’s email and mobile phone. The team just needed to select the babysitters name from the dropdown, the rest would happen automatically. 🙂
(Due to the confidential details of babysitters, we can’t show this campaign, but here’s what’s happening after a babysitter is selected from the dropdown – their email address and phone number is temporarily added to a custom field on the client record by using the Set Field Value function).
Campaign 4 - Booking Communications
The purpose of this campaign is to have all the communications in one place. All emails and SMS’s live in this campaign for booking confirmations, amendments and cancellations for both the client and babysitter.
Sample Client Communications
Sample Babysitter Job Communications
(PS Ignore the date in the SMS, this was an old test that clearly doesn’t match up with the email, but for illustration purposes only).
Ok, have I still got you? Great! Ok, there is a lot fancier stuff going on within this campaign with some advanced automation features, but that’s the most important elements above that drive the results that this business has been able to experience from the automation setup.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT
We have already made a number of improvements to the automation already, particularly after go live each time, and in phase 3 of the project as well. But as with any form of setup, there are always opportunities for improvement.
Some further opportunities include:
The ability to automate payments and invoices from these booking transactions would take this setup to the next level (there is a level of complexity around solving this problem, but something to explore further).
The ability to send a picture of the babysitter to the client in an email, and a link to their babysitter bio on their website. This would be a nice touch, put a face to the name, and allow the client to get to know the babysitter better before they arrive.
- (Unrelated to this campaign, but another great opportunity) – Training & onboarding campaign for new team members.
WORKING WITH LISA
Lisa has been a dream client to work with! She has been incredibly helpful in providing the critical input we needed, plus being very open about ideas on how we could solve some of her biggest challenges. It was a big project, and she put her faith in our ability to take her on a journey and deliver a reliable system for her. It was an honour, and we’re absolutely thrilled to see these life-changing results come to life for Lisa and her team.
Here’s what Lisa had to say about working with us…
“Mandy & the team have fundamentally changed how we do business through automation, streamlining & game changing ideas. I haven’t worked with anyone so smart, efficient, professional, supportive & responsive. The time saved on admin and tiresome processes has effectively enable us to double our business. THANK YOU, you are amazing & I am so grateful.”
Lisa Taylor, Owner, Cherished Cherubs, Perth, Australia
About Us
At Streamline For Success, we love working closely with clients who have big manual workflow problems. We are an award-winning Keap automation expert, with over 7 years’ experience in helping clients in Australia get the most out of the platform. We partner with businesses to design, build and launch automation to transform their processes, and ultimately, their lives. By implementing best – practice solutions, it allows businesses to streamline and implement automated solutions to save valuable time, costs, and resources. If you’d like to chat about your specific automation needs, feel free to book a free call.
