How Agilize Automates 37 Steps in a Customer Service Workflow
Highlights
More than 10,000 customers across Brazil
Integrated free financial and accounting application
Agile online solution
Excellence in customer service
Pipefy is a solution uniquely integrated into our operation. It works perfectly and connects to various apps, besides having good UX for customers.”
Rafael Viana, Head of Product at Agilize
Agilize Accounting
Agilize was founded in 2013, in Salvador, Bahia. It became the first online accounting company in Brazil. Since their start, they’ve acquired more than 10,000 customers across the country, helping companies save almost US$ 600,000 every month.
Agilize combines accounting and technology to streamline bureaucracy and avoid delaying company accounting processes. The founders wanted to address a lack of transparency and inaccurate information in accounting departments.
This results in innovative, smart, and automated procedures that provide more agility, transparency, and savings to small business owners. And the goal is to make these results feasible for most Brazilian entrepreneurs at an affordable price.
Agilize operates on three levels: accounting processes, new companies registrations, and helping individual microentrepreneurs.
Challenges
Large volume of spreadsheets and processes was a red flag
Hard to communicate status of procedures to customers
Need to notify missing documents for a registering company
Automating parts of the process allows them to focus on compliance
We needed a platform that allowed process building in a flexible way."
Brazilian legislation is complex, especially regarding new businesses and tax management. This excludes much of the population from understanding and becoming involved in entrepreneurship.This is why one of Agilize’s biggest challenges has always been to enable people around Brazil to start companies more quickly and easily.
In this context, Agilize has accelerated their growth and developed their process management which became vital to their success.
Agilize has approximately 200 new customers every month, and the company created 37 steps to provide follow-up support for their services. Therefore, the management of documents and information became increasingly problematic and significant.
Agilize used manual spreadsheets to track each new customer’s deadlines and status. When they started as a small company, this approach worked, but as the number of customers grew, the spreadsheets and emails started to get messy.
“We needed a platform that allowed process building in a flexible way,” says Rafael Viana, Head of Product at Agilize. “We’ve searched for systems and solutions to bring order out of chaos. We had several new customers every month, and we still had to deal with manual spreadsheets that were getting bulkier.”
Besides providing adequate tools for their internal team to handle the volume of their requests, they also needed to ensure a high-quality experience for each incoming customer.
Tax and accounting compliance is essential for those dealing with corporate accounting. Following specific parameters is key to ensuring the company is guaranteed to comply with the tax authorities and the regulating institutions. Thus, it’s important for the Agilize team to constantly learn, effectively monitor, and accurately address frequent changes in legislation.
“We used tools that did not offer mechanisms for control and compliance, but we couldn’t let our team skip processes’ steps. We had to make sure we completed all intermediate phases correctly,” explains Viana.
The ongoing bureaucracy of registering new companies and cataloguing contract changes generates a large volume of data, requiring Agilize to engage with customers, government, and tax agencies. This was a red flag for Agilize’s team because their workflows were dependent on customer feedback and documentation, primarily when registering new companies. This process was manual, slow, and led to errors and delays due to the extensive volume.
Solution
Converting spreadsheets into processes
Organizing massive task forces
Integrating processes and departments
Generating reports and metrics
Mass screening with automation
With Pipefy, a notification is sent to the customer repeatedly so he can resolve the pending issues with us. Otherwise, the process is not going ahead."
Amongst their needs as a growing company, Agilize also needed to provide transparent information for customers about the progress of their processes. This improvement was necessary to decrease client anxiety about their work’s pace.
“There were attempts to use other tools, but none were as flexible and adherent to our needs as Pipefy,” says the Head of Product. "Most did not meet our use cases."
Because of Pipefy’s flexibility, Agilize was able to create their main workflow for registering new companies. Right after a customer signs the contract, a 37-step flow begins. Everyone goes through Customer Onboarding until they can officially register the new company. This workflow triggers several Agilize departments, with some actions depending on the clients themselves.
“With Pipefy, a notification is sent to the customer repeatedly so he can resolve the pending issues with us. Otherwise, the process is not going ahead,” explains Viana. “Because of this automation, we had an increase in delivery rate.”
Since it is a long and complex flow, Viana and his team still had a big challenge: keeping all their customers up to date on the status of their company’s request.
After studying Pipefy's integration capabilities, Agilize found an easy way to solve this issue. Using Google Sheets, they created a follow-up spreadsheet that receives data from Pipefy’s updates.
“By using filters, customers can track their processes in an exclusive way, whenever there’s an update,” says Viana. “With this solution, we were able to greatly reduce support tickets coming from customers who did not know how their processes were doing.”
Besides promoting communication with customers at every turn, all 37 phases of the primary process are connected. The Pipefy Customer Onboarding system links Agilize’s leading service to parallel workflows. It also automatically notifies teams so they can be aware of the status of each client.
Results
ROI
thousand hours in 4 months with automation
thousand cards opened in the system within 11 months
thousand automatic emails
thousand automation jobs
Pipefy is a solution uniquely integrated into our operation. It works perfectly and connects to various apps, besides having good UX for customers."
Although there was an initial resistance to transition to Pipefy, Agilize staff soon realized the value and advantages of having structured processes instead of manual spreadsheets. “The ease in setting up a new process was key for Pipefy to work at Agilize,” says Viana. “The software gave the team autonomy to structure problems in an organized process.”
At this moment, Agilize has 97 active processes within Pipefy, and almost 100% of the company’s employees have an account to use the tool and track the progress of customer requests.
Moreover, the numbers obtained between January and November 2020 were astonishing. The Agilize team opened 92,000 requests in the system, and more than 60,000 of them were completed. Of this total, 49,000 requests were connected by levels of automation, integrating processes and departments.
Adding all types of automation, Agilize saved 3,500 hours with Pipefy, which generated a 448% Return on Investment (ROI) in the first quarter of 2021.
“Pipefy is a solution uniquely integrated into our operation. It works perfectly and connects to various apps, besides having good UX for customers,” the Head of Product at Agilize adds.
