If you operate a SaaS company or are running a startup, having a clear understanding of your usage and generating reports are incredibly important. For Chargify, a subscription billing platform, this couldn’t be more true. Brit Gwaltney, the Director of Sales, knew he needed to generate comprehensive reports in order to display the health of the business and make sure the company is optimized for growth.
“When I first started my job, I needed to create reports but it was really hard because of all the bad data and duplicates that were coming through our current integration program,” says Brit. “Workato prevents duplicates when you’re pushing stuff into Salesforce and that’s such a big deal for us.”
In order to move Chargify’s information from three cloud apps (including their own product, Chargify) and into Salesforce, Brit created a series of Workato recipes. Recipes are a set of tasks that get work done across your apps.
By syncing data from Wufoo, Zendesk, and Chargify seamlessly into Salesforce, Brit can immediately retrieve the metrics that matter most: How many closed accounts? How many people are using a trial account? How many converted to to paid customers etc. Salesforce can be a powerful reporting tool and by using it as “the system of record,” Brit can not only understand what’s happening across the company but also gain a 360 degree view of his customer body. “Workato allows us to have a full picture when we pull reports from Salesforce without any manual work,” says Brit.
Now Chargify can track a customer’s complete lifecycle through Salesforce with no manual work and no fear of duplicates. They also don’t have to distract their own engineering team from working on what matters most — the product.
Chargify completes this in 4 steps:
I. Lead Gathering
II. Up to date Customer Data
III. Product Data
IV. Retrieving reports in Slack.
1. Lead Gathering
Chargify acquires leads using a Wufoo sheet on their landing page. If someone is interested in a great subscription billing solution, they can fill out the form to learn more about the product. Brit needs the information being gathered by Wufoo to sync without any duplicates into Salesforce, so he created a recipe to not only create new profiles in Salesforce, but ensure that the lead doesn’t already exist.
Wufoo Recipe: When there is a new entry in Wufoo form, Workato will search for the lead by name in Salesforce. If the lead exists, Workato will update the profile. If it does not already exist, Workato will create a new profile.
2. Up-to-date Customer Information
The lead information from Wufoo is only one part of the equation when it comes to understanding your customer. Brit also needs to access the information in Zendesk where the tickets hold more insight. In order to move the ticket information into their system of record a.k.a. Salesforce, Brit uses this recipe:
Zendesk Recipe: When there is a new/updated ticket in Zendesk, Workato will get details of the ticket and transfer them to Salesforce. If the Case ID or Contact ID is not present, Workato will create a new one, and if it is, it will update it.
3. Product Data from Chargify
The last step in creating a comprehensive reporting system for a SaaS company is transferring your own user data into Salesforce. Brit needed to know and have record of whenever someone signed up for Chargify, made a payment to Chargify, updated their profile information, changed products, or received a refund. To move this information from Chargify to Salesforce, Brit created 5 recipes:
Recipe 1: Product change in Chargify Updates Salesforce
Recipe 2: Refund success updates Salesforce
Recipe 3: When state changes. Update Salesforce
Anytime a Chargify customer edits their subscription (if there’s a product change or a new credit card refund) Workato updates their account in Salesforce with these 3 recipes.
Recipe 4: When an opportunity is created update the amount field and actual Chargify plan field
When someone signs up for Chargify and a new opportunity is created in Salesforce several steps need to occur. If they sign up on a paid plan, Workato will trigger information on the plan when a payment goes through as their plan and revenue needs to be updated in Salesforce.
Recipe 5: Copy of New Site event in Chargify will get subscription from Chargify
A lead that filled out the Wufoo form might create a test account, then Workato will take that information and combine it with the first Wufoo form they filled out in Salesforce.
“Native integrations never fix everybody’s needs, there’s always one person who has a customization and needs to change something,” says Brit. “If you actually built all of your edge cases it would take forever and cost a lot of money. People have custom objects, custom record types or multiple instances they want to plug in all at once — all these things can cause issues and with Workato you can just set it up and fix it. I’ve actually connected to some crazy things with Workato!”
With Chargify connected to Salesforce, Brit can see the important information coming from their own product without building out the connections himself, wasting valuable time and resources. Workato can easily support any Force.com App and with the new dev kit coming, any app with a public API will soon be a snap to integrate without all the trouble of an IT team.
4. Retrieving Reports in Slack with Workbot
With Chargify, Zendesk, and Wufoo all synced to their CRM, Brit can use Salesforce to pull reports on important SaaS metrics instantly. Workato’s Workbot for Slack takes this convenience and makes it even easier to generate reports. When the CEO pings him asking for specific information, instead of logging into Salesforce to generate the reports, Brit can simply stay inside the Slack console and let the information come straight to him.
“Our CEO wants data about sales, users and operations every single day. Before, this meant logging into multiple business apps and pulling the data in pieces. With Workbot, I can now find out the answer with a single command right within Slack. That’s powerful. Workbot feels like a new superpower created by combining two tools that are essential to Chargify: Slack and Workato,” says Brit.
Measuring Automation Success
The sheer volume of manual data entry and margin for human error that has been eliminated is apparent through the numbers. Using the workflow Brit has set up in Workato, Chargify has processed 3,000 signups in just two months and almost 9,000 payment events. More than 22,000 tickets have been synced into Salesforce with no fear of duplicates.
“Workato has probably saved just me alone five hours a week that I would have spent just managing Salesforce,” says Brit. “It also saves us engineering costs and stops us from distracting the engineering team so they can focus on our product. Had we outsourced, it would have cost around $10,000 to have a Salesforce Developer do what we did with Workato.”
Brit and his team can rest assured that any report they need can be pulled at any time, without a second thought!
Are you using Workato’s Workbot for Slack in interesting ways? Let us know in the comments or shoot us an email at info@workato.com.
