Whether or not a remote company thrives or flounders depends on a great many things, chief among them—communication. With employees scattered across states, countries, and continents instead of across an aisle, it's harder to know what your co-worker in another department is up to in their day-to-day. Heck, sometimes it's easy to lose track of your own teammates when they work in a different timezone.

Hotjar, a website analytics and feedback platform used by over 200,000 companies, is a remote company. Spread across four continents, Hotjar helps website owners understand their visitors and uncover opportunities for improvement. With this data, businesses can identify the how and why behind their visitors' behavior and redesign their site with a smarter flow, better language, and discover what their customers respond to. With an offering this complex, Hotjar relies on its employees to work together as efficiently as their product.

"We're located all over the world with no physical office," says Nick Heim, Director of Marketing at Hotjar. "It is absolutely necessary that we communicate in smart ways that promote personal productivity but also nurtures a team dynamic."

"Being 100% remote, it's essential that we don't become siloed in the way that we work," Nick explains. "[App automation tool] Zapier helps us be faster and more efficient as teams." Whether it's pulling information from a CRM into billing software, building a database of invoices, or updating clients across multiple platforms, Hotjar uses Zapier for Teams and its Shared Folders to reduce manual work and boost cross-team productivity.

Build a Form Response Database with HubSpot, Google Sheets, and Freshbooks

Chief among the workflows Nick and Hotjar needed automated was a path from their content management system (CMS), HubSpot, to their billing software, Freshbooks. The finance team at Hotjar was manually collecting information about users interested in annual plans and making sure data in HubSpot and Freshbooks matched.

"Rather than ask our engineering team to build an integration, which would have taken time and resources from other projects, we linked together a sequence of Zaps," Nick explains. Zaps are a bridge between two or more apps and, in Hotjar's case, connected their CMS and billing programs with Google Sheets.

Their first step in automating this workflow was to create a form on a HubSpot landing page. Any time a customer submits a response, Zapier sends those entries to a Google Sheet to create a separate database. Once in the Google Sheet, Zapier passes the entry on to Freshbooks, creating a new client.

"This integration took us one day of testing and saved our finance team a ton of manual time collecting this information."

Try out Hotjar's HubSpot to Google Sheets to Freshbooks workflow below—we even broke it up into pieces in case you need to customize your workflow:

"No one knows their workflows better than the team that works within them," Nick says. "Creating a Zapier account that houses multiple teams—all solving different problems—gives you a bird's eye view of different departments' processes, which helps break down walls that exist between teams."

Navigating remote work and what that means for teams coordinating efforts will always be a challenge. But with Zapier for Teams and Shared Folders under the hood, Hotjar found a way to keep efficiency and collaboration at the forefront of their processes.

"We're always trying to test new ways to improve creativity and collaboration. Zapier for Teams empowers [us] to not only identify gaps in team efficiencies but also create a system to improve them."

All images courtesy of Hotjar.