It's 3:47 p.m. on Friday afternoon. You can taste the weekend and it's pumpkin spiced. But then you check your to-do list. You forgot about the week's data entry. Now you need to go into application A and make sure the payment went through. It's good, so you copy the items ordered from A into tracking system B. Marketing needs that customer on mailing lists, so jump into email app C and add their email address.

Repeat ad nauseam.

It's no surprise Rush Tech Support turned to app automation tool Zapier to crush their manual work. Rush Tech Support provides their clients with an IT alternative: Remote tech support. Clients call the RTS team, connect with an agent, and the agent solves the computer's woes remotely.

Before Zapier, Andrew Lassise, owner of RTS, tracked sales manually. "Having 50 agents and keeping track of who sold what for how much was extremely tedious and time-consuming," Andrew explains. But with Zapier now in their wheelhouse, the RTS team works more efficiently than ever.

Instantly Create Order Databases

Manual work is the death of productivity. "We used to process a payment on our WooCommerce shopping cart, manually enter the items purchased into Podio, manually add the customer to MailChimp, and manually create a FreshDesk ticket," Andrew explains.

Andrew knew it wasn't sustainable. "With the help of Zapier, we're able to immediately send sales from our shopping cart to Podio, which automatically keeps track of the salesperson associated with the sale."

Andrew automated their most time-consuming workflow and gave five hours back to himself and his team—every week.

When a new order is placed in WooCommerce, Zapier automatically creates a new project entry in Podio. This entry contains the tech support services RTS's client requested, which will come into play shortly.

After Zapier makes the Podio entry, the customer's email address is added to a list in MailChimp. The final step in this Zap (our word for a bridge between two or more applications) creates a Freshdesk ticket, pulling the requested service and customer information.

"Having all of these happen with one Zap helps me keep track of my customers and commissions," Andrews says. RTS essentially builds a service request database in both Podio and Freshdesk, allowing different agents to pick up a request where another left off. This history means that no matter who helps a client, they receive the same level of support from every agent.

We'll break RTS's Zap down into its components. That way, you can steal their efficiency and adapt it to your workflow.

Beyond simply handling the tedium of manual work, creating efficient workflows with Zapier allows Andrew to think bigger.

"Now that Zapier handles the workload, I can focus on larger deals knowing that our backend is extremely scalable and our data is consistent."

All images courtesy of Rush Tech Support.