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Leverage

The goal of the Leverage Podcast is simple: to learn from the best and discover how we can all live a better life, build a more fruitful business, and be more efficient. Leverage’s Founder and CEO, Nick Sonnenberg, is the host of the Leverage Podcast. With a background in data science, high-frequency algorithmic trading, and business efficiency consulting, Nick has an innovative mind and is obsessed with learning from the people around him. Join him each week as he interviews fellow entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and leading experts to discuss everything from efficiency hacks to new technologies to life as an entrepreneur.
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Now displaying: April, 2018
Apr 30, 2018

How Intercom has reinvented the wheel when it comes to personalized communication with clients. Intercom is a communication tool + email automation + help center + shared inbox all rolled into a single platform. Learn how Leverage uses Intercom to make customized communication with clients simple and easy.

Like all of the tools we use at Leverage, it’s not enough to just know about the tool. In order to really get the most out of any service, you need to customize the experience and use a developer to customize the way YOU need it to be used.

At Leverage, we connect Intercom to our database, allowing us to receive details such as customer information, total revenue per client and a hub of internal notes on each person — all in one place. Intercom’s API makes it easy to customize your experience.

With its Zapier integration, you can set up commands, such as tagging any client that reports an issue, automatically starting a checklist in Process Street for that issue, and automatically filling in a client’s necessary information. It can also integrate with your email, text and Facebook, therefore if someone sends you a message on any of these platforms, you can choose to have it sent to your Intercom inbox.

Intercom makes segmenting audiences and email marketing a breeze. You can choose who receives each message you send, whether it’s a one-time or recurring automated message AND who is going to be responsible for follow-up.

This list allows you to choose between sending a message to leads or your current customers, or take it to the next-level by choosing guidelines such as “customers that have done over 10k in revenue and have been active for at least three months” and send this custom message within minutes. You can even choose whether they receive this as an email or a push notification on their linked devices.

For example, Intercom lets you choose both the sender and responder. Nick will send a message and if a reply comes in, the Leverage management team will all be able to see it and respond, therefore more people can manage responses and eliminate wait time for the user.

Conversations can also be assigned at a department level, not just a person level, by creating rules. For example, you could create a rule that if the subject line of an email comes into the shared inbox and contains the word “receipts” it will automatically be sent to the finance department.

Now that you have an idea of how to set up a message for various audiences, let’s review some other helpful features of Intercom:

  • Do you know the chat boxes you often see pop-up on websites? It’s most likely from Intercom. These can be run automatically by selecting trigger parameters, and/or sent out manually for one-off messages. If you visit getleverage.com, you’ll notice we’ve set a timer so that once someone visits our homepage for 15 seconds, a video shows on screen.
  • There’s Intercom Educate, which are help centers and Q&A forums that live within Intercom — it allows you to create collections, and then have multiple articles within a collection. At Leverage, we have a Q&A collection for clients and an internal wiki for our freelancers.
  • Within your inbox, you have the capability of assigning certain messages to people. For example, if we receive a question about hiring, we’ll tag our HR manager so they know they are in charge of responding to that message.

If you’re interested in developing your custom Intercom, let us know! We’ll get a team member to set you up today.

Ready to Join the Community of Business and Productivity Enthusiasts? To start engaging with our network, join our free online Slack community at https://slackpass.io/leveragecommunity

 

Apr 19, 2018

Process Street has been all the buzz around Leverage. We can’t stop talking about it — or using it. This tool has proven to be so useful that we are giving our members a free enterprise account for an entire year. Here’s a behind the scenes look at how Leverage is using this tool to transform our service.

Leverage has already documented how we do every task in the form of an easy checklist in Process Street. Documenting has benefits such as reviewing your current way of doing things to notice areas of improvement and make your current process more efficient. But, it is also a great way to implement a brand new idea. Before launching the idea into action, you organize each step of the way and assign the appropriate team members to each part of the checklist.

Recently we received a case study from our Head of Business Operations, Florence Bout. She told us how Leverage is using Process Street to create a brand new service offering for our members, to provide an easier and more positive user experience.

Leverage is rolling out fixed project pricing, instead of its signature hourly rates. Why? Well, there are many reasons we chose to go this route to better serve our clients, but to keep it simple it is a way to give clients a full project cost estimate and remove any uncertainty before their work begins.

Phase 1 — Project Scope

In this phase, all parts of the checklist are formed around discovering what the client needs, what the project will entail and creating a full scope of the project.

Phase 2 — Define

After the project is assessed, we develop specific project milestones and the total cost. This way the client can see a timeline of deliverables and the project cost… therefore mitigating unexpected surprises from popping up along the way.

Phase 3 — Set-Up

Here we prep all the Trello Cards and/or Slack channels that we’ll need to properly manage the project and all internal + external communications.

Phase 4 — Milestones

This section is specific to our finance department. The image below shows how each person on the team and their respective cost is shown directly in the checklist, keeping it easy to organize how to pay multiple team members that are collaborating on a single project.

After all of the milestones are completed, the project is finalized which means the client is given their final deliverables and the project is closed.

So, there it is. Our real-life, real-time example of how we document our workflows and prep our staff to be fully prepared each step of the way before we launch a new idea or service. This process, in theory, could be applied to most types of project management application for testing prototypes, new products or new service offerings.

Ready to Join the Community of Business and Productivity Enthusiasts?

To start engaging with our network, join our free online Slack community at https://slackpass.io/leveragecommunity

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