How we helped a client automate customer onboarding.
Introduction
Customer onboarding is very important to any business. New customers are what helps keep a business alive and promotes growth. Often this involves one person establishing contact with the customer, and then manually guiding everything through the multitude of tools they might use to help them manage the different aspects of their business. In this particular instance, the customer was spending a lot of time managing emails from customers, putting those customers into their CRM software, and then when the customer needed work, they would manually move the customer from their CRM software to their invoicing software and finally into their project management software. Sometimes this could take hours! In this example the customer was using the following software to manage all of this.
1: Squarespace (Contact form that customers used to establish contact).
2: Zoho CRM
3: Wave (Invoicing solution)
4: Notion (project management solution)
This customer already had a subscription to Zapier , an integration platform that allows non-programmers to connect different SaaS (software as a service) products via APIs. We were able to set up three "zaps" that automated the entire onboarding process—moving customer information from the contact form, through the CRM, invoicing, and finally into project management software. These zaps were triggered by specific events in the previous software.
Method
Zap 1 linked directly with the Squarespace contact form. Zapier offers this integration, which Squarespace doesn’t appear to make available to standard developers. Alternatively, if you're not using Squarespace, Zapier can monitor an inbox that receives customer inquiries. Based on the email content, Zapier can automate various actions. For this client, Zapier parsed the contact form data (e.g., company, phone number, email) and used Zoho CRM’s API to pass the data into the CRM, ensuring no duplicate leads.
Zap 2 connected Zoho CRM with the invoicing software, Wave. The trigger was converting a lead into a contact within Zoho. Once a contact was created, it would automatically generate a new customer in Wave, enabling the client to send invoices immediately, saving time and effort. Zapier checked if the customer already existed in Wave by email; if not, it created a new one.
Zap 3 followed Zap 2. It linked to the customer creation event in Wave to automatically create a new page for the customer in Notion, allowing project managers to start logging tasks for the new customer. This was the final step in automating the customer onboarding process.
In Conclusion
This setup nearly eliminates the manual effort of moving a customer from website inquiry to fully onboarded, ready for invoicing and project management. These tools are especially valuable for small businesses where saving time directly impacts the bottom line.
If you're interested in a similar setup, feel free to reach out!
