How Telegram bot overcame designer procrastination and helped increase digital agency revenue

The founder of the digital agency Roman Kvartalnov shares a simple solution that helped make production processes transparent, made it possible at any time to evaluate the cost of the project and the company as a whole, and also save about 1,000,000 rubles in collecting reports from employees.

Do you know the cost of your company? Can you get access to information about the work done in 3 minutes in yesterday? And in a week?

Four years ago, I opened my company. At the start, we had a small team. Obviously, the fewer people, the better they manage to work harmoniously, to be a single organism. By the end of the first year, we began to actively scale and faced growth problems. At some point, we simply lost control of the processes within the company and began to make decisions randomly. There is such a term - “chaotic management”, it can be interpreted as follows: the manager is not able to predict risks, constantly puts out fires and does not understand why they occur. This approach has 2 development paths:

1. Recognize that such is life and the role of firefighter is assigned to the founder of the business. In this case, your ceiling is a cool fireman, superman fireman.

2. To realize that fire extinguishing develops in a spiral fashion, ie time goes on, tasks grow, resources decrease. In this case, your goal is to exert yourself and go beyond, get over problems and try to find system solutions.


I tend to hypothesize and test them. This approach was laid by teachers at the university, where I studied nuclear physics. Actually, I apply the same approach to business. I find a problem, hypothesize management decisions that can systematize processes, and test my assumptions. A hypothetical solution to the problem of "perpetual fire fighting" was the operational control of the cost of the company in real time. To get access to this and other important information, I really needed regular employee reports.

The chaos that had to be fought

Being engaged in the design of system interfaces, portals, mobile applications and other digital solutions, we work in a team of creative, a little crazy people. The most organized and disciplined people among us are developers, and everyone else: designers, screenwriters, copywriters, designers, managers, analysts, marketers, sales managers, accounts - maliciously sabotage the filling of daily reports. This deprives the manager of the opportunity to quickly assess the cost of the project at a real time and make important management decisions, which ultimately leads to loss of profit.

It so happened historically that for us the quality of the result of work and getting into the client’s business goals is a must have. But at the same time, in pursuit of the same quality, we can go into uncontrolled processing, which leads to sadness in the project budget.

Solution

We started with a primitive solution - we introduced a rule for filling daily reports in Google form. The solution is very simple, understandable and not particularly effective. To be more precise, the average monthly occupancy rate of daily reports was less than 15%.

We tried rewards, found out what we didn’t like, changed the wording in Google forms, held personal conversations with an explanation of how important this is, but, unfortunately, the human factor in this process is not eradicated.

*ремарка 
Есть компании, которые вводят прямую зависимость системы оплаты труда путем привязки к потраченному времени, говоря простым языком, нет отчета – нет зарплаты. Считаю данный управленческий прием тоталитарным, равнозначным армейскому «упал – отжался». В таком случае мотивация сотрудников стремится к нулю.


To simplify the process of filling out reports, as well as to pump employees' ability to focus, we have introduced the practice of completing tasks with a timer. Everything is simple - the contractor starts the timer during the start of work on the task and fixes the amount of time spent on its execution. This makes it unnecessary to recall at the end of the day the number and essence of the tasks performed. To my regret, only super-systemic and disciplined people can work this way, of whom there are few.

So what needs to be done so that people fill out daily reports
regularly, on their own, quickly, simply, without unnecessary plea from the management?


I was always wondering under what conditions and why people make a certain choice: to buy or not to buy, poke a button or not, write or call, etc. In the context of this, there are many scientific approaches in psychology, neuromarketing, neuroeconomics and physiological features the human body.

One of the trends drew my attention - this is the concept of “artificial intelligence”. In my opinion, this is the highest degree of system development. There are several communicative levels of interaction between a system and a person:

1. Man - System. These are input tools where a person is the initiator of actions (Word, Excel, Paint, terminals for payment of purchases, parking, public transport, etc.)

2. Man - System - Man. This is the construction of the interaction of people using the system (instant messengers, task managers, Yandex taxis, Uber, etc.)

3. System - Man. This is the construction of such an interaction where the system initiates a dialogue (Google infrastructure is an excellent example. You buy plane tickets and on the day of departure you receive a reminder of the following content: “Today you have a flight at such and such a time. The road to the airport from your geolocation will take at that time, it’s time to move forward ”)

In order to exclude the human factor, the solution to our problem was to create conditions where the system itself becomes the initiator of dialogue activation.

An excellent solution was the bot in Telegram - ZERO

Not a person should remember that it is necessary to fill out a report, but the system (ZERO) independently starts a dialogue. It is a dialogue.

How does this happen?

At the end of the working day, a notification about a new message in Telegram pops up on the employee’s phone: “New message from ZERO”. A person opens a familiar conversation window and simply answers questions that he can hear from a friend, tells how his day went. The mechanics are justified by a purely psychological effect. Modern man perceives the messenger more personally. It’s one thing to follow the link and fill out some form, and it’s quite another to answer a friend in correspondence with simple questions, for example: “How are you?”, “How are you?”, “What have you been doing today?”, “How long have you been doing this?” did? ".

It took us about 1.5 months to launch a full-fledged MVP. When we released the alpha version of ZERO, the hypothesis was confirmed. The average monthly occupancy rate rose to 95% in the first month. And this is very tangibly resonated with the company's business processes.





Observations on the implementation of ZERO: A

high percentage of report completion is not just a demonstration of discipline in a company. ZERO made it possible to save an impressive amount. The math is very simple:

Reduced time to fill out reports - saved about 100 thousand rubles a month.

The average picture:
At the end of the day, each employee fills out a report on the work done, spends an average of 15 minutes to remember, forcing himself to sit down to fill out a form or table, as a rule, he cannot do it on the go. He sends a report to the manager, he raked reports weekly and spends about 2 hours collecting and compiling summary information.

Counting the time:

Team time: 15 minutes x 21 working days = 315 minutes / 60 = 5.25 hours x 15 people = 78.75 hours / month
Managers time: 2 hours x 4 weeks x 2 managers = 16 hours / month

Counting money :

Money: 78.75 hours / month x 1,500 rubles (the average rate of the contractor including invoices) + 16 hours / month x 2,200 rubles (the average rate of the manager including invoices) = 118,125 rubles + 35,200 rubles = 153,325 rubles each company loses month on filling out reports.

153 325 rubles - the monthly amount of lost profits of the company (17 employees).


Multiply it by 12 months.

815,100 rubles
so much for a year a company of 17 people receives less for a year because of filling out reports.



And if the staff is a hundred people? And if a thousand? Try to make a calculation for a company like Rostelecom? Or the calculation of sales companies with more than a hundred daily salespeople reporting ROPs? It turns out just huge money.

We managed to automate and humanize this business process as much as possible, which is important.

At the moment, every employee of our agency spends 2-3 minutes daily talking with ZERO. This usually happens between times, on the way home or at bedtime. As a result, the system automatically generates summary tables for the company.

For me, saving time and money, although important, is not the most important value of ZERO. Now I can at any time ask my managers about the status of projects and get an answer in a minute, since they always have the managerial version of ZERO on hand.

To be honest, now I can and without the participation of managers get information about the cost of the project for the entire reporting period, for the last week, for any selected day, the efficiency of each employee’s load and a report on those who sabotage the system tightly or are actually in sadness.

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For us, more than ever, the emotional state of each person in a team and directly the emotional intelligence of the team have become important. Our ZERO already at this stage of development allows me, as the owner, and all the leaders of the company to be connected with employees.

ZERO proved to be an effective tool because it was created to solve specific problems, specifically our company. This once again proves the importance of experimentation. Now we do not sell the bot, but we are actively developing it. The idea of ​​the sea - starting from the general humanization of the dialogue, for example, randomly building a conversation, analytics and predicting various performance indicators of employees and teams, integration with various services that are used in the work, creating the simplest corporate services for employees (intranets) and ending with an internal corporate loyalty system. In the future we plan to turn him into Jarvis, a personal assistant for each member of the company.

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