How Telegram-bot overcame designer procrastination and helped increase the income of digital agencies
The founder of the digital agency Roman Kvartalnov shares a simple solution that helped make the 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 on collecting reports from employees.
Do you know the cost of your company? Can you get access to the information on the work done for yesterday in 3 minutes? And in a week?
Four years ago, I opened my own company. At the start we had a small team. Obviously, the fewer people, the better they are able to work harmoniously, to be a single organism. By the end of the first year, we began to actively scale up and faced growth problems. At a certain point, we simply lost control over the processes within the company and began to make decisions erratically. There is such a term - “chaotic management”, it can be interpreted as follows: the head does not have the ability to predict risks, constantly extinguishes fires and does not understand why they occur. This approach has 2 ways of development:
1. Recognize that such is life and the business founder is assigned the role of a firefighter. In this case, your ceiling is a cool fireman, a fireman-superman.
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2. Understand that fire extinguishing develops spiral, i.e. time goes by, tasks grow, resources decrease. In this case, your goal is to stretch and go beyond, stand over the problems and try to find system solutions.
I tend to hypothesize and test them. This approach was laid by teachers in the university where I studied nuclear physics. Actually, I apply the same approach to business. I find a problem, build a hypothesis about management decisions that can systematize processes, and check my assumptions. The hypothetical solution to the problem of "perpetual fire extinguishing" was the operational control of the company's cost in real time. To gain access to this and other important information, I urgently needed regular employee reports.
Chaos, which had to fight
Being engaged in the design of interfaces of systems, portals, mobile applications and other digital solutions, we work in a team of creative, slightly crazy people. The most organized and disciplined people among us are the developers, and all the rest — designers, screenwriters, copywriters, designers, managers, analysts, marketers, sales managers, accounts — are maliciously sabotaging the filling of daily reports. This deprives the manager of the opportunity to quickly assess the cost of the project at a real point in time and make important management decisions, which ultimately leads to loss of benefits.
So historically, for us the quality of the result of the work and getting into the business goals of the client 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.
Decision
We started with a primitive solution - we introduced the rule of filling in daily reports in Google-form. The solution is very simple, clear and not very effective. To be more precise, the average monthly occupancy rate for daily reports was less than 15%.
We tried the promotion, found out what did not like, changed the wording in Google-forms, conducted personal conversations with an explanation of how important it is, but, unfortunately, the human factor in this process is not eradicated.
To simplify the process of filling out reports, as well as to pump the ability of employees to concentrate, we have introduced the practice of performing tasks with a timer. Everything is simple - the performer includes a timer during the start of work on the task and records 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-system and disciplined people, of whom there are few, can work this way.
So what needs to be done so that people fill out daily reports.
It was always interesting to me, under what conditions and why people make a certain choice: buy or not 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 human body.
My attention was attracted by one of the trends - the concept of "artificial intelligence". In my view, this is the highest degree of development of the system. There are several communicative levels of interaction between the system and the person:
1. Man - System. These are input tools, where a person is the initiator of actions (Word, Excel, Paint, payment terminals for purchases, parking, travel in public transport, etc.)
2. Man - System - Man. This is the construction of the interaction of people using the system (messengers, task managers, Yandex-taxi, Uber, etc.)
3. System - Man. This is the construction of such an interaction, where the system is the initiator of the dialogue (a great example is Google infrastructure. You buy plane tickets and on the day of departure you receive a reminder of the following content: “Today you take off at a certain time. The road to the airport from your geolocation will take so much time, it's time to move forward ”)
In order to eliminate the human factor, the solution to our problem was the creation of conditions where the system itself becomes the initiator of the dialogue activation.
An excellent solution was the bot in Telegram - ZERO
It’s not a person who needs to remember to fill out a report, but the system (ZERO) starts the dialogue on its own. It is a dialogue.
How does this happen?
At the end of the working day, a notification about a new message in the 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. Mechanics based purely psychological effect. Modern man perceives the messenger more personally. It’s one thing to follow the link and fill out some form, and quite another to answer a friend in the correspondence to simple questions, for example: “How are you?”, “How is your mood?”, “What did you do today?”, “How long have you did?
It took us about 1.5 months to run a full MVP. When we released the alpha version of ZERO, the hypothesis was confirmed. The average monthly occupancy rate grew to as much as 95% in the first month. And it very significantly resonated with the company's business processes.
Observations on the implementation of ZERO:
A high percentage of report filling is not just a demonstration of discipline in a company. ZERO made it possible to save impressive amounts. The math is very simple:
They reduced the time for filling in the reports - they saved about 100 thousand rubles a month.
Average picture:
At the end of the day, each employee fills out a progress report, spends an average of 15 minutes to remember, to force himself to sit down to fill out a form or table, as a rule, he cannot do it on the go. He sends the report to the manager, who weekly rakes up the reports and spends about 2 hours collecting and compiling summary information.
We count 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
We count money:
Money: 78.75 hours / month x 1500 r (the average contractor’s rate, including overhead) + 16 hours / month, x 2200 r (the average manager’s rate, including overhead) = 118 125 p + 35,200 r = 153 325 p each company loses month on filling out reports.
Multiply it by 12 months.
815 100 rubles
And if the state has a hundred people? And if a thousand? Try to make the calculation of such a company as "Rostelecom"? Or the calculation of companies specializing in sales, in whose states more than a hundred daily reporting sellers, over which are ROP-s? It turns out just huge money.
We have managed, as far as possible, to automate and humanize this business process, which is important.
At the moment, each employee of our agency spends 2-3 minutes daily to communicate with ZERO. This usually happens in between times, on the way home or before bedtime. As a result, the system automatically generates pivot tables for the company.
For me, saving time and money, though important, is not the main 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 at hand.
To be honest, now I can get information about the cost of the project for the entire reporting period, for the last week, for any chosen day, the effectiveness of loading each employee and a report on those who are sabotaging the system or actually are pechalka.
"
"
For us, the emotional state of each person in a team and the team’s emotional intelligence directly become ever more important. Our ZERO already at this stage of development allows me, as the owner, and all company executives to be connected with employees.
ZERO turned out 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 are not selling a bot, but we are actively developing. Ideas of the sea - from the universal humanization of the dialogue, for example, randomly building a conversation, analytics and forecasting of various performance indicators of employees and teams, integration with various services that are used in the work, creating the simplest corporate services for employees (intranet) and ending with the corporate loyalty system. In the future we plan to turn it into "Jarvis", a personal assistant for each participant of the company.
Do you know the cost of your company? Can you get access to the information on the work done for yesterday in 3 minutes? And in a week?
Four years ago, I opened my own company. At the start we had a small team. Obviously, the fewer people, the better they are able to work harmoniously, to be a single organism. By the end of the first year, we began to actively scale up and faced growth problems. At a certain point, we simply lost control over the processes within the company and began to make decisions erratically. There is such a term - “chaotic management”, it can be interpreted as follows: the head does not have the ability to predict risks, constantly extinguishes fires and does not understand why they occur. This approach has 2 ways of development:
1. Recognize that such is life and the business founder is assigned the role of a firefighter. In this case, your ceiling is a cool fireman, a fireman-superman.
')
2. Understand that fire extinguishing develops spiral, i.e. time goes by, tasks grow, resources decrease. In this case, your goal is to stretch and go beyond, stand over the problems and try to find system solutions.
I tend to hypothesize and test them. This approach was laid by teachers in the university where I studied nuclear physics. Actually, I apply the same approach to business. I find a problem, build a hypothesis about management decisions that can systematize processes, and check my assumptions. The hypothetical solution to the problem of "perpetual fire extinguishing" was the operational control of the company's cost in real time. To gain access to this and other important information, I urgently needed regular employee reports.
Chaos, which had to fight
Being engaged in the design of interfaces of systems, portals, mobile applications and other digital solutions, we work in a team of creative, slightly crazy people. The most organized and disciplined people among us are the developers, and all the rest — designers, screenwriters, copywriters, designers, managers, analysts, marketers, sales managers, accounts — are maliciously sabotaging the filling of daily reports. This deprives the manager of the opportunity to quickly assess the cost of the project at a real point in time and make important management decisions, which ultimately leads to loss of benefits.
So historically, for us the quality of the result of the work and getting into the business goals of the client 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.
Decision
We started with a primitive solution - we introduced the rule of filling in daily reports in Google-form. The solution is very simple, clear and not very effective. To be more precise, the average monthly occupancy rate for daily reports was less than 15%.
We tried the promotion, found out what did not like, changed the wording in Google-forms, conducted personal conversations with an explanation of how important it is, but, unfortunately, the human factor in this process is not eradicated.
* , , , – . , « – ». . To simplify the process of filling out reports, as well as to pump the ability of employees to concentrate, we have introduced the practice of performing tasks with a timer. Everything is simple - the performer includes a timer during the start of work on the task and records 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-system and disciplined people, of whom there are few, can work this way.
So what needs to be done so that people fill out daily reports.
Regularly, independently, quickly, simply, without unnecessary entreaties from the management?
It was always interesting to me, under what conditions and why people make a certain choice: buy or not 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 human body.
My attention was attracted by one of the trends - the concept of "artificial intelligence". In my view, this is the highest degree of development of the system. There are several communicative levels of interaction between the system and the person:
1. Man - System. These are input tools, where a person is the initiator of actions (Word, Excel, Paint, payment terminals for purchases, parking, travel in public transport, etc.)
2. Man - System - Man. This is the construction of the interaction of people using the system (messengers, task managers, Yandex-taxi, Uber, etc.)
3. System - Man. This is the construction of such an interaction, where the system is the initiator of the dialogue (a great example is Google infrastructure. You buy plane tickets and on the day of departure you receive a reminder of the following content: “Today you take off at a certain time. The road to the airport from your geolocation will take so much time, it's time to move forward ”)
In order to eliminate the human factor, the solution to our problem was the creation of conditions where the system itself becomes the initiator of the dialogue activation.
An excellent solution was the bot in Telegram - ZERO
It’s not a person who needs to remember to fill out a report, but the system (ZERO) starts the dialogue on its own. It is a dialogue.
How does this happen?
At the end of the working day, a notification about a new message in the 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. Mechanics based purely psychological effect. Modern man perceives the messenger more personally. It’s one thing to follow the link and fill out some form, and quite another to answer a friend in the correspondence to simple questions, for example: “How are you?”, “How is your mood?”, “What did you do today?”, “How long have you did?
It took us about 1.5 months to run a full MVP. When we released the alpha version of ZERO, the hypothesis was confirmed. The average monthly occupancy rate grew to as much as 95% in the first month. And it very significantly resonated with the company's business processes.
Observations on the implementation of ZERO:
A high percentage of report filling is not just a demonstration of discipline in a company. ZERO made it possible to save impressive amounts. The math is very simple:
They reduced the time for filling in the reports - they saved about 100 thousand rubles a month.
Average picture:
At the end of the day, each employee fills out a progress report, spends an average of 15 minutes to remember, to force himself to sit down to fill out a form or table, as a rule, he cannot do it on the go. He sends the report to the manager, who weekly rakes up the reports and spends about 2 hours collecting and compiling summary information.
We count 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
We count money:
Money: 78.75 hours / month x 1500 r (the average contractor’s rate, including overhead) + 16 hours / month, x 2200 r (the average manager’s rate, including overhead) = 118 125 p + 35,200 r = 153 325 p each company loses month on filling out reports.
153 325 rubles - the monthly amount of lost profits of the company (17 people).
Multiply it by 12 months.
815 100 rubles
so much for a year a company of 17 people is underpaid for a year due to filling in reports.
And if the state has a hundred people? And if a thousand? Try to make the calculation of such a company as "Rostelecom"? Or the calculation of companies specializing in sales, in whose states more than a hundred daily reporting sellers, over which are ROP-s? It turns out just huge money.
We have managed, as far as possible, to automate and humanize this business process, which is important.
At the moment, each employee of our agency spends 2-3 minutes daily to communicate with ZERO. This usually happens in between times, on the way home or before bedtime. As a result, the system automatically generates pivot tables for the company.
For me, saving time and money, though important, is not the main 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 at hand.
To be honest, now I can get information about the cost of the project for the entire reporting period, for the last week, for any chosen day, the effectiveness of loading each employee and a report on those who are sabotaging the system or actually are pechalka.
" "For us, the emotional state of each person in a team and the team’s emotional intelligence directly become ever more important. Our ZERO already at this stage of development allows me, as the owner, and all company executives to be connected with employees.
ZERO turned out 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 are not selling a bot, but we are actively developing. Ideas of the sea - from the universal humanization of the dialogue, for example, randomly building a conversation, analytics and forecasting of various performance indicators of employees and teams, integration with various services that are used in the work, creating the simplest corporate services for employees (intranet) and ending with the corporate loyalty system. In the future we plan to turn it into "Jarvis", a personal assistant for each participant of the company.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/454332/
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