Case study
How Chatbot Maker runs 100% of its operation in Jestor
Chatbot Maker uses Jestor to centralize all their business processes and have a precise, real-time view of the company’s functioning. Everything from product development to recruiting to sales now has a single source of up-to-date data which is flexible enough to meet all their needs.
2,500,000+
Users
2.5 Billion
Messages sent
450+
Clients
About Chatbot Maker
Chatbot Maker is a startup that enables businesses to automate their communication with customers using intelligent, customizable bots.
Their AI assistant, named Suri, learns from the data of each client, and becomes more customized as it’s used. This makes state-of-the-art language models accessible for SMBs and large corporations in Brazil alike.
When even good processes can break
No matter how optimized a process is, it can go to the verge of breaking if care isn’t taken. Here are the main culprits:
- The process only happens if the whole team executes it in sync. Using spreadsheets and text editors like Google Docs to run processes means that the steps to be followed live only in the team member’s heads, and not on the actual software. This is fertile ground for accidental inconsistencies, which make the whole process less efficient.
- Even the best processes need to be managed. Not being able to monitor progress and productivity of processes is like trying to walk blindfolded: you have a sense of where you’re headed, but how do you know you’re actually in the right direction? More traditional, open-ended software like G Suiteleave COOs in the dark by not offering this level of control.
Chatbot Maker knew it needed to defend against these two threats, and knew Jestor was the only platform flexible enough to do this for all their operations across the board.
“Adopting Jestor had a clear impact in our bottom-line as a company, since we saved so much time with manual processes by having everything in one place. I don’t know of any other tool that can support so many sides of our operations at once and adapt to new processes so quickly”
Thiago Amarante
CEO at Chatbot Maker
Making the most out of a powerful tool
Since they started using the platform, the Chatbot Maker team has been extremely proactive in bringing more and more of their processes into Jestor. Their investment has been paying off, and goes to show how Jestor really allows for quickly building scalable operations.
Protecting their processes required them to be running in an integrated way, and to be transparent for managers to verify progress. Chatbot Maker started implementing Jestor for a few of its processes, and went on to progressively bring more of them into the platform.
This is precisely because in Jestor there are no barriers between data from different teams: they can be connected and automated, allowing enough customization to actually specify several different processes. In the end, they managed to build a centralized data center with Jestor: a primary source of information for all the most important processes in the company.
Before Fragmented view of growth Information about sales, KPIs and customer implementations was scattered across spreadsheets. Tracking the growth of the company had to be done manually across multiple sources. | After Everything in one place Not only is all that info now stored in Jestor; it is also linked together using Jestor Connected Tables. This allows Chatbot Maker to have a reliable picture of the company’s situation in all areas automatically. |
Scattered recruitment process The recruitment team had to keep track of job descriptions, prospective candidates and advertising separately. Avoiding duplicate e-mails, for instance, was a challenge. | Consolidated recruitment pipeline Now all this information is inside Jestor, and is part of a pipeline involving specifying open positions, using Jestor Tricks to send advertising e-mails systematically and Kanban Views for evaluating candidates up until the actual hire. |
Gap between operations and finance New sales or churns did not automatically reach the finance team, and needed to be communicated manually. | Operational and administrative teams connected in real-time In Jestor, no-code automations notify the financial team as soon as balance changes occur. This leads to a much more transparent management of finance, and freed the team from having to bridge the gap manually. |
TLDR: Chatbot Maker went from having its Growth, Recruitment and Finance operations scattered across spreadsheets and docs to having them integrated and automated within Jestor.
“Jestor gave us a much better managerial view of our operations in several areas, including Sales, Growth and Recruitment. What we built on the platform specifically reflects how we like to run processes, and lets us keep track of how they’re going and modify them whenever necessary”
Marlos Távora
COO at Chatbot Maker
Aggregating points of view to build a better product
At Chatbot Maker, any team member can give suggestions on how to improve the product. They use Jestor to receive and organize these suggestions, and hold weekly meetings to discuss them.
Every table in Jestor can be visualized as a Flow (Kanban). This makes for a visually appealing way to coordinate each step of the execution of these suggestions, from the initial submission to evaluation to actual implementation. Jestor Tricks allow customized actions to be executed when the phase changes, such as creating a new record in another table, sending a custom e-mail or even a WhatsApp message.
Freedom to suggest improvement is also a strong part of our culture at Jestor, and so it’s no coincidence that we also use our platform for this!
Seeing growth as it happens
Chatbot Maker did away with having to look at several e-mails, spreadsheets and docs to drive and monitor the company’s growth. Now they handle customer acquisition strategies like Referrals, as well as the sales themselves, using Jestor.
Each customer’s subscription type (Starter, Basic, Smart and Pro)and how much they pay are all stored in Jestor. This can be easily integrated with outside products like Power BI (for analytics) or Chatbot Maker’s own product (for determining the level of access of each customer). But using Jestor’s low-code features, they can continuously compute and keep track of their KPIs.
In a market as competitive as chatbot making, it’s also essential to know the landscape very well. Because of this, Chatbot Maker also uses Jestor to do Market Research. As new information about possible opportunities appear, their team inputs this in a Jestor table. This allows them to find the best directions for improving their platform, to set growth directions and goals, and not be caught by surprise when new relevant players emerge.
Besides having their data centralized and connected, running 100% of their operations in Jestor meant they could manage everyday tasks more efficiently. That’s because of Jestor Tasks, which can be sent out to team members and can be tied to particular entries in tables, so that tasks are always in context, which saves loads of unnecessary emails and messages just to explain what needs to be done.
Ensuring customer success
Another consequence of this competitiveness is that, once you acquire clients, you need to work hard to keep them, and Chatbot Maker knows this very well. They have a pipeline in Jestor of implementations for customers, which allows them to directly manage the situation of each service, as well as to register the time it took to complete each step. All of this is configured without code and saved for future reference on the team’s performance.
The overall process is visualized as a Kanban. They then have a separate table for keeping track of the time taken on each phase. Every time a phase change occurs, a Jestor Trick automatically creates a new record with the time spent on that phase. This can then both be used in Jestor Dashboards for quick visualization, and also exported to data lakes.
But even fighting hard to keep clients, churns unfortunately also happen. They can be for reasons over which Chatbot Maker has no control, but may also be due to a flaw in the product or customer engagement. How do you know which is the case? That’s why they also have a Flow for registering and analyzing churns, so that relevant improvements in the platform and engagement strategies can be implemented.
A customized and streamlined way of finding talent
Like any high-growth startup, Chatbot Maker lives and breathes by the talent of its team members. The process of finding new ones used to run on Google Sheets, Docs and Forms. Then they realized their recruitment was falling prey to the 2 culprits of process breaking: unstructured software and lack of monitoring.
Now the whole operation runs on Jestor. They register open positions on a Jestor table, and have an associated Jestor Formthat automatically updates according to the positions available. Submissions then fall into a customized recruitment pipeline (that is, a Jestor Table with a Flow view), in which the time spent on each step is also registered using Jestor Triggers. Attached to this is also a table with a Talent Pool, where they maintain candidates who didn’t make it through the first time, but would make good collaborators in the future. This way, they don’t have to worry about losing information and CVs among several e-mails and Google Drive folders.
Expenses and property tracked with robustness
Chatbot Maker needed the information about new sales and expenses to be accessible by their financial team, even when it came from other teams. They solved this problem with Jestor by using Jestor Tricks to automate forwarding this data to finance, replacing hundreds of manual e-mail writing and spreadsheet editing.
Another optimization they achieved was with tracking property lended to team members. With everyone working from home, Chatbot Maker offered its employees ergonomic chairs, computers, mugs and other items, which gave rise to needing to monitor which item is where.
Much like our clients in Proptech and Foodtech, they soon discovered that Jestor solves inventory management problems very well, and managed to implement the functionalities they needed for this quickly and cheaply. All it takes is a Jestor Table to keep track of items, their locations and quantities, and another to register the sending of items to team members. As Jestor allows for unlimited users, any person in the team can easily register the movement of items (or rather, only the people whose Jestor Permissioning profile allows).Jestor Tricks are then set to update quantities automatically as new transactions are input to the system.