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Automating Your Onboarding Process: A Beginner's Guide
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In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to automate your onboarding process using Google Forms, Google Drive, and Gmail.
By doing this, you'll be able to make the client onboarding process super smooth, minimize manual work, and make sure your clients are impressed.
Essentially how it works is as soon as you close a deal, you fill out a simple onboarding Google Form. This triggers a personalized welcome email, creates an external Google Drive folder, and invites the client to Slack.
To make all of this happen, we're using the services of Make. Lets jump in!
Create a Google Form for your onboarding process and add the necessary questions to the form. The details here will depend on your process, and you can get as complex as you like.
For this tutorial, we'll keep things simple with a basic example:
Create a new folder in your Google Drive to store client's folders. We’ve simply titled ours “Clients”
Click on the “Create a new scenario” button in Make to begin automating.
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A trigger in Make is a change or event that causes a rule or target to be executed. In this scenario, we will use the ‘Watch Events’ to trigger our scenario.
From there you’ll be able to connect the form you made earlier, and thats all for this module, easy enough, right?
This is so we can assess where the data will be coming in. Simply fill out the form you made earlier with fake names. Once completed, right click on the “Google Forms” Module and click on “Run this module only.”
After it runs successfully, you can click on the number in the top right, and view the data. Under “Operation” you can click on the + signs to undo the bundles and see all the data from your test response.
Add the Google Drive module to your scenario and select “Create a folder.”
Here should see the folder you created earlier in the tutorial. Connect this, then press ok and move onto the next module. Do you feel like a tech wiz yet?
This time you’re going to select “Get a share link” This module is to input the email of your client so that this Google Drive is shared with them. If you only use Google Drive folders for internal purposes, you can feel free to skip this step.
Select “Folder” and fill out the “Folder ID” as the “Folder ID” and fill the “Email Address” as the actual value in your Google Forms data. To do this you will need to scroll down, and drop down until you find the “Client Email” value:
The last step here is to add the Gmail module and select “Send an email.”
Simply add the clients email address from your form data. Set the output as a personalized email to the client with the onboarding information and the share link to your Slack and/or any other necessary places.
We'd highly recommend a “First Name” field on your form, as this would send as “Hey John Smith,” 😂
Oh, and one last thing. Don’t forget to go to the bottom left corner of the scenario and flip the switch to ‘On’ You’ll be able to set the form on a timer to run at a schedule such as every day, every hour, etc.
You should note that you WILL need to use make credits on here, which aren’t free for long. You can get around this by getting a add-on for Google Forms to create a custom Webhook on that form. We’ll have another tutorial on this soon!
There you have it! Now you know how you can automate the process of onboarding and stop manually creating folders and sending manual invites/messages. But at the same time, things feel super personal and your new client will be extremely impressed.