Principles 👩🏫 Gulliver CRM

Every system, including automation, should only be implemented for one purpose: to increase company profits! But how do you know you're making money? Usually, confusing, old-fashioned reports that are created after the fact, losing 80% of their effectiveness, are used for this. Only large companies with a long planning horizon can afford such an approach. 📚

The industry we are trying to automate - educational services with group attendance - is extremely dynamic, seasonal, decisions are often made on the fly, and you need to quickly react to unforeseen circumstances. 🏄‍♀️

So how do you know you're making money? 🕵️‍♂️

In a simplified form, your profit is the difference between customer payments and employee salaries combined with rent. At the same time, the largest expenditure is employee salaries. But it's not that simple! 🤔

Group as the Center of the System 😉

In every business, we will surely find thousands of nuances, details, shades, and subtleties. The most important distinguishing feature of your processes is conducting classes in groups. 🙋‍♀️

Since classes are conducted in groups, we have determined that the metric with the maximum management benefit is the group's occupancy with clients, which should be monitored as quickly as possible. Why do we think so? 👨‍💻

To explain this, let's consider two cases.

In one scenario, you have 100 clients who are placed in 10 groups, while in the other, you also have 100 clients, but now 100 groups. You will likely notice that the second case is more than unprofitable for you, because instead of decent income, you get a decent loss. So what's the matter?

The problem lies in employee salaries. In the second case, employee payment will be 10 times higher, and this will eat up all your revenue, consequently, you will not make a profit.

How can this problem be solved? Let's make fewer groups, increase the number of people, but even here there are surprises. It is worth considering that very large groups cannot be made. Clients will be unhappy, employees will find it harder to conduct classes, the premises may be too small, the quality of service decreases, as well as many other inconveniences and problems. And here we get the main task: maintain the highest possible group occupancy that circumstances allow. 🦎

Thus, it is not the number of clients, their payments, average checks, etc. that are important for your success, but the proper management (organization) of groups. Unfortunately, existing CRM systems do not take this important nuance into account, which means they help with anything but making money in our specific business, and therefore do not meet the goals of implementation. 👩‍🔧

The importance of group occupancy as a metric formed the basis of our system's architecture. We have embodied not only the classic functionality of a CRM system, the core of which is the client themselves and their personal relationship with the business, but also created convenient group management with the ability to quickly and accessibly receive information about the state of affairs in the group, while reacting in a timely manner to unexpected circumstances. 🧯

The data itself is great, but equally important is its presentation to the user. We searched for this form and found it in the form of a journal. I hope you appreciate and like this thing as much as we do! Journal

The Layered Cake Principle

Sometimes you experience the most wonderful feelings from watching a movie or reading a book when, after a certain amount of time, you realize: "Wow, there's something else here, there's depth, there's a deeper meaning." You don't see it right away, you start to understand it over time. Special admiration appears when you realize that the author intentionally embedded this in the work. Why do masters do this, not put everything on the surface, not convey it in simple language?

One explanation I see for myself is this. If everything is shown simultaneously, it becomes very difficult for the viewer to understand, unclear, confusing, too voluminous. The author protects us from an excess of information, from the appearance of negative emotions that will spoil the impression of his works.

We tried to transfer this principle to our system, to the extent of our knowledge and talent. We tried to keep the simplest and most frequently used elements on the surface, and hide the rarely used and complex ones deep within the system. Creating such relationships in a strict system is a whole art, and I'm not sure we succeeded, but we at least tried... This allows users to learn the basic functionality as smoothly as possible, and learn something new about the system at a measured pace, without stress and negative emotional coloring.

Many tests have shown that no training is required to start working in our system; people figure it out themselves, intuitively learning like children learning to ride a bicycle. But there is depth in the system that opens up over time. Even after many months of use, users continue to discover new useful features, and this learning process is positive, which we are very happy about!

Comment on Everything

People are wonderful! One of the distinguishing features of the species "Homo sapiens" is its insatiable thirst for communication. We talk to everyone about everything. The evolutionary benefit of communication has been scientifically proven and substantiated many times. But for us, as creators of an automation system, communication is a mechanism for transferring information. There is one problem: during live communication, distortion, degradation of information, and its gradual loss occur. No one will fully remember what they were talking about a week ago. This is bad if the information that was transmitted is useful to the business.

One of the most important modern business problems is the slow movement of information within the company, the lack of delivery of information to the necessary people in the company, or its loss or degradation. The opposite problem is the delivery of excessive information to employees who should not possess this information.

We tried to solve this problem by creating comments. This is a rather powerful tool for preserving, circulating, and delivering information within the company. But you might say that comments are available in many places, and you would be right. The difference of our tool is that in our system you can comment on everything... Literally all entities present on the page can be commented on. Why is this necessary? It is very important to understand what you are commenting on: a price, a lesson, a client, or a payment. This preserves a large amount of non-verbal information. Chats and Comments

Standardization or Customization

Automation systems can be divided into two large groups. The first group has a rigid standardized entity structure in which it is impossible to add or remove functions (Bitrix24) and customizable ones where you can create functions and entities yourself (Fibery). Flexible customizable systems allow adaptation to changing circumstances. For systems with a rigid structure, this is very problematic, if not impossible.

We, of course, measure by ourselves. And we always want to change and improve something in a rigidly structured system, and at the same time, systems where you have to configure everything yourself are also frightening. We are somewhere in the middle, taking into account the experience of business specifics, if I can put it that way.

Our system has a rigid entity framework in the form of clients and groups. And at the same time, there is an extremely powerful tool for customization, configuration, and automation, which we called lists.

If you are missing something in the system, you can create your own tool based on lists, automate it, and save it for the future as a template. Lists

Save and Share Information

In the process of work, every company accumulates positive experience that is worth saving and disseminating within the company among employees. Comments are a great tool, but they are short, and what if I want to write corporate rules, an instruction with images, or a whole project? The ideal automation solution that solves this problem has already been created, since the task in this case does not have business specifics. We didn't reinvent the wheel and just wrote our own version of a corporate wiki.

Corporate Wiki is a tool that can significantly improve collaboration within the company. It allows employees to quickly and easily share information, ideas, and knowledge, which can significantly increase work efficiency and reduce task completion time.

A corporate wiki can also be used to create a knowledge base that will be useful not only for current employees but also for new employees who can quickly familiarize themselves with the company's processes and projects. In addition, a corporate wiki can help improve communication within the company by providing employees with the ability to communicate and collaborate on projects in real-time. This can help improve the quality of work and reduce task completion time, which is critically important for a company's competitiveness.

Have Fun 🎉😁😆

You can't work all the time, it's depressing and productivity drops. We noticed that our application generates not only practical benefits but also emotions. We wanted to support this phenomenon and color the emotions in a more positive light. Many will find this insignificant, but we like it, we added emojis out of the box. This is a convenient way to add emotional coloring 😁😂😆😭 to text messages and media posts. They can help clarify or enhance the tone of a message and make it more engaging for colleagues. In addition, emojis can be helpful for simplifying communication in different languages, as they are often used to convey concepts and ideas that can be difficult to express with words alone.

Emojis can also be used to create unique identities and improve the recognition of a 🎓 group, 🗽 list, or 🙏 project, as well as in comments. To insert them, simply press the key combination (⊞ Win + .).