Free Yourself from Task Management Slavery with Task Automation
Being a product marketer means I’m twice a slave to managing tasks — from product and from marketing. So, I automated my workflow and gathered insights from my colleagues from other departments how their work transformed with task automation.
My name is Pavel and I’m a Product Marketer in Albato. In our company each department has its own set of tools and services, with marketing using ClickUp, development using YouTrack, customer support relying on Intercom, CRM tasks managed in HubSpot, and team communication streamlined with Slack, among others.
I spoke with colleagues from various departments and asked them to share their experiences in automating processes, the challenges they faced, and the pains they solved.
Albato is a global technology company founded in 2018, headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal
Let’s dive into the world of task automation and find out how it can help you overcome operational obstacles and increase efficiency.
Project Management Automation
Stack of services: YouTrack, HubSpot, Telegram, Slack
The main users of Albato are marketers, e-commerce agencies, and integrators. For Albato’s SaaS platforms, they offer iPaaS (integration platform as a service), integration templates, and project automation tools that are implemented into SaaS clients via API or iFrame, providing a native experience for end users with Albato Embedded.
Emin Samedov, Technical Project Manager at Albato Embedded
In our interactions with B2B clients, we communicate with various departments such as development, product, and technical support, using different chats and services. While I am familiar with all the current tasks and project-related questions, my colleagues and managers may not always have the complete picture. Going through chats or task trackers can take half a day just to understand the current situation.
We maintain the project timeline (milestones) in HubSpot, and the card is created even during the pre-sales stage, so it makes sense to continue recording information there. Here are the integrations I have set up:
- When a new task for an Embedded partner is added to YouTrack, a note is automatically created and attached to their card in HubSpot.
- Telegram + HubSpot. In the client’s development chat in Telegram, you only need to write a “command”, and the message is automatically transferred to Notes and attached to the HubSpot card.
- Slack + HubSpot. Support requests are captured in the partner’s card in HubSpot.
💡 Emin Samedov, Technical Project Manager: The goal was to automate communication with our partners for me, my managers, and all company employees. Now, they don’t have to search for project updates in Slack or Telegram. They can instantly see the latest tasks from YouTrack, important development questions, and support requests — everything is captured in the partner’s card in HubSpot.
Product Marketing Automation
Stack of services: YouTrack, Slack, ClickUp, Webflow, Google Sheets, HubSpot
At Albato, new integrations with services are released every day, along with additions of new triggers/actions and other updates in the product and platform interface. ClickUp is the main task management service used in marketing automation.
Pavel Stenyushin, PMM
Before releasing new integrations and other updates in the product, it’s important to start preparing supporting materials in advance: instructions, social media posts, email campaigns, creatives, etc., so that by the time the updates are released, users and support already have and delivered to users through marketing channels.
My task was to streamline the content release process. This would not have been possible without task automation.
That’s why we set up several integrations that automatically create new tasks in ClickUp and duplicate notifications in Slack when the task status changes to “testing” in different YouTrack projects.
In the marketing department, Albato also helps with operational tasks. We create various automations, as we mentioned in our previous article about building a chatbot in Telegram using OpenAI, with a database in Notion, and other scenarios.
Albato also assists in conducting webinars. We create a landing page on Webflow, then connect it to Google Sheets where customer data is stored, and within 2 minutes after registration, a template email is sent through HubSpot. We can also send email campaigns using the database from Google Sheets (the automation needs to be run in “Data Migration” mode), and easily gather reports on the number of participants, etc.
This is what the automation setup looks like:
Sales Tasks Automation
Stack of services: Stripe, Slack, Gmail, Trello, Webhook
Manuel Bernal, Head of Global Client Success
Almost 90% of all payments are processed through Stripe. For user convenience, many of them use autopay, which allows them to be assured that their subscription will automatically renew or additional transactions will be automatically added. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t always guarantee a successful transaction, for example, due to insufficient funds, etc.
In case of a subscription plan stop or transaction expiration, the user won’t be able to submit their data. This can have serious consequences for the business: data won’t be processed in a timely manner, important notifications won’t be sent, inventory won’t be updated, and leads may be lost. Although the account manager is not at fault here and it’s important to address and resolve the issue to ensure customer satisfaction.
To solve this problem, automation was created between Stripe and Slack. Now, when a payment fails in Stripe, Albato managers instantly receive a message in Slack notifying them that the customer’s subscription or transaction failed to auto-renew, and they can immediately contact the customer to resolve the issue, reactivate the subscription, or add the transactions.
Also in customer support work, technical support employees can create tickets for enhancements to triggers, actions, new partners, link errors, and other tasks. The technical support team used to communicate this information through various channels in Slack. However, account managers had to spend a lot of time tracking and informing customers, and some requests were not addressed, resulting in customers only finding out about closed tasks when they themselves contacted technical support.
To solve this problem, we automated the process using YouTrack, HubSpot, and Google Sheets.
Now, when a user needs to be notified about a closed task, the ticket from YouTrack is recorded in Google Sheets, and a task is created for the account manager in HubSpot.
Customer Support Automation
Stack of services: Intercom, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Slack, Webhook
When we ask our users why they choose Albato, they often mention the performance of our customer support team. And it’s no wonder — our specialists have extensive experience and effortlessly handle even the most complex integrations. However, in addition to dealing with user requests, our customer support team receives a lot of information that is also relevant to other departments, such as sales, product management, and development.
Diana Pogodina, Head of Support
Our goal is to create a system that allows each member of the support team to focus on 2–3 key services, while still being able to promptly respond to each user inquiry in Intercom and exchange information with other departments. For account managers, it’s important to have access to the history of user inquiries, tickets raised, and other important information. This information can also be useful for our colleagues in product and marketing for conducting customer development, collecting use cases, and more.
To centralize all user information and create customer journey automation, we decided to use HubSpot. We set up automation that transfers the chat history to HubSpot after a chat is completed.
When a chat with a customer in Intercom is closed, we receive the entire dialogue, customer’s contact information, locate their contact in HubSpot, create a note with the entire conversation history, and attach it to their CRM contact.
Now support doesn’t waste time transferring information, and colleagues can see the entire history.
Quickly involving other departments in customer communication
Sometimes, during customer interactions, technical support staff need to transfer the customer to another department, such as sales or accounting.
To transfer customer requests, support used to switch from Intercom to Slack, find the appropriate channel, and send a message to colleagues. Within a workday, one support staff member could forward around 20 such requests to different departments, which inevitably slowed down response time for new and current customers, and made support staff feel like mere “forwarding managers”.
That’s why we automated the process. Depending on the tag added by the support staff, a note is created in HubSpot and a notification is sent to Slack.
This allows us to address multiple issues at once: we don’t hinder the handling of customer inquiries and promptly close all tickets. Additionally, it saves time for our technical support staff, as they can resolve customer issues with just a tag, instead of multiple actions.
Wanna learn more about Customer Support Automation? Our Head of Support shares expert tips and real-life examples in our latest blog post. Check it out!
Development Tasks Automation
Slava S, Product Owner
We spend a lot of time working in YouTrack, and daily and weekly calls always involve discussions about “open” task management. So we are well aware of all the latest updates. To avoid having to inform everyone about new updates, and to make it easier for others to find information in YouTrack, we set up notifications in Slack for different teams, depending on the type of task and components involved. These notifications are sent to different Slack channels, such as Product News, SupportDEV, and Front-releases.
This way, the sales, support, and marketing teams can stay updated on new services, updates to current integrations, and other important product news.
We created this automation using code, as it only requires a few lines of code and a few minutes for a developer to set up in Albato. Albato provides tools such as “Regular Expressions,” “Inserting JS Code,” “Decoding JSON,” and others, which allow you to solve more complex tasks easily and quickly using automation in Albato.
We also recommend our AlbatoAI tool, which is capable of handling certain tasks using AI. For example, if you need to extract an email or other data from a text email, you don’t need to write code or regular expressions; just ask the AI to analyze the text and extract the desired variables.
⚡️ Want to try these solutions in real life?
Download/Watch our Task Automation Guide with detailed instructions here and set up the process with no-code.
Follow the links to “Solutions” — pre-configured automation tools that we have already set up for you in Albato. And try them during free-trial period in Albato, simply install the solutions and provide access to the accounts for the applications used in the automation.
See our solutions in action. Watch our video on YouTube now!
