“I was planning to learn more technical skills, and airSlate seemed to be the coolest project since it was an ambitious product spearheading the automation revolution,” Oleh recalls. 

After airSlate’s launch, the Customer Support Team aimed to transfer its internal processes to the platform. airSlate has helped Support maintain different kinds of records by making them easily accessible for everyday use and reporting purposes.

“airSlate is a dynamic tool constantly expanding its capabilities, thus motivating users to acquire new skills.”

— Oleh Pidfihurnyi,
airSlate customer support specialist

How the Support Team uses airSlate

The Customer Support Team’s most popular airSlate Flow is used for data-keeping and reporting on demo meetings with customers. “During the demo meetings, we show customers how to use airSlate, where to find onboarding materials to start building Flows, and integrate the product into their business ecosystems,” Oleh explains. 

After Support specialists fill out a form, automatic updates are posted in the company’s Slack channel, synced with the data-keeping and reporting Flow. Any airSlate employee can find information about a specific customer use case in a dedicated channel and download it as a PDF file. The information gathered during demo meetings allows airSlate’s project owners, developers, and marketers to learn more about customers and what they want to achieve with automation. 

The Support Team also uses legal Flows and Flows for escalation in cases when they need to transfer a customer to the Sales Team. This usually happens when a customer is interested in purchasing a large volume of licenses or needs a tailored offer to suit their needs. “We have designed a Flow where we put together all the necessary information about a customer,” says Oleh. “The Flow transfers the information to the Sales team and automatically archives all the data so anyone can easily find it later.”

Becoming a citizen developer with airSlate

People with little to no technical background want to know if airSlate is easy to use.  “Mastering airSlate is not difficult. We tell everyone who comes to us and expresses a desire to become a citizen developer that it is possible! You don’t need to spend several years doing it, but it will take you longer than a week,” says Oleh. 

Oleh believes that it takes several months to become an expert in airSlate automation, due to the comprehensive nature of the platform. To understand the principles of how airSlate Bots operate and how to make disparate building blocks work together, you have to spend some time practicing creating a Flow.

“airSlate automation is like Legos, and Bots are like building blocks.”

– Oleh Pidfihurnyi,
airSlate customer support specialist

“All the pieces are there, assembled, and each piece performs one or more simple functions,” says Oleh. “The trick is to find the one you need and to learn what it does. Then you can think of how to combine these blocks to build your custom automation flow!”

Saving time with airSlate automation

It is impossible to generalize how much time is needed to create a Flow. A simple Flow where you only need to add fields and send a document for completion, and eSigning, can take two or three hours to create. A Flow that operates on 20 documents with different field settings, access limitations for recipients, and running up to 20 bots could take you a month.

“The outcome and level of sophistication largely depend on your imagination. If you desire to simplify everything to save time in the long run, you should be prepared to spend some time dedicated to Flows,” says Oleh.

“airSlate can free up your whole day. Some Flows take time to set up, but I don’t remember ever having to go back to them. They become entirely autonomous.”

– Oleh Pidfihurnyi,
airSlate customer support specialist

airSlate’s integration with Salesforce is one of the best examples of how seamlessly automation can be a part of everyday workflows. airSlate for Salesforce is a powerful integration that sends documents, exports data, and uploads and manages it the way users want.

“If you are willing to spend enough time on automation once, you will stop wasting time once and for all,” says Oleh. “It is much better to spend 8 hours automating something that takes you 8 minutes than to spend 8 minutes on the same thing over and over again.”

Automation is the future

Oleh believes that automation software like airSlate is the future. For people who want to connect their lives and careers with automation, airSlate offers a great experience. “With airSlate, you can streamline any process to the point where you stop thinking about it. Machines should work for us, and airSlate is like a machine in a way,” says Oleh. “All you need to do is teach it to do what you need, and at some point, this machine will start working for you.”

The post Automating customer support operations with Oleh from airSlate appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

airSlate’s legal automation pioneer

Misha’s position at airSlate is quite unique — he’s the first Legal Ops & Automation Manager in the company.

“I build Flows, automate processes, and manage documents that are not only limited to the Legal department. The purpose of this role is to transfer as many legal processes as possible to the airSlate platform to automate them,” says Misha.

It was Roman Perchyts, Head of Legal at airSlate, who came up with the idea of automating legal processes. Misha was a believer and became an enthusiastic implementer of the project!

Despite having had automated Flows in place for a long time, the Legal team wasn’t using airSlate to its full capacity. It was evident that a number of processes could be further streamlined for lawyers, raising their efficiency and productivity while minimizing the neverending paperwork.

“I started implementing automation gradually, so now we have fully-automated Flows for the Legal team to use daily,” Misha says. Today, the list of the most popular workflows includes the Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement Flow, the Business Associate Agreement Flow, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Flow, and others. “These Flows improve our time management and help us deal with incoming requests.”

According to Misha, most requests come from the Sales department: “When a salesperson brings in a potential customer, the Legal team’s duty is to examine all the risks and approve or reject a contract before signing it. Plus, we work with the Customer Success team that manages relationships with our existing enterprise and SMB customers. We are also involved in vendor management processes and more.”

The most frequently implemented use case: The Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement Flow

In his new position, Misha started by automating document workflows that the Legal department deals with on a daily basis. Most of these documents are non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) signed with customers, external stakeholders, and employees. 

“The MNDA Flow was the first Flow I designed,” Misha recalls.”There are 26 possible scenarios of what could happen within the MNDA Flow depending on the type of signatories. I needed to set up different conditions for it to run smoothly across all scenarios.”

Automating this Flow helped streamline the process for airSlate and made it more intuitive for customers who needed to countersign documents. Today, when the Sales team needs to sign an NDA, they no longer have to: 

• spend hours on end exchanging emails with customers;
• explain how to eSign documents using signNow;
• contact the Legal team if a third party wants to make changes to the initial document.

“I’d say that this Flow saves up to 70% of the time that the Legal team used to spend on signing Mutual Non-disclosure Agreements. And not only the Legal team, it’s a timesaver for the Sales team, and other teams having negotiations with external stakeholders.”

— Misha Kuzemskyi,
Legal Ops & Automation Manager at airSlate

The Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement Flow visualization

Results achieved with airSlate

“After I built my first MNDA Flow, the procedure for processing a document manually for this type of agreement vanished,” Misha says. “Now, we simply get notifications for two cases: when we need to sign the MNDA and/or when a client offers some adjustments to a document.” 

Before this Flow, it took the Legal team more than five emails to finalize the process, not to mention the time needed for approvals and getting responses from third parties. 

Mundane tasks, such as organizing the incoming documents, renaming them, saving them, and so on have now been eliminated. Since all of the documents are now processed, named, and saved automatically, the entire NDA documentation Flow can be handled by a single person.

“Automation saves so much time, that’s why I’m always keeping an eye out for anything else that can be automated.”

— Misha Kuzemskyi,
Legal Ops & Automation Manager at airSlate

No-code automation transforms the Legal industry

Misha believes that the principles of no-code automation overlap with the Legal industry — structure and logic. That’s why they work perfectly together. 

“Back in the day, when I worked at my law firm, I realized that the industry and people working there were suffering from disorganization,” says Misha. “This may sound cliche, but this is how legal organizations and the labor market operate.”

“I was always drawn to things that could help me organize my working process and keep me focused on things that really matter. Automation features everything I need to take this routine off the backs of those processing legal documents.”

— Misha Kuzemskyi,
Legal Ops & Automation Manager at airSlate

‘Automate or you’ll lose to your competition’

The Legal industry is moving forward, so business efficiency largely depends on the pace at which customers are served.

“If you don’t keep up with the market conditions, you’ll lose to your competition,” Misha believes.  

Imagine setting up logic for all your documents to go back and forth among your employees and even to your external customers without any action from your side. Hundreds of hours can be saved over the long term by taking manual work out of this process and streamlining it.

“Based on my experience, everything that involves signing, filing requests, and filling out forms can be easily automated.”

— Misha Kuzemskyi,
Legal Ops & Automation Manager at airSlate

Automation can even help contract negotiations by taking the manual email correspondence out of the process. It’s the perfect remedy for eliminating the most common bottlenecks in the Legal industry and clearing out the paperwork that just sits there and blocks Legal departments from closing cases or finalizing deals. Misha firmly believes that Operations Managers across different industries will only win by implementing document workflow automation into their day-to-day tasks.

Watch the video interview with Misha below:

The post Automating legal operations with Misha from airSlate appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

Maria Makhurenko joined airSlate as an office administrator in January 2020 right before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world as we knew it. Before airSlate, Maria had a long career as a flight attendant and was on her way to become a flight instructor and tutor other aspiring pilots.

“It happened that my friend recommended this company to me when I was thinking of trying something new,” Maria says. “I had this dream that I needed to try something else, so here I am at airSlate!”

Before airSlate, she didn’t know the first thing about workflow automation. Two and a half years later, Maria has grown to become an in-house automation guru – she’s mastered the art of Flow creation and is juggling 50 forms for different purposes.

We sat down with Maria to learn about how she’s using document workflow automation in her day-to-day work.

An office manager with no office

A month and a half after Maria started at airSlate, COVID-19 struck, and everyone switched to remote work.

“airSlate saved me because I learned how to make Flows and automate forms and questionnaires. That was my main responsibility during the pandemic since we had to monitor employee status, vaccinate, and do all sorts of things to maintain the WFH (work from home) transition.“

– Maria Makhurenko, airSlate office administrator

The remote work model generates the need to collect a lot of information from employees. At first, Maria and her colleagues wanted to use Google Forms but then they thought it’d be more convenient to collect information with airSlate instead. 

“The first time I tried using it was a total failure (laughs),” says Maria. “The good thing is that I remembered that we had all of these step-by-step video guides, so I glued myself to YouTube for a while. This is how I learned to create forms and understood how it all works.”

The first use case: The airSlate Delivery Flow

The first use case where Maria started using airSlate (and “failed”) was when an internal airSlate delivery campaign was launched during quarantine. The idea was to kick off the monthly swag delivery to airSlate employees to cheer them up. 

“At that time, I set up the Bot in a way that it uploaded information about all 900 employees into a single line of a spreadsheet, which, as you can guess, was a very long line,” Maria laughs. “From that moment on, I learned how to set up Bots correctly.”

The airSlate Delivery Flow visualization

Everyone’s favorite use case: The Food Order Flow

As an office-admin, perhaps the most stressful yet impactful work Maria has on her plate is ensuring the smooth delivery of food to feed over 900 employees. The company offers a lengthy menu for employees to choose from.

“When I started at the company, we used to order a lot of food, which we eventually had to donate to the shelter nearby at the end of the day,” Maria recalls. “Now, using the Food Order form, our people can choose what kind of food they want for the next week.” 

The Food Order Flow is extremely convenient because it eliminates the need to guesstimate the amount of food to order. People get to choose whatever they want to eat, and there aren’t so many leftovers at the end of the day. As a result, using airSlate’s Food Order Flow made the process much easier and also budget friendly!

The airSlate Food Order Flow visualization

Estimated time to set up the Flow:

• 30 min to set up a simple version of the Flow
• 2 hours to set up a complex version of the Flow

Maria primarily works with simple Flows like the airSlate Delivery or Food Order: “It takes a maximum of half an hour to set those up. A complex one can take up to about 2 hours.”

On the way to automation success

Not only does Maria operate the two Flows above, but she’s now also become a document workflow automation enthusiast who often helps employees from other departments set up task-specific Flows.

“I use at least five forms consistently and usually create a new form once a month. In general, I have more than 50 forms for different occasions. I also get asked by our accountants to create Flows for them once in a while.”

– Maria Makhurenko, airSlate office administrator

Within just two short years, Maria has evolved into a Citizen Developer, a non-technical user who’s skilled in automating workflows and building simple applications for a specific purpose.

People coming from a non-technical background want to know if airSlate is easy to use for someone with less tech knowledge. The beauty of airSlate is that it has been purpose-built for non-technical users so it is easy to get up and running. 

“Getting started with airSlate is quite easy,” Maria says. “It all depends on how you explain it. There were times when I showed my colleagues how I design a Flow, and that was all it took for them to start building their own Flows from scratch. It comes down to staying hungry for something new and probably the dopamine kick you get when everything starts working the way it should. That’s how you get hooked on automation. After seven years in aviation, I never used Google Docs or Google Forms, I was like a “blank slate” in the technical aspect, and airSlate filled this gap quite easily.”

“I was like a “blank slate” in the technical aspect, and airSlate filled this gap quite easily.”

– Maria Makhurenko, airSlate office administrator

The key to leveraging automation: “Don’t be afraid, just go for it!”

Maria believes that leveraging automation has had a positive impact on her performance. airSlate is a relatively new product, so there’s always room for discovery and experimentation. And yet, there’s something that keeps HR and/or office administration from implementing automation at scale. 

Here’s what Maria has to say to her colleagues who are still reluctant to automate their day-to-day workflows:

“I think that people are afraid of trying something new,” Maria says. “But hey, it played out well for me — from leaving aviation to making my own Flows and becoming, as you say, a Citizen Developer. So my piece of advice is – don’t be afraid, just go for it!”

Watch the video interview with Maria below:

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