Have you ever measured how much time do you spend on meeting-related tasks?
Internal company meetings themselves take as much as 15% of the organisation’s time. Add there those set up with your clients, job interviews or calls with partners and the whole flow of preparation, and you’ll get amazed.
The chances are that changing the way your company works doesn’t depend on you and would be a long, demanding process. Yet, there are some tactics that you can implement individually and observe quick wins measured in time dedicated to meeting-related tasks.
There are various ways to work smarter, not harder. Making use of integrations is definitely one of them. Read further to get various ideas on how integrations can smarten up your meeting workflow.
How do integrations work?
A lot of services gather data that can be useful in other tools that you use. In the majority of cases, they don’t cooperate directly. That is where tools like Zapier enter the scene.
Zapier creates a way for those services to exchange data and perform given actions triggered by some factors of your choice. Those integrations are called Zaps. For example, you can send out a Slack notification when your meeting gets scheduled.
You can connect together over 2000 apps and services dedicated to different areas. That lets you adjust the workflow to meet your specific needs.
Gains of automating your workflow
Time-saving
Integrations are made to free up the time you spend on tedious, manual, low-effort tasks. When you use integrations, tasks like copying and pasting the data from one tool to another get done in seconds – and disappear from your to-do list.
Think about situations like sending a template-based email with some attachments, creating tasks in Asana or the necessity of checking up manually some changes in your meetings. Why don’t you get integrations that can do it for you and let you know when they’ve finished?
Efficient
Performing tasks that could be automated can decrease our overall work performance and satisfaction. Focus on tasks that need your skills and experience, and think about integrations to take care of the boring part.
Human error-prone
When you set up your integration and test it out, you can let it work and just focus on other challenges. The integration won’t forget about some necessary steps, take a day off or mess up in another way.
Of course, it can happen that when creating a Zap, you won’t predict each possible result. That is why you should be alert to any unwanted behaviour. You can start out with simple integrations and then, step by step, extend the tasks you delegate them.
Free or low-cost
When you use built-in integrations or tools like Zapier, you can set up your flow without splashing out. No need to reach out to developers for help: setting them up is easy and intuitive.
To make the most of the integrations in Harmonizely, opt for the premium plan. Before you make up your mind, you can check out the 14-day free trial period.
Integrations in meeting scheduling
Built-in Harmonizely integrations
Integrations lie in the very heart of Harmonizely, connecting with a variety of calendars to streamline the process of scheduling meetings. It is also integrated directly with services like Zoom or Whereby to create a link for your online meeting.
Further possibilities with Zapier
If the above-mentioned solution isn’t enough for you, we also got you covered. Integrations hide much more potential. Let’s explore the possibilities available with Zapier integrations.
A new meeting gets scheduled
Get a Slack message about a new meeting
As soon as your clients book a meeting, Harmonizely sends you an email notification. Sometimes it might not be enough, though. If you use Slack, you and your team can receive a message anytime a meeting is scheduled.
It can also appear as a new card in your Trello board, a task in Asana, or any similar action in your project management system. That is how you can avoid manual update both of your team and your tools.
Avoid the copy-pasting
Whether you add some private notes about your meeting straight in Harmonizely or gather this information in a Google spreadsheet, make sure those spaces are updated. Instead of manually copying and pasting the content, create Zapier integrations to transfer it between the tools.
Harmonizely allows you to set up a custom set of questions to be answered when scheduling a meeting. This data will be easier to process when you import it into a spreadsheet or another database. Again, let Zapier work for you.
A meeting gets cancelled
Ping the cancelled meetings
If you swear more by Slack than email, you’ll be happy to receive notifications about cancelled meetings on this channel. By connecting Harmonizely to Slack via Zapier, you can be up to date with your meetings.
Send an email to the invitees
When your invitees cancel the meeting, think about emailing them to ask about the reasons for cancellation. In that way, you can gather important insights into your clients’ behaviour.
To use this flow, you should connect Harmonizely with Mailchimp or other email marketing systems via Zapier.
Managing the meeting
Get the meeting flow handy
If you have prepared various meeting flows, you create an integration flow to keep them handy. For example, you can set up an automated task in Asana that, based on the meeting type chosen in Harmonizely, will link to a different meeting flow. That is how you will avoid looking for the documents 5 minutes before the meeting.
Share the materials with your team
Share your internal meeting documents with your team. Prepare them in advance, and set up a Zap to notify your team on Slack with a reminder. In this way, you will increase the chance that they will look into the agenda or read the most important information.
Send the minutes to your team
If you hold a meeting with your client, it’s a good practice to share the notes with your team. You can set up a Zap to make sure your documents appear in the place they should.
For example, you can create a separate card in Trello with your notes after the meeting. By setting up an integration between Trello and Slack, you can ping your team to read it. Also, you can transfer them to your CRM, together with meeting data from Harmonizely.
Updating the database
Harmonizely stores various data about your meetings: date, type of meeting, and your private notes. Why don’t you share them with other systems you use?
Specify tags on your mailing lists
Based on your criteria, you can set up various tags on your mailing list. Use Zapier to connect Harmonizely with Mailchimp or another email system.
Send the meeting data to a CRM
Let’s say you gather your customer data in Salesforce. By connecting Harmonizely to that tool, you can keep the meeting information together with other important details. That allows you to check, for example, how many meetings do you need before closing the deal.
By completing your CRM data with information from Harmonizely, you get a more detailed picture. When you analyse it, you can gain more in-depth insights that have a heavy impact on the way you do business.
Final thoughts
Integrations are a powerful way to leverage your productivity and accomplish more meaningful tasks. Harmonizely allows you to connect with numerous apps and services via Zapier. By coupling the systems you use, you can improve the effectiveness of your tools.
After all, technology is there to help us work smarter. Make the most out of it with the Premium plan of Harmonizely.