How automation decreased Lucidchart's QA checks by 30%

Collaboration across teams ought to be business as usual. But if you've ever worked at a company that's undergone rapid growth, you know communication can break down almost as quickly as new employees are hired. Tasks get lost in the shuffle, teams lose track of projects, and productivity grinds down.

But collaboration doesn't have to take a hit; just look at flowchart maker and online diagram software Lucidchart. This year alone, the Lucidchart team has grown 49%—and there's still over two months before year's end. "As a company grows, cross-team collaboration [becomes] more and more important," Micaela Wright, Associate Digital Marketing Manager, explains.

For Lucidchart, collaboration is more than just a way to work together—it's built into their product. From flowcharts to network diagrams to ERDs (entity relationship diagrams), Lucidchart makes it easy for their clients to collaborate with each other. With group chat and comments, viewable revision history, and more, Lucidchart knows teams that collaborate have a better chance of succeeding.

Taking that principle to heart, Lucidchart worked to maintain cross-team communication and keep different departments collaborating. To help them in that mission, they use Shared Folders in app automation tool Zapier. Shared Folders, a Zapier for Teams feature, gives multiple users access to a team's Zaps—a bridge between two or more apps. Using their new secret weapon, Lucidchart's quality assurance (QA) checks decreased by 30% and they optimized the flow of information between the marketing and sales teams.

With a Zapier team account, Micaela and Lucidchart built multiple Zaps and shared them across departments. Essential to Micaela's work on the marketing team are two specific Zaps: One syncs leads with the sales ops team and the other simplifies email QA.

Automatically pull data and create leads in Salesforce

Marketing and sales, the age old foes. Which team claims responsibility for increased sign-ups, revenue, conversions? Hard to say (it's marketing) but in truth, it's the combined efforts of both departments that creates an environment for a company to succeed. When these two departments align, leads become conversions and trials become sign-ups.

Part of Lucidchart's lead generation comes from their email service provider of choice, Marketo. But due to Lucidchart's specific business case, the out-of-the-box syncs provided by Marketo didn't provide the connections they needed. Micaela turned to Zapier for a solution.

"Zapier allows us to send leads from Marketo to Salesforce via webhooks with extreme reliability and ease," Micaela explains.

Key to this Zap is Webhooks by Zapier. Webhooks carry information from one source to another and are extremely powerful once you know how to use them.

Lucidchart uses webhooks to pull new lead data from Marketo: Name, email, phone number, etc.—all the data a sales team would need to follow-up—and creates a new lead in Salesforce, ready for the sales team to take over.

"What I love about this Zap in particular is that it's so flexible: We can add and remove information from the sync whenever we want without having to go through a sales op person," Micaela says. "We can also replay Zaps, so if we ever reach our Salesforce API limit, we can go through and easily sync the leads we may have missed."

Webhooks work with more applications than just Marketo so if you want to try creating leads the way Lucidchart does, give this a try:

Create support tickets with Webhooks instantly

Lucidchart doesn't just create new leads from Marketo; they also build customer support tickets in support platform Zendesk. If Lucidchart receives a sales inquiry or a request for more information instead of a lead, the support team constructed a Zap to quickly create new tickets in Zendesk with webhooks.

Zapier builds the ticket with the name, email, and question or comments from Marketo. With this Zap, Lucidchart's support team doesn't have to rely on another employee monitoring Marketo for these specific requests. Instead, they just check their Zendesk queue and work as usual.

Notify your team of errors in Slack

Since the flow of leads from Marketo to Salesforce is crucial to the sales and marketing teams, this Zap gets a lot of attention. Multiple people on the team are keen on getting notifications about new leads and their updates.

To make sure the entire team if something goes sideways, Micaela turned to Zapier's Shared Folders and team chat application, Slack. With a simple shared Zap, Micaela makes sure that any issues that might pop up are sent to the entire team (even if the person responsible for the Zap was on vacation).

If you have any business-critical Zaps that you like to keep an eye on, this Zap automates that process so a Slack notification will keep you informed.

Build a QA database with Parserr and Google Sheets

The Lucidchart marketing team runs multiple email campaigns at any given moment and the data in those campaigns—what were the open and click-through rates?—shapes and guides future efforts.

Shared Folders are an excellent fit with any kind of campaign: The campaign owner can jump into your team's Shared Folder and create the Zaps they need to run and monitor the campaign. You can even create a template that each campaign owner copies at the start for ease-of-use.The marketing team had a simple goal: track campaign progress over time.

Lucidchart turned to email parsing software Parserr and Google Sheets. "By connecting our Parserr and Google Sheets accounts with Zapier, we're able to build really robust QA dashboards for things like email metrics—opens, clicks—as well as flow volume," Micaela says.

"This helps us identify breaks much quicker than we used to—and as a manager, gives me great peace of mind!"

This Parserr - Google Sheets Zap is a real timesaver, too. It's reduced the amount of QA checks Micaela and her team have to perform by 30%.

Automation certainly plays a role in making the teams at Lucidchart more efficient during periods of rapid growth and sharing Zaps helps foster a collaborative environment. But departments coming together for the same mission makes all the difference.

"Lucidchart is growing incredibly fast and making sure the company is all going in the same direction with the same aggressive goals is something our leadership has done a great job orchestrating," Micaela says. "As roles switch and the team grows, making sure our Zaps are up-to-date and working is [a responsibility] shared by more people and sharing Zaps allows us to do that."

All images courtesy of Lucidchart.