"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." -Albert Einstein

At Rype, we are big believers in "doing things that don't scale", especially in the early phases.

But there comes a point where doing the same things over and over again has a diminishing return in your business. For months, we had hesitations of automating processes in our business, assuming it would reduce the human personalization that our customers loved.

As we continued to grow our members, we faced some major growing pains (and still do), and it became increasingly difficult to provide the same quality of care and personalization to each customer.

We knew this was an issue that every great company must have been through, so we began to study some of the best companies in the world that were known for their customer service. Then we stumbled upon this...

[lead dropcap="no"]“Systemization isn’t trying to replace human touch points, but it's used to qualify, highlight, or progress someone to the right points where human touch is essential.” [/lead]

This was a real eye-opener for us.

A company is nothing without its people behind it.

But what we've learned is: by spending our time trying to put a human touch in every step of our process, we were sacrificing the quality of service we could be offering when it mattered most.

This is why we've made the decision to design strategic systems in our business that saves us over 100+ hours/month, so we can double down on what drives results.

Today, I'm going to share with you some of the most impactful systems we have integrated into Rype, and how it saved our company. I hope it serves you.

Marketing

The days of "build it and they will come" are long gone. You can have the best product or service in the world, but if no one lives to hear about it, they'll never get to experience it.The greatest companies in the world have learned to not only design marketing into their product, but into their story. Here are some processes we use to simplify our marketing efforts.

1. Blogging

The story that we share on this blog is our biggest driver of growth today and for the foreseeable future.People often ask how we're able to push out consistent blog posts every week, and there's no sexy answer to this. It's the systems we created to make sure we have new content ideas that we've pre-brainstormed to provide value for our audience.To brainstorm, organize, and manage our content calendar, we use a free tool called Trello, and categorize our articles into four categories: Ideas, To-do, To be published, and Published.

2. Email

Email can be the biggest timesucker for any individual or organization. We've created multiple free resources like our Learn a Language Challenge and newsletters for new visitors to our website, because we know that most people aren't ready to try Rype the first time around.They want to learn more about who we are, what our values are, and how we're different.Whenever someone joins our newsletter, we have an automated stream of emails, including a welcome email that gets sent as soon as they join our list.

This is an example of what our Learn a Language Challenge email stream looks like on the backend through Mailchimp.

3. SEO

Millions of people around the world search online to find ways to learn a language. From our end, search traffic is one of the highest converting channels we have, since searchers looking for something specific are usually ready to buy.On our Wordpress blog, we use a tool called SEO Smart Links which automatically creates backlinks within our blog for keywords that we are targeting. This way, we don't have to go back to all of our previous posts to link each keyword (this alone saves us over a hundred hours).

Customer Experience

Systemizing our customer experience without jeopardizing our human touch was one of the most difficult obstacles we had to overcome. While we don't have millions of users, our customers invest in our brand expecting a premium level of customer support. Here's what we systemized without sacrificing the human touch.

4. Knowledge base/FAQ

As we continued to grow our students, we noticed that the same questions were being asked over and over again. This is when we decided to invest in our Knowledge base. We realized that for many of the questions that our students were asking, they just wanted a direct answer that solves their issues.Our goal was to craft an in-depth Knowledge base that our students can always refer to, where each of the questions were answered as if a human was on the other end answering it. We love getting on a 1-on-1 call with customers to walk them through anything they need, and having a scalable Knowledge base allows us to spend more time helping customers who need more personalized help.*We use Help Scout for our customer support and knowledge base.

5. Customer Follow-up

When customers reach out to us via our Contact page, receiving an automated confirmation email reassures them that the message went through, and that a real human will reach out as soon as possible.

We even do this with our personal follow-ups a few days after customers have started their free trial. Yes, these are systemized to send at a certain timeframe, but anyone that responds to these emails will be handled by one of our team members.

6. Payment Failures

Chasing after customers due to failed payments is not the best way to be spending our time as a company, nor is it the most exciting conversations to have. We'd rather focus on getting to know them.This is why we use Stunning to send follow-up emails with a one-click procedure for any of our customers to update their billing, and emails that get sent out if there's a likelihood a card will be declined, so there's no interruption of their experience.

Hiring

Rype is an invite-only community, and it's one of the ways we're a differentiating solution. But it also means that we have to set up a rigorous and thorough hiring process to only let the best ones in.

7. Coach Recruitment

Everyday we have 25-50+ new applicants that want to coach with us. With a lean team, it's nearly impossible to vet through each candidate one by one before our live 1-on-1 call.With Zapier, we're able to filter through the most important criterias that will help us retain the best teachers out of the applicant pool.

8. Coach Onboarding/Training

Lastly, with new teachers joining our community every week, we've developed a Coach Academy that every coach must go through which explains how to get set up, what equipment is our minimum standard, and best practices they can model after.This allows us to focus strictly on learning more about the teacher's qualifications and how they align with our brand, rather than answering their questions about how coaching at Rype works.

What systems do you have in place?

Whether you're a business owner or an individual looking to save more time, having systems built into your life is critical. It saves you from doing repetitive tasks over and over again that don't drive results, and allows you to focus on the things that matter.Having systems saved our business, and I hope we sparked some ideas that could benefit you.