Automate Your Business Success: Streamline Workflows with Knack + Zapier

Efficiency and productivity are essential to healthy business growth, and to keeping your team focused on high-value activities that deliver the biggest results to your bottom line. But without taking the right steps to optimize workflows and simplify data management, it’s easier said than done. How can you be certain everyone is working with the best, most up-to-date information? And that they can access it whenever and wherever it’s needed?

By leveraging Zapier, a versatile automation tool, and Knack’s API, you can easily move data between your Knack no-code app and other core business apps. It simplifies and automates critical workflows, saving time so you can focus on business growth and better serving your customers. By connecting Knack to other key cloud-based platforms in your tech stack, you can take full advantage of the real-time data in your Knack app and make it your single source of truth and the central hub of your business.

It’s easy to build “Zaps”, which are workflow automations that don’t require any code, to eliminate repetitive manual business processes, keep records updated, and trigger important notifications. Here are the top categories of low-code apps that Knack users are connecting via Zapier to strengthen their business operation:

1. Marketing Automation

Connecting marketing tools like Mailchimp to your Knack app through Zapier  makes it easy to efficiently manage email subscriber data. Joining the two apps lets you align your marketing initiatives with important audiences and customer preferences to drive more engagement. For example, you can create a Zap to automate the process of adding new subscribers to your Knack database, segment audiences based on predefined criteria and even update contact information as needed.

This integration will buy back time you’d otherwise spend manually managing subscriber details and tags to segment your list, and lets you invest it in crafting customized marketing campaigns and creating assets to build engagement, trust, and stronger relationships. 

Keeping all relevant information unified also enables deeper analysis because you’re working with more comprehensive data and insights about the performance of various marketing activities. You can use the insights and intelligence to make data-driven decisions that improve follow up and outreach with more personalized and targeted campaigns to increase ROI and brand loyalty.

2. CRM and Sales

When you’re ready to expand your custom CRM beyond your Knack app, you can use Zapier to connect to popular customer relationship management and sales platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce.

Creating Zaps to automate the movement of data between your Knack app and these other platforms makes it easy to manage customer data, track metrics and keep your sales team up to date on new leads and all customer interactions that occur. Now, your sales reps can focus on building relationships and taking action on new opportunities rather than spending limited time and resources on manual data entry or trying to find customer information by searching across multiple platforms.

3. Project Management

Project management can make or break an organization. If tasks fall through the cracks or key milestones are at risk without enough advance heads-up to get the activities back on track, strategic goals and, ultimately, business growth and customer satisfaction are on the line.

To stay on top of your projects, connect project management platforms like Trello and Asana to your Knack database app. The integration keeps data seamlessly flowing between the project management platform and Knack so all stakeholders can access relevant, up-to-date information, monitor progress, assign action items, and stay informed about project updates. It keeps everyone on the same page and helps minimize miscommunications that can delay project completion.

4. Finance and Accounting

Finance and accounting activities are at the heart of every business, but managing the workflows and ensuring that all necessary information is recorded and processed accurately and in a timely manner can involve a lot of manual checks and balances that strain resources.

Integrating financial apps like QuickBooks, Xero or FreshBooks with Knack via Zapier can significantly simplify data management and reporting. Leveraging the new connection and building Zaps, you can automate time-consuming tasks like invoicing, expense tracking and financial reporting, and keep it consolidated and easily accessible to make better informed decisions. Access to the connected data makes it easy to track and analyze costs and spending to identify opportunities for improvement.

Rather than spend your time on manual data entry and reconciliation, you gain back valuable time to apply to strategic financial planning and analysis.

5. E-commerce

Are you juggling all the activities that come with managing an e-commerce business? If so, automating tasks is especially important before you become buried in everything from order processing to inventory management.

When you connect your Knack database to e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, you can efficiently manage up-to-date customer data while also automating many regular tasks. You can even sync inventory levels between the apps to better monitor stock availability and optimize purchasing decisions. The automation minimizes errors, saves time and creates a more frictionless shopping experience for your customers.

6. Help Desk and Support

Responsive customer support is critical to every business. Plus, it’s smart business. It’s been proven time and again that it’s far less expensive to retain a customer than acquire a new one. And when you grow a business by delivering an outstanding customer experience, the organic word-of-mouth referrals from loyal customers are priceless.

The first step is putting processes in place to ensure you build long-lasting relationships. To help with this, integrate helpdesk platforms like Zendesk or Freshdesk with your Knack app.

By automating the flow of information between your helpdesk platform and Knack, you can be more responsive to customer issues. When a customer support ticket is created, the details can be automatically added to the Knack database customer record, providing a single-source view for customer support, sales and other team members to easily monitor the status and ensure a speedy resolution.

The full power of integrating third-party services via Zapier with your Knack app comes when you strategically evaluate and optimize your workflows to leverage automations and minimize manual repetitive tasks.

To gain the greatest benefit, take action using the following steps:

1. Identify the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks. These tasks can become so ingrained in work processes that it’s easy to overlook important opportunities to save time and resources. Look for tasks that involve manual data entry or require coordination between multiple platforms. These are prime candidates for automation via Zapier.
2. Conduct periodic reviews to refine workflows. As your business grows, its needs, processes and requirements evolve. Activities that were once optimized need a fresh evaluation. New platforms in your tech stack should be assessed to identify valuable points of connection that will improve efficiency and productivity. Committing to continuously refine processes ensures you return the greatest ROI to your business.
3. Ensure data accuracy across platforms. The goal of integrating other services with your Knack app is to create a seamless data flow across platforms. Success takes consistency and accuracy. Establish data validation rules, standard naming conventions and formats to ensure you maintain data integrity as information moves between platforms. The upfront investment will help avoid discrepancies that could negatively impact decision making.

Using Zapier to integrate your business apps with Knack delivers a powerful solution for automating tasks, streamlining processes and improving efficiency across your operations. By creating Zaps to seamlessly move information, business owners and operations leaders can build a more cohesive and data-driven ecosystem to optimize decision making.

Learn more about Knack integrations today.