The Startflows story

Updated May 31, 2023

Startflows story

Why build Startflows?

The way people interact with service providers (such as in finance, hr, accounting, legal, medical) at the start of a process still hasn’t changed a lot. It may involve meetings, phone calls, or when there’s a digital option, filling in a PDF form, with more calls and messaging along the way to deal with questions.

Startflows is dedicated to connecting 1000s of service providers with its data collection solution to streamline how they start their work.

What is Startflows?

Startflows is a solution for messy or unmanaged data collection practices in business and professional services. It streamlines data collection and turns it into a distinct and managed phase of an overall process. This brings structure, clarity and simplicity to data collection, saving time and improving the quality of the service delivered.

The solution has five main parts:

  • Data collection web apps that run under your own website and domain/url
  • Admin portal with workflow and collaboration tools for managing the data collection process
  • Templated micro web apps for easy presentation and sharing with related parties
  • Dedicated infrastructure to build on with ease
  • Integrations for sending collected data to the main work applications used to deliver a service or process.

Together, these parts enable a method of data collection that can enhance any business' existing service provision, so they can deliver like the best in their industry without taking on a complex and expensive software project.

What problems does Startflows solve?

Problem 1

Starting a business process is not treated as a discrete phase. While CRMs or similar work applications are great for managing your regular service delivery, it can take days to collect the data required to actually get started.

Solution

Startflows is a simple but powerful way to reshape your service delivery. It gives operators the tools to make onboarding actually enhance the overall process rather than stand in its way. In short, it extracts the “startflow” from your process and optimises it.

Anti-patterns

  • Collecting the information required to start a process is disjointed or ‘chatty’.
  • Onboarding data is strewn across various interim sources—like Word Docs, Google Sheets, Excel files or notes—before it’s entered into regular work applications like a CRM.
  • Important data is often missing and needs to be chased up.

Problem 2

Work applications are built for agents to deliver work—they’re not designed for the intricacies of starting work. It’s expensive and tricky to transition customers from your branded digital marketing channels to your regular service delivery channels.

Solution

Startflows turns the gap between marketing your service and delivering it to your advantage. It makes the experience of starting simple and clear. It delights your customers, puts them at ease and builds trust from their very first interaction. (Your agents won’t mind that it eases the burden of managing a clunky manual process!)

Anti-patterns

  • There’s a lag between a customer clicking “Start now”, “Get started” or similar on your website, and something actually happening on the backend.
  • Separate teams are needed to collect onboarding data and to deliver the service.
  • You have a beautiful website or landing page to collect leads, but lack digital tools to help them as a customer.

How can businesses get access to Startflows? 😄

Startflows will build collect app starter template in a few key industries and offer those directly to relevant customers. Startflows will consult for customers in those and other industries to build out custom collect apps. Startflows intends to release a kit of higher level components, available as an SDK to third party developers, to help support independent collect app development.

Startflows

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