The Challenge

Before using Lark, Surgo Media juggled multiple collaboration platforms to manage different aspects of their business. However, as their client base quickly expanded, their existing collaboration tools were not scaling well to adapt to their speed of growth.

• Scattered client information: They would use different communication platforms to cater to each client's preferred mode of contact. Not only was it difficult to juggle various clients on different apps, but they also could not efficiently search across all the apps for specific information

• No bird's eye view on business performance: Surgo couldn't track real-time key metrics across multiple essential areas, such as revenue, profitability, deliverable statuses, hiring, and marketing campaigns, which led to many hours wasted on manual work and scattered spreadsheets

• Inefficient workflows: Surgo spent lots of time manually sharing data with customers, updating project statuses, and writing up tedious, repetitive reminder messages, which resulted in inefficient collaboration

• Slow onboarding: Each new client or employee had to create several new accounts, such as Loom, Slack, and Google Docs, to complete the onboarding process and wasted time trying to find materials and tutorials

  
  

"I tried integrating everything with Zapier—but it wasn’t efficient at all." says Alexei, "Since everything was siloed within separate apps, we couldn't have a comprehensive view of everything going on with clients and overall the business performance."

The Solution

With Lark, the Surgo team is able to consolidate internal chats and communication with clients onto Lark, automate client management workflows, create visualized dashboards for marketing campaign performance, all to lift client partnerships and grow their business efficiently.

Everyone. And everything. On Lark.

All communication with every client and team member is now happening Lark through chat groups, email, and video meetings. "Before, we had to use Google Meet, Zoom, and more platforms to meet with clients." says Alexei, "Now, our customers are all on Lark. I keep track of everything without having important information fall through the cracks."

Plus, when having everyone on one platform, they don't need to worry about any geographic or language barriers. "We work with a lot of remote teams, and a bunch are using multiple languages for work, " says Alexei, "so Lark's translation features help a lot with our communication and we don't need to use an external tool to manually translate."

The team at Surgo Media is able to make use of real-time video meeting translation subtitles, and all of their chat messages can be automatically translated for easy communication, too.

Real-time data on business and clients.

"The Lark feature that especially transformed Surgo is Lark Base dashboards: being able to pull statistics from everything across their business helps us save up to 4 hours a day."

With Lark Base, Surgo Media has a bird's eye view on their business performance by tracking all business metrics, like revenue, sales, profitability, budgeting, and costs in one dashboard. They customize their dashboards to include visualized charts, such as bar graphs and pie charts, so they can quickly derive business strategies from real-time data.

When using Lark Base to run marketing project management for clients, the team can import project details quickly into Lark Base, then create different views, such as Gantt, Kanban, Calendar, and Gallery, to easily see project progress, track upcoming tasks, and create social media calendars.

When it comes to handling client information, all of the data is also one dashboard so that they can easily filter or group client details within seconds. And for each client, they have a designated project plan table that automatically tracks their workloads and project statuses to collaborate faster.

No more grunt work. Hello automated solutions.

Surgo Media has built several automated workflows to increase their efficiency in client collaboration. For client projects, Lark will automatically send the team to Surgo Media a message about the updated project status, once a client has completed a task and marked it in the project tracker. When a prospect is interested in chatting with Surgo Media and schedules a time to call on Lark Scheduler, a Lark bot will immediately inform the Surgo team about the new meeting and add it to the Surgo team's calendar.

Their team also uses Lark Task Lists so they prioritize to-do's for each week. They assign each task to a team member and attach a deadline; then, Lark automatically sends them reminders before the due date to keep them on track to hit key milestones. "We now save a lot of time with automation because we don't waste time on back-and-forth updates anymore," says Alexei, "and our team gains around two hours of our time per day back on project management. Our processes have become 30% faster."