How Fellow brews growth by automating their business-critical processes
Scalable customer onboarding
Fellow uses automation to run their entire wholesale onboarding flow. Now, they only spend 8-10 hours per week manually onboarding new accounts, which is about 75% more efficient than doing it all by hand.
Better customer (and employee) experience
By automating internal processes, it's easier for the Fellow team to adjust customers' orders. That means customers get the right products, and employees don't have to stress about last-minute changes.
Growth powered by automation
Since 2019, the Fellow team has expanded from 20 to 80 people, with plans to grow another 50% in 2022. And automation powers Fellow's entire growth strategy.
About Fellow
- Company size: 80+
- Industry: Fellow is a wholesale coffee business that also designs luxury coffee products for your home.
- Location: San Francisco, CA
Automation makes customer onboarding easier—accelerating company growth
Challenge
Fellow struggled to manage the manual workflows for their customer onboarding. They didn't have the capacity to keep onboarding new wholesale customers—which limited the company's growth.
Solution
Fellow created a Zap that connected their order form to their CRM. Then, they built a Zap that sent new customers relevant documentation while also creating matching wholesale accounts in Shopify. This automatically helped them keep track of orders, documents, and contact info for customers.
Results
Thanks to automation, Fellow now only spends 8-10 hours a week onboarding, which is a 75% reduction in the time the team spent managing the wholesale business. This means they can grow their customer base without growing their to-do list.
Zapier instantly updates orders—so Fellow can do more, faster
Challenge
Fellow didn't have an easy way of tracking order changes, which led to incorrect shipments and unhappy customers.
Solution
Fellow uses Webhooks by Zapier to easily modify eCommerce orders. With Zapier, Fellow can put orders on hold, flag any orders, or update an order as soon as a customer makes a change.
Results
By automatically tracking order changes, Fellow provides a better customer experience. The support team can respond to changes without any delay.
Consolidated data enables better inventory management
Challenge
With data spread across multiple tools and teams, inventory management was time-consuming and complicated. The Fellow team needed a simpler way to monitor inventory.
Solution
Fellow created a Zap that posts a message to Slack if a product's inventory falls below a certain level. They also created a Zap that allows them to check inventory numbers with just a few keystrokes. With a quick Slack command, a Zap sends a message with details of the product's inventory level in real time.
Results
Now, it's much easier for the Fellow team to stay on top of their inventory, avoid stock-outs, and prevent overordering. Plus, these Zaps save them time—giving them valuable information on demand.
"I've been at Fellow for six months, but I've been using Zapier for six years. It's been so cool to bring automation into this role where it has a much bigger impact than just, say, sending myself a reminder before a meeting. Those reminders are still really helpful for me, but we're basically building the backbone of our entire customer experience with Zapier, and it's exciting to see how well it's scaled."
Stephen Davis Hernandez
eCommerce Product Manager at Fellow
