Feedback Medical uses Zoho Flow to automate key workflows and eliminate manual work
Feedback Medical is a London-based company that develops technology for the medical imaging field. We spoke with Senior Systems Engineer Adam Kentrop about how Zoho Flow has helped Feedback Medical with their integration woes.
Here's our interview with Adam:
First off, can you tell us a bit about Feedback Medical?
Feedback Medical is a software company developing new technology to be used in the medical imaging field. Currently we have about 10-15 people and are growing, spread over two offices and some remote workers. Primarily, our customers are in the medical industry, both healthcare and research, but anyone who has use for medical-grade images is able to use our software, no matter where in the world they are.
What are the various applications you use?
Right now, we’re using Zoho Flow, Zoho Forms, Zoho Desk, and Zoho CRM. We’re looking at integrating Projects next though. Within Flow, we’re using a few custom functions to automatically adjust due dates and fill in Forms URLs, as well as create and amend tickets and tasks.
What were the core problems that needed to be solved through integration?
We have a number of scheduled maintenance tasks for both customer sites and our internal systems that were based off of a shared Google calendar. These tasks then needed to be brought into our new support system (Zoho Desk) to remove human error. The proof of concept worked so well, and apparently no good deed goes unpunished, so now I’m working on getting them all pulled in through Zoho Flow.
What were you looking for in a solution?
Something powerful in use, but easy to maintain or duplicate in the future. We needed a tool that could expand at the same rate as our use cases do, and Zoho Flow does exactly that.
How did you use Zoho Flow to solve your integration problem?
A lot of learning Deluge! Most of our tasks have strange date triggers and patterns, so there was the immediate problem that we couldn’t just use the straight date triggers—we needed a lot of date calculations, decisions, and manipulations just to get the tickets and tasks flowing at the right time.
Once that was done, we implemented some more custom functions to set up future dates and decision points within the tickets, and it was finished.
What improvements did you experience by using Zoho Flow?
Zoho Desk is still getting signed off internally, but just having the tickets come in at the right time during our process is helping hugely with that sign off, as it shows the product and our implementation is working exactly as our design. It also means I’m not having to keep one eye on Zoho and another on the calendar!
How did you learn about Zoho Flow and what do you love about it?
I come from a scripting and automation background, so I was investigating what automation I could do with Zoho. The fact that Zoho Flow can integrate with almost anything in Zoho One is a huge selling point for me, plus there’s a lot of default actions and those can be extended with custom functions, as well.
"The best part is how closely Zoho Flow integrates with the rest of Zoho One."
Adam KentropSenior Systems EngineerFeedback Medical
I have a long list of automations that need to be put into place, and that’s only going to get longer when we migrate other tools into Zoho One. My experience so far with Zoho Flow gives me confidence that this will go well.
What was your business process like before implementing Zoho Flow? How is it different now?
All manual processes. We would manually look at the calendar to see what’s up today. Manually create tickets. Manually attach PDFs. Manual everything.
"After implementing the processes in Zoho Flow, we have no more calendar checking, no more manually creating tickets, the URLs for Forms are automatically populated with ticket information, and the PDF files are automatically stored—it is basically night and day."
Adam KentropSenior Systems EngineerFeedback Medical
Would you recommend Zoho Flow?
I absolutely would. One thing I would say is that the Deluge part is semi-mandatory, as you’ll find that some of the edge cases won’t be covered by the pre-made functions. Especially if you're going to use the other Zoho apps, as you can do way more with Deluge and Zoho Flow than you can with just Zoho Flow.
How has your experience been with our customer support team?
I'm not sure if it’s the same team (most of our queries have been around Desk and CRM), but the support I’ve received (I say I, because it’s been me driving adoption!) has been amazing. Even at the point of converting from a CRM trial to a Zoho One account, they’ve been in touch along the way to make sure everything was going smoothly, to offer help where needed or advice to point me in the right direction, which is a very different experience to the last time I went through this sort of process! Being treated like this while only being part of a small business is amazing.
How would you sum up the impact Zoho Flow has had on your business?
Zoho Flow has been amazing for us. It’s helped identify and eliminate any human error we may have encountered by simplifying our processes for the team, and freed up big amounts of processing time for us to concentrate on bigger things—and that’s while it’s still a proof of concept for us! When it comes to production use, I’ve got a long list of things to put into Zoho Flow, which is only going to save us more processing time.