Our Approach to Creating Successful Memberships

As you’re weighing your options for workflow automation, you’re likely wondering what the working relationship between XRay and your organization would be like. 

XRay memberships involve close collaboration between our teams as we analyze your business processes, help you identify opportunities for workflow automation, and build automations to create more time for mindful work. 

In this post, we’ll tell you about our commitment to our members and what you can do to ensure that your membership is successful. We’ll handle the automations and the data; we just need transparency, access, and clear communication in return. 

XRay Handles Data and Automation

Our team will be responsible for building all of your automated workflows and for managing the associated data. 

Your XRay techs will design, construct, document, and manage all of your automated workflows throughout your XRay membership. They’ll coordinate closely with your team to make sure the automations suit your business goals, so you won’t have to spend any time building automations yourself. 

Once an automation is complete, our team will send you all the documentation you need to run the automations yourselves. 

Our team will also establish systems designed to collect, house, and visualize key data generated by your automations. Each time an automated workflow runs, we’ll collect data in an Airtable database associated with that specific run. 

Mutual Expectations: Transparency, Access, and Communication

Transparency: Help us Understand Your Business

Each business is unique, and automations work best when they support your company’s specific needs rather than just performing generic actions. 

To that end, we ask all of our members to be as transparent as possible about how your business operates and what you hope to achieve with your automated workflows. The more we know about your business processes, the more we can do to calibrate each automation to fit your purposes.

It’s also important for us to understand the people behind the business. Knowing your story and your personal pain points helps us to understand the bigger picture of your automation journey, and lets us build automations that create more time for the work and activities you’d rather be doing. 

As a member, we’ll offer a similar level of transparency to you, explaining exactly what we’re doing and why. We’ll also provide frank feedback throughout your projects, even if we think things need to go in a different direction. 

Our goal will always be to build the automations that best fit your business and create more mindful time for your team, and mutual transparency will help us to achieve that goal.

Access: Building on Your Accounts

At XRay, we don’t build member automations on a test server or on our own accounts locked away from view until they’re “ready”. We build everything on our members’ accounts, so you’ll have access to the automations as soon as they’re built. 

Building in your accounts also makes for a very smooth handoff once each automation is complete, as there are no files to transfer. Instead, we’ll just provide you with documentation that describes what each automation is for and how to use them. 

To build in your automation accounts, all we need is access to them. We’ll ask you to share your account credentials through a secure app like Lastpass, which will allow us to log in to your accounts without ever seeing your actual password. 

Typically, we’ll just need access to any of the automation platforms you’ll be using - Zapier, Integromat, Parabola, etc. We may also ask you to connect some of your additional counts, like Google Drive or Hubspot, to your automation platforms. When and if you need to do this, we can give you step-by-step instructions to make it easy. 

Creating your automated workflows in your company’s software accounts is the fastest and most practical way to proceed, so we encourage all of our members to share any necessary credentials as soon as the membership starts to kick things off quickly. 

Communication: Staying in Touch to Keep Things Moving

To maintain momentum during your membership, we’ll establish a regular communication cadence. Each week, we’ll have a 1-hour meeting on Zoom to share our progress, address any outstanding questions or concerns, and plan our next steps. 

In addition to our scheduled Zoom meetings, we’ll set up a shared Slack channel for impromptu communication throughout the week. Your XRay team will regularly check on this channel for any new messages, and we’ll ask that you do the same.

We’ll use the Slack channel for urgent or time-sensitive issues that can’t wait for the weekly meeting, or to address issues that are preventing our team from moving forward. We’ll do our best to respond quickly to any message that you send in Slack, and we’ll ask that you make a similar effort as well.

In many cases, our tech team will hit a crossroads and will need you to make a decision before proceeding. Ultimately, we build automations that support your workflows and your business; while our team can rely on their judgment and experience in most cases, there will be situations where only you can make the call for your company, and we’ll let you know when those arise. 

Maintaining regular communication lets us build faster and keeps everyone apprised of recent progress and future plans, so we make sure to stay in touch with all of our members through Zoom and Slack. 

Building a Partnership

At XRay, we prefer memberships over project-based contracts because we believe it allows us to build a stronger partnership with each of the organizations we work with. Through mutual transparency, access, and communication, we can build automated workflows that completely transform our members’ businesses over time, saving hours of work and creating more consistent and reliable output. 

If you’d like to learn more about how we build automations at XRay, check out our blog or our YouTube channel. You can also follow XRay on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.