I automated the hell out of my boring back-office with n8n

Organizations don’t succeed because of the little things they do well; but they often fail if they don’t do such things well.. These are the minor hygiene tasks that though doing them well doesn’t necessarily do any good, but not doing them comes with significant repercussions; sometimes existential. Try skipping washing your hands for a week. You’d probably land in the hospital.

When the Bible was talking about the little foxes that spoiled the vine, trust me, it was about these tiny annoying stuff.

This becomes a catch-22 for companies, especially medium to large ones. How could they focus on what’s important without getting lost in tactical processes that don’t guarantee success even if we do them well?

Automation to the rescue!

I remember sending an email to my team a couple of years ago where I said that tactical work done with lack of automation can bring out the worst in the best of the best.

Speaking about myself, everybody knows I have the sh*ttiest, most incredibly stupid memory in the world. Half of the time when I wake up in the morning, I can’t remember my own name. I literally have a document by my bed that reminds me my name is Adedeji 🥹.

However, one of the ways I’ve solved my problem is that I figured out that I could use a digital crutch  to remind me of all my pending tasks. For this, Todoist has been pretty incredible.

This has helped me extremely as I use it to set reminders to check on my siblings, check on some elders who haven’t yet kicked the bucket, reach out to those seniors to me and even reach out to some customers and some of my employees. I know fully well that If I don’t set these reminders, I won’t be able to do these things. 

Basically, without some form of automation, I’d have been messed up.

I also noticed when I started Lendsqr that there are some incredibly great guys working with me, yet I get so upset with them because packets are getting dropped. The funniest thing is that they weren’t dropping the large, extremely important packets, but the much smaller ones like sending reports and checking system performance.  

That was when I told myself, you know what, any organization that doesn’t have a way of automating its tactical stuff will never go anywhere because they would keep dropping the “hygiene” tasks that are not so large but are highly important.

This brought me back to when I was at FCMB (I’ve worked in a million banks) and we implemented this back office automation application called Integrify. I worked on this with some amazing people and I’m always excited when I remember the bank is still using that till today. That was one of the best projects I ever worked on.

I tried to do this with every single bank or institution I ever worked in since that time like UBA and Fidelity Bank, but the cost  was always high, and no one really cared.

But I understood what it meant to be efficient, and so when I started Lendsqr, and saw the same problem, where the best people were getting dinged by customers and sometimes, me for dropping some packets, it just occurred to me that we couldn’t and wouldn’t win if there were no automations, especially for the tactical tasks.

So the question was, how would we do this?

There were a few things we worked on, such as running jobs in the database to send emails and tons of Metabase results, but that wasn’t enough for what I wanted to achieve.

We knew something had to be done.

We kept experimenting until one of us, Frogman, found n8n, an open source automation software, which we deployed and that has been one of the best things we’ve ever done.

n8n is like Zapier, though not as fancy and popular. It’s an open source software that helps you automate tasks, with plugins for almost every kind of task you wish to carry out. Fortunately, some smarty pant drank my Koolaid and joined my team so I nailed the automation initiative to her cross, to bear.

We then went on a tear and automated as many things that could move from the HR process, to Sales, Product Support, and Finance processes – It’s absolutely amazing. 

N8n was so much fun that when Bland AI was launched, we used n8n to automate our introductory calls to our customers. We also used it to remind some of the  loan defaulters at Irorun. Those usually swear for us and then never paid. Nigerian borrowers are something else 😪 

We also use it for Sales to notify my team instantly whenever a non-Nigerian lender signs so we can reach out immediately and engage on WhatsApp.

System Performance

One of the worst things that could happen to a company is having things breaking in the background and no one is aware of this. Not every customer would escalate to the team. You might just come back to realize you’ve been using your own hand to chase customers away.

At Lendsqr, we’ve had our fair share of this, finding out certain things are breaking and sending our customers away without our knowledge. While there are reports that can be sent constantly by team members, there’s just so much the team can report on. This is where n8n comes in again. We have automations that notify us when customers are complaining, when certain system metrics are lower than they should be. We automatically test our systems and report specifically on each of them to prevent stories that touch the heart.

These are just some of the examples of the use cases we have set up.

In summary, n8n is one of the best things we’ve ever done as a company and I’m looking to keep finding better ways to improve organization efficiency and provide the best experience for our customers.