Helping Hand Labour, a Melbourne-based labour-hire company, needed a flexible tool to improve staff onboarding and weekly job scheduling.
Operating most of the business on Whatsapp, Helping Hand Labour uses Mercu’s chat-based enablement platform to automate highly flexible job scheduling, streamline their onboarding, and improve customer satisfaction.
Helping Hand Labour offers various labour hire services across construction and landscaping in Melbourne and surrounding suburbs.
Challenge: Reduce admin overhead for onboarding and rostering while improving completion and no-show rates
Before using Mercu, Helping Hand Labour relied on email for onboarding new staff. This required extensive back-and-forth communication and continuous nudging with low completion rates.
Weekly job scheduling was a manual two-step process in a Whatsapp group with all Helping Hand Labour staff. The team would ask for everyone’s availability for the following week and manually paste the replies into a Google Sheet.
Then, they would create the job schedule for the following week and post a screenshot in the Whatsapp group. Knowing who had read their assigned jobs for the next week and acknowledged them was nearly impossible, and frequent no-shows affected customer satisfaction.
"We spent a lot of time manually managing the onboarding and scheduling processes, and it was clear that this wouldn't scale. We needed a solution that worked with Whatsapp and could automate much of the admin overhead."
— Timothy Breadmore, Co-founder
Their requirements for any potential solution were clear:
- Whatsapp: Helping Hand Labour runs its business operations primarily on Whatsapp, a chat app most people already have on their phones. Any solution must play nice with Whatsapp.
- Integration: Helping Hand Labour uses Google Sheets extensively for onboarding and job scheduling. An out-of-the-box integration was a must to support existing workflows.
- Implementation: The team needed a solution that could be implemented quickly to help them scale. There was no time for a lengthy onboarding process.
Solution: Use Mercu to automate the onboarding of new staff and weekly job scheduling via Whatsapp
In response to Helping Hand Labour's requirements, Mercu implemented their Whatsapp-based platform and integrated it with the team's existing workflows on Google Sheets to deliver a frictionless onboarding and job scheduling experience.
By meeting Helping Hand Labour's staff on Whatsapp and automating regular nudges to guide new joiners, Mercu automates Helping Hand Labour's onboarding process from application to day one. No email or phone call follow-up is needed.
On the job scheduling side, Mercu collects staff availability weekly via Whatsapp and automatically updates the information directly in Google Sheets.
The Helping Hand Labour team then creates a schedule based on staff availability and incoming jobs for the next week. After that, Mercu automatically sends each staff member their job schedule via Whatsapp, tracking whether they have received, read, and acknowledged the plan in real-time.
Result: Increased operational efficiency, reduced no-shows, and improved customer satisfaction
Since implementing Mercu, Helping Hand Labour has cut down significantly on admin overhead, reduced no-shows, and improved customer satisfaction.
The impact is threefold:
- Time: Automating previously manual workflows saves considerable time that can be redirected to high-priority tasks.
- Reduction in No-shows: With automated reminders and individual shift notifications, staff feel more in control and no-shows are reduced.
- Customer Satisfaction: The operational efficiencies create fewer problems overall, resulting in greater customer satisfaction.
"We're a lean and fast-growing business. Time is of the essence. Thanks to Mercu, we’re saving a lot of time on onboarding new staff and scheduling weekly jobs without sacrificing the convenience that communicating via Whatsapp offers."
— William Strapp, Co-founder
Helping Hand Labour, a Melbourne-based labour-hire company, needed a flexible tool to improve staff onboarding and weekly job scheduling.
Operating most of the business on Whatsapp, Helping Hand Labour uses Mercu’s chat-based enablement platform to automate highly flexible job scheduling, streamline their onboarding, and improve customer satisfaction.
Helping Hand Labour offers various labour hire services across construction and landscaping in Melbourne and surrounding suburbs.
Challenge: Reduce admin overhead for onboarding and rostering while improving completion and no-show rates
Before using Mercu, Helping Hand Labour relied on email for onboarding new staff. This required extensive back-and-forth communication and continuous nudging with low completion rates.
Weekly job scheduling was a manual two-step process in a Whatsapp group with all Helping Hand Labour staff. The team would ask for everyone’s availability for the following week and manually paste the replies into a Google Sheet.
Then, they would create the job schedule for the following week and post a screenshot in the Whatsapp group. Knowing who had read their assigned jobs for the next week and acknowledged them was nearly impossible, and frequent no-shows affected customer satisfaction.
"We spent a lot of time manually managing the onboarding and scheduling processes, and it was clear that this wouldn't scale. We needed a solution that worked with Whatsapp and could automate much of the admin overhead."
— Timothy Breadmore, Co-founder
Their requirements for any potential solution were clear:
- Whatsapp: Helping Hand Labour runs its business operations primarily on Whatsapp, a chat app most people already have on their phones. Any solution must play nice with Whatsapp.
- Integration: Helping Hand Labour uses Google Sheets extensively for onboarding and job scheduling. An out-of-the-box integration was a must to support existing workflows.
- Implementation: The team needed a solution that could be implemented quickly to help them scale. There was no time for a lengthy onboarding process.
Solution: Use Mercu to automate the onboarding of new staff and weekly job scheduling via Whatsapp
In response to Helping Hand Labour's requirements, Mercu implemented their Whatsapp-based platform and integrated it with the team's existing workflows on Google Sheets to deliver a frictionless onboarding and job scheduling experience.
By meeting Helping Hand Labour's staff on Whatsapp and automating regular nudges to guide new joiners, Mercu automates Helping Hand Labour's onboarding process from application to day one. No email or phone call follow-up is needed.
On the job scheduling side, Mercu collects staff availability weekly via Whatsapp and automatically updates the information directly in Google Sheets.
The Helping Hand Labour team then creates a schedule based on staff availability and incoming jobs for the next week. After that, Mercu automatically sends each staff member their job schedule via Whatsapp, tracking whether they have received, read, and acknowledged the plan in real-time.
Result: Increased operational efficiency, reduced no-shows, and improved customer satisfaction
Since implementing Mercu, Helping Hand Labour has cut down significantly on admin overhead, reduced no-shows, and improved customer satisfaction.
The impact is threefold:
- Time: Automating previously manual workflows saves considerable time that can be redirected to high-priority tasks.
- Reduction in No-shows: With automated reminders and individual shift notifications, staff feel more in control and no-shows are reduced.
- Customer Satisfaction: The operational efficiencies create fewer problems overall, resulting in greater customer satisfaction.
"We're a lean and fast-growing business. Time is of the essence. Thanks to Mercu, we’re saving a lot of time on onboarding new staff and scheduling weekly jobs without sacrificing the convenience that communicating via Whatsapp offers."
— William Strapp, Co-founder
