Case Study
Giving back hours a week by ending manual client intake
About the client
A content marketing agency with a team of 8, taking on 12 new clients a month. They sell fixed-scope projects, so the first week sets the tone for everything after it.
The challenge
Every new client arrived through a form and was then retyped by hand three times: once into the tracking spreadsheet, once into Monday.com, and once into a welcome email. That was 12 manual steps and 25 minutes per client, repeated every single time.
The real cost showed up later. A typo in the intake didn’t surface on day one. It surfaced weeks in, as a wrong deliverable or a misaddressed invoice, and someone had to unpick it. Meanwhile the first reply to the client took 48 hours, because it depended on a person opening an inbox.
The approach
I built one Make.com scenario that takes the form submission, validates it once, writes the client record into the Google Sheet the team already lived in, opens the project in Monday.com already loaded with the right checklist, and sends the confirmation. The data is typed once, by the client, and never retyped.
I deliberately left scope and pricing confirmation as a manual approval. It is the one point where someone genuinely needs to look before the work moves, and automating it would not have removed the judgement. It would have pushed the mistake further downstream, where it costs more to fix.
I also documented the scenario inside Make.com so the team can adjust it without me. A workflow only one person understands is a new dependency, not a solution.
How the workflow runs
One submission, validated once, then fanned out to the three systems that need it. The dashed branch is the step kept in human hands.
Outcomes
- 9 hours a week returned to the team.
- Time to first client reply fell from 48 hours to 90 minutes.
- Manual steps per new client went from 12 to 2.
- Intake errors down by roughly a third, measured by how often a deliverable had to be reissued.