Deputy simplifies shift work and boosts hourly employee engagement for 250,000+ workplaces globally

Ashik Ahmed, CEO, CTO & Co-Founder at Deputy, had a lot of business-critical applications that all needed to function in unison. Integrating these systems required lots of custom code, which had become difficult to maintain and wasn’t reliable, often leading to data inconsistencies.

The lack of synchronicity meant that employees were tasked with lots of manual cross-checking. Customer service agents, for example, had to go back and forth between Salesforce and Intercom to gather all the right customer details. Employee managers had to check Deputy to sign off on leave requests.

Previously, Deputy engineers were responsible for managing integrations. But Ashik wanted his engineers focused on building the product—not on internal integrations. At the same time, the business was highly motivated to collaborate on integration projects, but had no means to get involved.

Deputy’s own product was a quintessential example of the importance of integration; to function properly, the software needed to integrate many systems. As users of their own product, Ashik knew there was an opportunity to model how to best streamline integrations and increase automation.

For a brief moment Ashik considered investing in all-in-one platforms, which bundled a number functions, as the solution to his integration woes. But he quickly realized that best-in-breed applications offered the best functionality—he just needed a way for them to work seamlessly together.

Workato immediately stood out for several reasons. First, it was easy to use—Ashik didn’t have to rely on engineers. Second, it’s highly scalable, which would allow business users to experiment and execute fast. And finally, the maintainability of the platform was another huge advantage.

Ashik has since implemented Workato and identified the three best applications of the platform: People Ops, Revenue Ops, and productivity use cases. In all three areas, Workato is able to deliver huge value to the company, driven in large part by the business units themselves.

The number of Workato use cases has exploded across Deputy. One such use case is the ability to import customer information from Salesforce and Intercom into the Deputy product in order to personalize the user experience, which has greatly enhanced product-led growth and increased product usage.

Similarly, Deputy uses Workato to extract customer data from AWS and Snowflake to populate Intercom so that customer service agents are better prepped with customer knowledge. Visibility into the customer account allows agents to better meet customer needs.

Ashik also uses Workato for employee leave requests. If an employee applies for leave through Deputy, their manager is notified via Workbot Slack and is able to approve the request right then and there. This has greatly reduced the number of stalled or delayed employee requests.

Finally, Ashik uses Workato to automatically unsubscribe any unsubscribers from all relevant systems. In turn, this helps ensure that the business is kept in compliance and prevents Deputy from facing steep fines.

Ashik cites Workato as a key driver of allowing Deputy employees to do their best work. Thriving systems lead to thriving employees, he says, which in turn better power the company. Ashik is excited for the many more Workato use cases that he and his team have in the works.