We released Agile CRM in 2013 with one goal in mind: to streamline customer relationship management with a more broad selection of sales and marketing functions. At that time, the CRM market was still growing, and we decided that the best way for us to stand out was to simply offer more tools in less packaging. Less packaging means fewer installations, fewer software updates, and less down time in general.

Less packaging means business owners and managers can use our product to replace a host of others. Or, if they have one or two favorites they can’t let go of, Agile CRM integrates seamlessly into an overall larger process.

Even back in 2013, our team was full of diverse personalities, experienced marketers and salespeople. We never tried to force our product into the marketplace. Our philosophy was (and continues to be) that there were enough small business owners and managers who could truly benefit from an encounter with Agile CRM to fill up our share of the market. With that mindset, it was a waste of time to market to people we knew didn’t need our help. As a result of countless hours, flawless execution by our marketing and sales teams, and the value our product brought to business processes, our brand began to take off.

We made it a point to keep up with changes in the market and different schools of thought surrounding CRM, sales, and marketing. As a result, Agile CRM has gone through revisions and rebirths, so to speak. Whenever we noticed a new need, we added a feature or function to Agile CRM to fill that need.

Our work in this area paid off, as customers and clients began praising our dedication to the overall user experience. Our base began to grow exponentially, from honest marketing on the part of our team, as well as from referrals and recommendations from our base. As our base grew, so grew the scope of our product.

Throughout this period of expansion, we began to reflect on the performance of our staff and the effectiveness and productivity of our business processes. We began to experience some of the pains of business growth. We brought on new employees and hired freelancers from around the world whenever we needed a certain set of skills to get the job done. Overall, however, we were in need of new ways to increase our productivity without spending a fortune.

Expansion led to larger projects with more employees. Most of our problems began to revolve around saving time and managing huge projects with enormous chunks of data.

We knew we couldn’t be the only ones dealing with these issues. Each problem we faced represented a much larger problem in our industry overall. As we searched for solutions already on the market, we came to a fork in the road: we could either spend a large sum of money to use an advanced solution, or we could create our own solution. If we could design a product to fill our needs, we could then add that product to the market and help others.

Meanwhile, AI automation was advancing at a rapid pace, and we realized that the automation we implemented into Agile CRM helped us maintain consistent productivity even when we were short-staffed. However, this automation had its limitations; mainly, the automation was only helping us in the areas of CRM, sales, and marketing. Our business processes needed to be enhanced and optimized across the entire company. We began researching a concept known as robotic process automation (RPA).

As our knowledge of RPA increased, we began to visualize a product that incorporated it into workflow optimization.

Why Botpath was Created: The Problem

Oftentimes, businesses create processes over time through trial and error. As they encounter new problems, they come up with solutions or processes to overcome those new obstacles. Whatever initial solution comes to mind that solves the problem in the least amount of time is implemented on the spot. There’s usually very little thought given to how the new solution will interact with other processes in the overall framework.

Workflow optimization is an essential part of business success and growth. Companies that experience sudden and exponential growth are often faced with problems stemming from a lack of workflow optimization.

Productivity is always the first to suffer from poorly optimized workflows. Issues can manifest themselves in employee performance, or in the efficiency of the processes and procedures themselves. It’s difficult to spot problem-areas within a business process without the aid of an advanced RPA solution.

It’s also common for business owners and managers to attribute problems to the employees that are actually caused by poor workflow. Automation cleans up workflows and makes it easier to visualize or map out business processes.

Automation has seen incredible advancements in recent years, but businesses still don’t take full advantage. Research from McKinsey revealed that "45 percent of work activities could be automated using already demonstrated technology."

"If the technologies that process and ‘understand’ natural language were to reach the median level of human performance, an additional 13 percent of work activities in the US economy could be automated." McKinsey

When we began to design a solution to these and other issues, we knew automation would continue to grow. So, early on we knew we needed a cloud-based product that could be optimized to grow with the technological capabilities of the time.

Ultimately, we needed a tool that would allow us to automate tedious and repetitive tasks. Additionally, we had many rules-based processes that were being carried out manually, and we knew that if we could automate those tasks as well, we would be free to reallocate saved resources to other pressing matters, or give our hard-working, dedicated employees more chances to sit back and relax without having to hire more staff to carry the load.

We envisioned a digital workforce, so to speak, that could work alongside our employees, boosting productivity, saving time, and increasing the accuracy and value of data collected throughout various processes.

The underlying concepts of RPA allowed us to visualize a team of automated bots with advanced AI capabilities. What’s more, we wanted to create a solution that allowed any one of our employees to sit down and build their own bot or team of bots, thereby delegating some of the responsibility felt by our development team, enhancing their workloads and increasing productivity as well.

And so, with an overall vision in mind, we began to consider the features and functions that would be required to create an app that could not only serve us, but also serve our base of consumers and fans who had come to expect the high-level of quality brought to the market by Agile CRM.

Why Botpath was Created: The Requirements

As we reviewed tools already on the market, we began to identify common themes that ran through the market as a whole. We also needed to identify features that our base wanted but that weren’t already being provided by the market.

In all, we identified seven core functions and features that we needed in an RPA software:

• Automated Bots - We wanted to be able to build automated bots to perform complicated tasks through automation.
• Bot Management - We needed our created bots to be stored and accessible anytime for activation or to duplicate to create new bots.
• Bot Templates - For those standard bots, we wanted to be able to choose from an existing template.
• Create from Scratch - Of course, we also wanted the ability to create a bot from scratch so we could build any bot we needed.
• Process Recording - Ideally, we would be able to create a bot by recording a process as we performed it to build workflows easily.
• Drag-&-Drop Creation - We wanted it to be easy to create or modify bots with a drag-and-drop visual creator.
• Bot Jobs & Assignments - It was our goal to have a way to create different jobs that employed specific bots so we could mix and match bots to jobs.

Why Botpath was Created: The Solution

The solution we came up with was a feature-rich RPA software solution to help us and our customers increase output while simultaneously saving time and money in the process. Botpath allows RPA to be implemented in any organization, by any employee, at a price-point designed specifically for small and medium businesses.

Botpath’s features are categorized to cover four key areas:

• Ease of Use - We created Botpath to be easy to use so that employees with little to no experience in AI or RPA could benefit from its tools and functionality.
• Range of Capacity - We also wanted to ensure that the features and tools included in Botpath would be robust and versatile enough to satisfy experienced users in the fields of automation and machine intelligence.
• Productivity - Productivity is a core element of workflow optimization, and Botpath enhances productivity on both an individual level as well as company-wide.
• Optimization - We included data-collection and analysis features so that users would have the means to monitor and optimize the performance of bots and processes.

Botpath enables users to create AI bots with little or no experience in AI or RPA. It allows for advanced customization in an easy to use interface. The features are robust and delivered in a way that makes the product cost-effective and easy to maintain.

Users can create bots from scratch, or select from a collection of commonly used templates that come preloaded onto the software. Drag-and-drop functionality makes Botpath one of the easiest bot creators on the market for beginners. What’s more, users can record manual and automated processes to compile performance data, identify problem areas, and optimize processes in an ongoing manner.

Bot management is crucial to a successful RPA solution, and Botpath enables users to activate, deactivate, duplicate, and delete bots from a single dashboard. Users can also organize their bot lists and filter lists by jobs. Jobs can be created and queued up for the next available bot, or they can be manually assigned.

As an added bonus, Botpath was created with a chrome extension to run bots anytime and anywhere while using the Chrome browser.

Since its release, Botpath has become an ideal solution to create and manage bots for small and medium business owners around the world. Botpath’s powerful automations allow operations to be performed automatically, accurately, and intelligently, allowing any business to do more in less time than ever before.

Final Words

The market today is saturated with RPA solutions all designed for various business sizes and project scopes. It’s important to find the solution that best fits your company, addressing the unique challenges and needs your team faces on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, most of the providers seem to target large corporations, and the price-points reflect this truth. That’s why Botpath was created… to provide the features that small and medium businesses needed but couldn’t necessarily afford.

In selecting a solution for your team, it’s vital to consider your current budget limitations. Additionally, it’s recommended that you get feedback from your team and include them in the decision-making process. Feedback we identified on social media helped us justify why Botpath needed to be created, because users were not able to find all the tools they needed in a single app.

If you’re in the market for a new RPA solution, we invite you to try Botpath free for 30 days. It’s an excellent means to create a digital workforce that supplements your employees across the board. Click here to start your free trial.

Botpath is part of 500apps’ Infinity Suite of productivity-boosting business apps. Click here to learn more about 500apps and try the entire suite free for 30 days!