The Google Workspace Hack that saves our company $20,000 a year.

At Flymya, we have a unique way of managing our external communication. While it saves us an incredible amount of money, our primary motivation was to address the shortcomings of email. Let’s start with all the things we hate about email:

1) The CC bomb.

We're not a big fan of cc'ing people, as it makes ownership & actionable items vague (am I supposed to do something now that you’ve cc’d me, or is this just to keep me in the loop?)

2) No transparency.

Whenever you're sending an email to someone, only two people (and nobody else) know what's going on. This loss of transparency is even more pronounced if someone leaves the company, as all of their emails & past communications are typically lost when their email is deactivated.

With email, there's always a balance between transparency (keeping people updated) and not annoying the hell out of your co-workers. We wanted both.

At Flymya, we don't use email. So here's how we manage our external communication.

We use a combination of integrations with Google Suite / Workspace, Gorgias, and Smooch to manage our external communications.

1) Our employees don't use email.

More specifically, they don't log into a traditional email client like Gmail or Outlook. One interesting note about Myanmar (where our headquarters is) is that only 1% of the population had access to internet 7 years ago, so luckily most people don't actually use email to begin with.

1) We use G-Suite, but only use aliases.

One of the reasons we don't have a wide adoption of G-Suite is the cost, as it’s quite expensive ($6 to $25 per user). With 300 employees, that cost adds up very quickly, so we use aliases.

Basically, we have one email ([email protected]), and set up multiple email addresses inside of that account. This means that all emails, whether it's [email protected] or [email protected], actually just goes into one account (the main [email protected] account).

As a result, a single shared email inbox is accessible by everybody, and all emails go into there, no matter who it was originally intended for.

2) We use Gorgias as the primary interface.

If you’ve ever used a standard Helpdesk software like Zendesk, you’re familiar with the benefits:

• internal notes that are only visible to your team
• assigning & reassigning messages to someone to establish clear ownership
• advanced metrics (response time, tickets closed per agent, etc)

At Flymya, we’ve integrated G-Suite with Gorgias, which means that instead of logging into Gmail, our employees only Gorgias to read & write emails.

We are enterprise software geeks here at Flymya, and we chose Gorgias over other more established SaaS products (we tried out and tested over a dozen products like Intercom and HelpScout) due to it being the best combination of price & speed.

3) We use Smooch to integrate all our chat channels.

We don’t use Gorgias just for emails. Our employees respond to every website live chat, Viber message, Facebook comment, and Whatsapp text the same way they would respond to an email. We should have our Line + WeChat integration up shortly, as Smooch's support team has been fantastic during the onboarding.

For our employees, this means that they don’t need to have multiple tabs opened, and it means that all of our business partners & customers communicate with us in their preferred medium.

4) We use "resources" as a hack in Google Calendar

One thing that we couldn't live without is Google Calendar, but if we don't pay for 300 users in G-Suite, how do we give every employee access to G-Cal?

Our solution is to use the "Buildings & Resources" feature in G-Suite's admin panel and to register our employees as a "room". This allows us to add employees to a meeting the same way we book conference rooms, and individual resources in G-Suite are given an individual Google Calendar.

It's a nice little hack to help us save money :)

Building a culture of data

This system of managing our external communication has a few profound effects on the culture of data we’re building here at Flymya, notably:

1) Full Transparency. Every employee can read the CEO's emails.

This means that every email & chat by every employee is accessible by everybody else. If you’ve ever written me an email or whatsapp message, it means it’s indexed somewhere in Gorgias for every current (and future employee) to read. 

No more “hey, can you forward me that email”, no more CC bombs, and no more important conversations getting lost in purgatory whenever an employee leaves the company. Every single conversation can be immediately found within seconds.

We strive to make all data as easily accessible by anybody as possible (we even make our salary bands public), and that company value starts with the way we store our external communication.

2) Building a culture

At first, our junior employees were understandably afraid to peek into my personal emails, but over time, I’ve noticed that my writing prose (along with my /giphy style) has gradually trickled to the rest of the company.

Giving all employees access to my emails allows them to see how I communicate with business partners & sales leads, and they even have a chance to read my internal notes attached with each thread to understand how I strategize each conversation.

So in conclusion, we use a combination of great SaaS products to save money & make all of our data accessible.

Flymya is an online travel agency in Southeast Asia. Jeff Pan is the CEO and based in Myanmar. Hat tip to Romain Lapeyre for making the best Helpdesk software on the planet.