Want to Spend Less Time on Admin and More Time with Members?

Running a coworking business involves lots of moving parts. From managing membership plans to billing processes, understanding space utilisation metrics to community engagement, planning sales and marketing activities to upselling opportunities – the many complexities of coworking operations can easily bog teams down when tasks are handled manually.

Enter: coworking automation, your ticket to streamlining processes across every aspect of coworking operations. Want to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time with your members? Read on to learn how to automate coworking tasks.

Automation is a major growth enabler

Coworking automation removes operational bottlenecks, increases efficiency, and allows teams to focus on value-added activities rather than repetitive tasks across community, hospitality, and growth.

Admin load

Running a coworking space involves a host of daily workflows that consume valuable time and increase the risk of human error when handled manually. Coworking automation significantly speeds things up, avoiding mistakes that may impact your community experience.

Churn risk

Friction with your community increases the risk of member churn. Picture this: a member books a meeting room with your community manager, but when they arrive, someone else is already using it (turns out your community manager double-booked the space because they’re using a spreadsheet for reservations). These types of awkward situations might be so frequent that you member decides to terminate their membership.

Meanwhile, automating coworking tasks hands control of coworking experiences over to members, freeing your team up for higher-level tasks, such as community engagement.

Scaling

A lack of streamlined processes, decentralised tools, and workflows leads to disorganisation. Without automation, scaling becomes near impossible as you simply won’t have the resources to grow and expand across new locations or markets. Meanwhile, automating coworking tasks using a centralised platform pieces together the essential tools to maintain consistency across sites, and can be accessed from anywhere.

5 Time-wasting workflows to replace today

Despite the range of operational tasks, there are five processes to prioritise with the support of coworking automation.

1. Desk bookings

Operating on a first-come, first-served basis in your hot desk and dedicated desk areas can lead to an overbooked workspace and frustrated members.

Here’s why you need automation for desk bookings:

• Give members control of their coworking experience, enabling them to self-organise bookings ahead of time.
• Update availability in real-time to prevent double bookings.
• Oversight of desk inventory helps your team know where to prioritise their time. For example, utilisation reports and heatmaps help your team focus on boosting occupancy in underutilised spaces.

2. Meeting room access

Managing keys can be chaotic, especially when your team is busy with other tasks. On the other hand, unlocking amenities may cause scheduling conflicts and result in lost profit opportunities, with members sneaking in.

Coworking automation lets you:

• Sync the entire coworking journey, from bookings to check-in and meeting room access. This is particularly beneficial for handling external customers, an additional revenue stream in your operations.
• Keys won’t be misplaced or lost when you use digital keys to access meeting rooms.
• Connect with dynamic pricing functionalities to boost prices during peak times and take last-minute bookings, maximising profit.

3. Billing

Processing invoices and payments manually can be a complex and time-consuming task, especially across multiple membership plans and upselling opportunities.

With automation, you can:

• Reduce time spent on creating and sending invoices by automating recurring and one-off invoices. In fact, automation slashes invoice processing times by up to 40%.
• Take payments faster by enabling automated payment collection and integrating with payment gateways.
• Automate payment reminders and late payment fees, reducing the risk of late payments and boosting cash flow.
  Handle refunds and maintain trust with members.

4. CRM follow-ups

Member acquisition is one of the biggest challenges global coworking operators face right now. However, there are so many other operational duties to maintain in a coworking space that lead nurturing can be overlooked, and opportunities missed.

Coworking automation means you can:

• Trigger automated follow-up messages to acknowledge lead requests.
• Segment audiences between leads and members. You can create targeted campaigns with offers, events, and promotions.
• Connect the information running through your CRM for remarketing campaigns.

5. Member communications

The nature of coworking is flexible, so don’t expect your member base to be in your physical space every week. Sticking updates on a notice board becomes a bit of a time waster, causing disappointment if members miss out on your events (because they didn’t know about them).

Embrace coworking automation to:

• Send welcome messages during onboarding journeys to establish house rules and support community integration.
• Share automated messages to members and groups.
• Schedule recurring communications, such as newsletters.

What does automation look like in practice?

By removing friction, coworking automation streamlines operations at crucial points throughout customer journeys.

Member onboarding

The customer journey begins before a prospect steps into your coworking space. Providing a well-designed member onboarding experience is the most important stage to get right, with first impressions contributing to converting prospects into loyal members.

But with lots of other operational tasks to achieve, coworking teams can often overlook the member onboarding journey. This may delay communication, leading to lost opportunities.

Nexudus worked with Impact Hub Madrid to automate its CRM system to book tours, create reminders, set goals for the team, manage their sales pipeline, and send proposals to prospective members. Automating welcome emails, community guidelines, and workspace management platform onboarding processes also supports a member’s entry to your coworking space.

Bookings

Team members can spend excessive amounts of time on manual booking tasks, such as fielding booking requests, updating calendars, rescheduling, and cumbersome back and forth, not to mention risking double bookings with a decentralised reservations process.

The team at Michigan-based coworking space Cahoots was spending lots of time on billing and meeting room reservation processes. While they were using a platform that supported members booking meeting rooms, there was little uptake, as it wasn’t compatible with a web browser.

Working with Cahoots, Nexudus automated the billing and meeting room reservation process, integrating a new platform to support large-scale meeting room bookings through web browsers. When members request help, the integration with Google Calendar helps the Cahoots team find the most suitable space for their customer easily, as all the available rooms are available in one view.

Automating bookings involves placing independence into the hands of members. Instead of relying on administrative back and forth with your teams to book amenities (which could result in double bookings and missed revenue opportunities), your coworking members can book amenities themselves and receive instant confirmation.

Check-in

Whether someone is visiting your coworking space for a tour or another member for a meeting, manual check-in processes can cause hold-ups and frustration, especially if your community manager forgets to inform members about a guest’s arrival.

When Nexudus worked with Cahoots, automating guest check-ins was a vital piece of the puzzle to streamlining operations with technology. Instead of tying a team member to the desk all day, guests can check themselves in using a self-service kiosk at reception, triggering notifications to members that their guest has arrived.

Automating guest check-ins frees up your team’s time to focus on higher level activities, such as providing a more holistic hospitality experience for new arrivals, rather than a run of the mill check in process. This means you can operate with a leaner team, reducing your overheads on staff costs.

Signs you’re ready to automate more

Embracing automation in your coworking operations makes a huge difference to your business. If you’re considering it, here are some key signs that you’re ready to automate:

• With a growing team, your time is stretched across training and development tasks rather than overseeing the entire operations. With coworking automation, reporting, and dashboard features automatically collect data on space utilisation metrics and forecasting, giving you a more comprehensive oversight of your business operations and peace of mind.
• Your customer base is growing across multiple membership plans and upselling opportunities. Embrace automation to continue handling the operational complexities associated with each customer type while developing diversified revenue streams.
• Recently, you’ve experienced admin delays impacting your bottom line. Using coworking admin software will significantly speed up invoice processing times, automate payment collections, reminders, and late payment fees. This boosts your cash flow and business profitability.

From operations to interactions

Ultimately, the goal of automation isn’t to build a ‘smarter’ space, but a more human one. Think of it as creating an invisible operating system that flawlessly handles the predictable transactions (bookings, billing, access), so your team can invest in meaningful interactions that software never can.

It’s about freeing up your people from being administrators of a building and empowering them to be cultivators of a community.