Task Mining and AI-powered automation drive growth at Leaf Home

Since its launch in 2020, Leaf Home has enjoyed a meteoric rise—becoming the no.2 home services provider in the U.S., covering 80% of all ZIP codes. With a fast-growing customer base, huge range of products, and a growing partner network, it couldn’t risk becoming a victim of its own success. 

Leaf Home decided it needed to establish a Quality Assurance (QA) practice to avoid operational teething problems and maintain standards as the business grew. That meant ensuring the quality of automations and applications by validating them—through automated testing. 

The need for QA and automated testing 

“One of the big gaps we saw was the need for a QA practice,” explains Brandon Smith, Vice President of Solutions Delivery. "And so, as part of that, we started building out a center of excellence for QA. "

We’ve had a lot of great success with UiPath Test Suite and the benefits around regression testing we’ve built out for our applications. We’re getting to the point where we can do daily deliverables and promotions to production—we wouldn’t be able to deploy humans to test on a daily basis to allow us to do that.

Brandon Smith, Vice President of Solutions Delivery

"We knew UiPath could do automated testing, so we thought ‘let’s try and get automation going here as well.’ We started small, and then automation really started to get a foothold when we understood how many great use cases we had out there,” says Smith. One of them involved targeting new spam filters, such as Robokiller. These were preventing legitimate businesses like Leaf Home from reaching out to new customers. They were also hindering Leaf Home from getting in touch with those customers who had requested more information. 

We were potentially losing $3 million a day because we couldn't contact customers. We began using UiPath to start rotating some of our numbers around to make them more localized so that they didn't show up as being spam.

Brandon Smith, Vice President of Solutions Delivery

With the help of the UiPath Business Automation Platform, they managed to solve the problem within a couple of days. According to Smith, this got the immediate attention of his CEO—who wanted to know where else automation could be deployed across the business. 

Expanding the footprint of AI-powered automation 

But it wasn’t just the CEO who was impressed. AI-powered automation has also translated into increased job satisfaction and a renewed sense of equilibrium in the work-life balance for teammates.   

The power of automation was undeniable, so more and more departments were getting interested. As Leaf Home built an automation backlog, they needed to understand how people performed their work, so they used UiPath Task Mining to accelerate the discovery process. “Instead of going through the normal process of getting on the call and interviewing employees, we leveraged Task Mining,” says Smith. “We had them run through their processes, analyzed the output, and were able to accelerate the conversation because we had a good handle on what they were doing. With Task Mining, we spent less time in the requirements gathering space and got to building the automation quicker”.  

AI-powered automation was extended across the accounting team, with UiPath Document Understanding used to handle a range of manual tasks around reconciliation and invoice management. Now the finance team has the tools to scale up at pace and cope with any spikes in workload, including those caused by new business acquisitions. The team is no longer at risk of lack of headcount, related revenue losses, compliance issues, or any interruptions to their work-life balance. 

That success led to HR taking a look. Next, UiPath Platform was integrated with Craigslist, using it for posting automation to free recruiters up from manual posting of adverts. This allowed the professionals to get back to doing what they do best—interviewing candidates. 

“They like it and they continue to keep feeding us more items to automate for them. So, they’re big believers, and they see the value in it,” adds Smith. 

It’s like a wildfire. Once you get everybody on board you get visibility at the leadership level and then ‘boom’, they want to do all these things.

Brandon Smith, Vice President of Solutions Delivery

Task mining drives new insights and big cost savings 

Leaf Home went through a transformation initiative, replacing five CRM instances with Salesforce. Smith says they deployed Task Mining across 13 business areas to more than 120 different users within the organization. By looking across different key functional areas, the data-driven discovery approach resulted in the capture of 440+ tasks and more than $120K+ in cost savings as migration speeds tripled. 

Task Mining has helped us tremendously accelerate our organizational transformation and understand our business more clearly.

Brandon Smith, Vice President of Solutions Delivery

“We discovered systems that we didn’t even know were in our portfolio, so it was a huge opportunity to accelerate the requirements gathering process for the Salesforce implementation,” says Smith. “Having estimated about six months for that process, I would say we’ve cut that time in half by utilizing Task Mining.” 

With Leaf on the acquisition trail, automation provided the gateway to growth. Between early 2021 and 2022, Leaf Home acquired multiple businesses. Such has been its success, the business is now adding Task Mining to its playbook for any future acquisitions, as well as applying it to understand how employees perform their daily tasks—identifying as-is and to-be processes. It’s also sharing Task Mining outputs with the training team—so it can build enablement materials for internal teams and continue to accelerate the enterprise-wide improvement journey. 

Smith says it’s already been a huge year for Leaf Home in terms of business outcomes. AI is changing the game for his workforce—particularly using UiPath Task Mining to support M&A. 

We set a target of 17,000 hours saved through automaton. We achieved that goal. This year, we set out for 30,000 and have already surpassed that—everything else on top will be a bonus. With the effectiveness in ROI, [UiPath] is now paying for itself.

Brandon Smith, Vice President of Solutions Delivery