Case Study
How Luhhu helped reclaim 20 hours of working time, each week, by automating client onboarding and bank transfers using Zapier, Transferwise, Twilio and Monday.com
The Challenge
ReclaimsUK helps their clients get refunds on overpayments of income tax. Hours of hands-on work was required to onboard new clients and return tax refunds to customers' bank accounts. Luhhu was tasked with automating this — with a focus on customer service and 100% accuracy.
The Outcome
Payouts are now completed automatically via a custom TransferWise Zapier Integration, saving upwards of 1 hour per customer. This saves between 20-25 hours each week — allowing ReclaimsUK to help more customers get what they’re owed.
The Story
ReclaimsUK is a small family run business based in Liverpool, founded in 2011. They specialise in dealing with tax refunds and tax returns, offering a no-win no-fee service.
Since their founding, they have grown rapidly — returning more than £12 million in tax refunds to their clients. These tax refunds include refunds for travel expenses, stamp duty (average claim £11,000), uniform rebates and research and development tax credits (average claim £56,000).
But as their reach increased, so did the levels of tedious administration required. It’s hard to help those who need it, when your workflows are slowing you down.
Two complicated processes are essential at ReclaimsUK:
- To prioritise ease of use and seamless customer experience, ReclaimsUK use SMS as their primary contact channel. This creates endless work sending and receiving messages from clients and copying these into a CRM system (Monday.com). Not only is this laborious, it’s also vulnerable to human error; SMS messages risk being saved against the wrong profile and/or the wrong clients can be contacted about a case.
- Contacting successful claimants to get their bank details and complete transfer payments, then update Monday to confirm this transfer is completed.
How Luhhu Helped
We started by speaking with ReclaimsUK to map their existing processes and identify opportunities for timesaving business process automation.
Thanks to our experience as Zapier Certified Experts we identified that SMS communication and bank transfers could be automated.
Next, we built a bespoke solution to automate these processes, by breaking down the process into clear steps.
SMS Automation with Twilio
Step 1: Receive SMS message with Twilio
Twilio has a Programmable SMS API which allows SMS to be sent and received globally. Twilio is fully integrated with Zapier, so we created a Zap that triggered when an SMS is received.
Step 2: Match incoming SMS with the client
Once the SMS is received, we match it with the correct client in the Monday.com CRM and add it to their profile. We use a Google Sheet that is synced with all the Monday.com record IDs to manage the lookup. This ensures that ReclaimsUK has a comprehensive record of all communication with their clients, making it easier to provide a high-quality service.
Step 3: Send outgoing SMS and add a note in Monday
To reply, the ReclaimsUK customer support team simply adds a note in Monday.com. We detect that this note has been added, then send the SMS via Twilio automatically.
Bank Transfer Automation
Step 1: Initiate the Bank Transfer Process
Once a client has received a tax refund, the ReclaimsUK support team adds a note in clients profile on Monday.com. This triggers the next stage of the process.
Step 2: Collect Bank Details
An email is automatically sent to the customer, requesting their bank details to be entered into a Typeform.
Payments are notoriously difficult to automate. But we searched the marketplace and found Transferwise, a low-fee payment platform with an API, which makes reliable payment automation possible. The next obstacle? Zapier doesn’t have a Transferwise integration.
To solve this, we developed a custom Transferwise Zapier integration on top of the Transferwise API, adding the ability to create recipients, initiate transfers and fund transfers.
Step 3: Dispatch Payment and Update CRM
Once the payment details are added, the transfer is funded and payment is sent to the customer via Transferwise.
To prevent double payments, the profile of the client on Monday.com is updated, confirming that the transfer was completed. This gives the client peace of mind; knowing their money is coming back.
The Result
Before we automated this process, staff members needed to copy and paste SMS and manually initiate transfers. Hours were wasted logging into bank accounts and human error was possible.
The work Luhhu helped us automate has made several areas of our business extremely more productive and profitable. We comfortably save around £2500 per month in the reduce costs of tasks that we used to perform manually each day.
As an automated process, this workflow runs like clockwork — with no potential for costly mistakes. This lets ReclaimsUK focus on their customers, rather than repetitive administrative work.
Very professional and excellent customer service helping us to reduce the time spent on manual tasks so that we can strategise and spend more time focusing on the bigger picture of the business freeing us up from the day-to-day tasks.
In the last week, ReclaimsUK initiated 36 payouts to their customers — of which were completed automatically. Before automation, this would have taken more than 1 hour per payout, as it required manual outreach to each client. Now? It’s all instant.
