Customer-Centric Marketing, Powered by Productive: Reflect Digital’s Story

Reflect Digital is a performance marketing agency and part of the Human First Collective, alongside our agencies, including LAB, a digital experience and technology agency, and the recently acquired digital transformation agency, Freestyle. Together, we work across a wide range of clients and sectors, with a particular focus on travel and tourism, hospitality, and property. I work as a Delivery Manager, which is heavily operations-focused. I spend a significant amount of time in Productive, monitoring resourcing and utilization across the business, as well as managing budgets and various project management tasks. In essence, I oversee day-to-day operations to ensure everything runs smoothly across departments and projects.

Reflect Digital has been using Productive for some time, and in my just under a year here, I’ve already noticed how much more integral it has become to our day-to-day operations. Earlier this year, we began using features such as AI reporting and automations. The AI side, especially in reporting, has been a learning curve, but as a business, we’re very forward-thinking when it comes to AI, so it’s exciting to explore how that can enhance our decision-making.

Automations are another area we’ve only just started tapping into, but they’ve already proven to be a real game-changer. Setting up task descriptions to automatically populate based on tags may seem minor, but it streamlines workflows and ensures consistency across the team. I can see us using automations more and more, especially for deals, where tasks could be automatically created at specific stages of the pipeline.

Beyond new features, our general usage has deepened too. My philosophy is that if you’re going to invest in a system like Productive, you should use it to its full potential. We manage everything through Productive, from projects, budgets, and resourcing to task scheduling, timesheets, and reporting. That means not just treating it as a time tracker or project tool, but making it the backbone of our operations.

The biggest one is definitely consolidation. Instead of juggling multiple tools and trying to get them to communicate with each other, we can run the full project lifecycle all in one place, from the initial call with a prospect through to delivery and reporting. That alone saves a considerable amount of effort and reduces the chance of things slipping through the cracks.

Tasks being inside Productive have also been a significant benefit. It means we don’t have to switch between project management tools and to-do lists; everything lives in the same system. Another big advantage is being able to customise tasks with custom fields, which lets us adapt workflows precisely to our teams’ needs.

Reporting is another area where Productive has resolved many issues for our business. We can pull reports on utilization, profitability, or project performance in ways that actually support decision-making. Once they’re in place, the insights are really powerful, and I’m particularly interested in Polaris because it allows us to combine different datasets into more advanced reports, something that was never easy to achieve before.

Initially, I gained a lot of knowledge through our own training manuals and by exploring the system myself. I also connected with Natasha, our success manager, quite early on, and then had a quarterly review soon after. Those regular touchpoints have been really helpful, especially in the beginning, whilst I was still getting my bearings. Productive is intuitive, so it didn’t take long to get comfortable using it. I value the fact that there are multiple ways to approach tasks, and we’ve kept quarterly reviews in place to check in, learn about new features, and make sure we’re getting the most out of the tool.

I would have said the resource planner, because that’s where I spend most of my time. I love how customizable it is, how you can save different views, and how it gives you just the right amount of information. Since setting up my first automation, it’s quickly become a favourite feature. It feels smart, and I can already see the time savings it brings. For instance, we’ve automated task descriptions based on tags, so the correct template is always pre-filled for the team. It’s a simple change, but it makes a big impact, and I can see real potential to expand this into deals and other areas.

It would feel like going back to spreadsheets, and no one wants that. Spreadsheets are often confusing, error-prone, and a nightmare to keep up to date. Productive gives us a clear “source of truth” that we rely on. I’ve used other systems in the past that cost more and did less, so I really appreciate how well Productive works. Even timesheets, something people usually dread, are now easier thanks to Google Calendar integration, which has completely transformed adoption for us. Without Productive, we’d be less efficient, under more pressure, and more prone to mistakes. Honestly, as a business, we’d really feel its absence.