Workflows are essential for modern, successful businesses in a broad range of sectors. Almost all commercial operations feature a set of recurring tasks that need to be repeated day in, day out, with little room for error. Workflows are an efficient, cost-effective way of achieving a seamless customer experience across the board.
However, when it’s reported that 26% of an employee’s day will be wasted on avoidable admin chores, unnecessary tasks and outdated ways of working, it’s clear not all work processes are fit for purpose.
Workflows can be tweaked to ensure that they’re not only serving their basic purpose but offering something more than simple process management. With a little TLC, they can play a key part in:
- Increasing revenue
- Raising employee engagement
- Promoting productivity
- Delighting your customers
They should not, however, be taken for granted. Things can go wrong, and when workflows lose their relevance, a business often counts the cost in dissatisfied customers and an unhappy workforce.
Here are three tell-tale signs of a poorly performing set of workloads, and how to fix them.
1. Poor client onboarding
First impressions count - providing a smooth, hassle-free onboarding experience is a key factor in building healthy commercial relationships.
If you’re not meeting your customer’s expectations - either by missing important deadlines or rushing out a substandard product or service - you need to re-evaluate how your business interacts with your customers, and how your staff members react to problems.
Take a step back and spend some time evaluating how you're evaluating your performance as a company- or if it’s being evaluated. Mistakes during the onboarding process are almost always caused by human error - usually by employees who aren’t adhering to standard business practices, or data handling rules.
Solution
Simplifying your onboarding process using a set of automated workflows saves you valuable time in delivering a service to your customer base, removes the risk of projecting a poor image to your client and increases your chances of upselling early on in the relationship.
2. Substandard app integration
If you’re scratching your head wondering why your staff wastes time manually collecting information from multiple IT platforms, or need to continually cross-reference multiple different applications, then you need to start making your data sources work together, instead of using them in isolation.
You’d be surprised at what modern business software can achieve. Applications are built with integration in mind - you just need to gain an understanding of how you’d like them to operate, and how they can link together with other systems to form an end-to-end solution that gives you the most bang for your technological buck.
Solution
Automation comes into its own when businesses take the time to assess their needs on a departmental basis, and implement bespoke workflows that operate in unison with each other and address the bigger picture.
If they don’t already, your workflows should include information from critical systems such as email systems, finance packages, and marketing platforms as standard.
3. Poor KPI visualisation
Condeco reports 64% of global business leaders said flexible working had a positive impact on productivity. The question is, do you know whether this is typical of your team?
In the age of hybrid working, business owners need to have a thorough understanding of how to measure productivity at a glance and visualise how hybrid workers are managing their workloads when they’re not in the office.
If your staff aren’t able to easily inform their colleagues about tasks they’re working on, or you’re constantly wasting valuable time gathering feedback from departmental managers, then it's a sure sign that your workflows aren’t capturing as much information as they should be.
Solution
Workflows that allow staff to update the status of a specific task at the click of a button enable management to gather information on the progress of a set of tasks as they’re being worked on.
Custom status updates allow your teams to make fast, informed decisions on their own workloads, and minimises the risk of information getting lost in translation.
SwiftCase has been built for modern business, with easy to use workflow management tools and ready-made templates to let you take advantage of these, and many more, productivity opportunities.