March 2016
Clean & Simple: 4 Tips for Tackling Timely Business Processes This Spring
March couldn’t have come soon enough if you ask us – we’ve got an early Easter to look forward to and the promise of Spring just around the corner (even if it is still cold and snowing). There’s no better time than the changing of a season to have a good old fashioned clear out. But before you reach for the duster, consider instead that your business’ internal processes could benefit the most from a Spring clean, rather than your workspace. As the mechanisms which keep your organisation ticking over, it’s important that they’re working at their most efficiently – and those that are less than useful are cleared out. Below you’ll find some of our suggestions for how to freshen up your processes this Spring – do you have any of your own to share? Happy cleaning!
1. Assess the Journey
When it comes to assessing your internal processes, it’s time to put your objective head on. What the business needs now is an impartial and brutal analysis of each process – and where better to start than the journey? Each process takes an employee through a journey to achieve the end result, but with some processes – especially if passed down between employees or if they haven’t been updated over time – the journey is unnecessarily long and time consuming. Instead of a straightforward mechanism, your team are instead forced to follow complicated stages that are making their time inefficient. Analyse this first and the rest of your Spring clean should be a breeze.
2. Ask Your Team
There’s no point in re-evaluating your business’ processes without getting the people who will be using them on a day to day basis involved. Ask your team for their feedback – including their own suggestions – and not only will they inspire you when it comes to shaking things up, but they’ll also feel listened to and appreciated. As your people on the ground, you’ll also find that they have a lot more hands-on experience with the processes you’ve created.
3. Employ a CRM to do the Legwork
If by this point you’ve found out that you have too many processes on the go and they’re too complicated/time consuming for your team to use efficiently, then perhaps you should consider using a bespoke CRM solution to do the legwork for some of the menial processes. If your customers are expecting emails at different stages of their engagement with you, for example, then why not set up your CRM to tackle this task automatically. Complicated reports that need to be completed on a regular basis? A CRM can do that too, if it’s shaped around your business’ reporting parameters and populated with the correct data. Not only does this eradicate wasted time for your team’s schedule, but it also guarantees that each process will be fulfilled correctly.
4. Simplify & Standardise
Finally, when you’ve dissected your internal processes and talked to your team about changes to make, it’s time to start putting your cleaning to good use. At this stage, it’s important to remember two things: simplify and standardise. As we’ve talked about above, complications are a waste of time, so boil your process down to its most basic, simplified form and stick to that; if it can be done by a CRM, delegate it there instead. Once you’ve got the skeletons of your processes sorted, it’s time to flesh them out – and this is where ‘standardise’ comes in. Remember that every member of the organisation should be able to follow these processes, even if the employee responsible is absent. With that in mind, use standardised language and layouts to ensure that any member of the team can pick things up at any point. The only thing left to do now is to decide what to do with all of your team’s spare time!
Interested in giving your business’ processes a spring clean this year? Find out more about how a bespoke CRM solution can help with a free demo from Lunar CRM – simply get in touch to request your demo now!