Category: Workflow Automation

What is Workflow Analysis? 

Workflow analysis is the process during which your business examines data about its workflows to identify trends and improve their efficiency. In turn, this improves employees engagement, customer satisfaction and the competitiveness of the business itself.

Quite often, if you ask people why a particular workflow is set up the way it is, they’ll tell you “That’s how we’ve always done it.” The design probably made sense years ago, but as the organization and its business environment have changed, the workflow was probably never updated.

Continue reading “Workflow Analysis: How to Improve & Optimize Your Processes” →

“You had me at hello.”

Is this how new customers feel about you? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could engineer this sentiment into every new customer?

After all, good customer relationships start with good customer onboarding. 

So, what kind of first impression does your business make on new customers? 

Chances are that if you aren’t 100% sure it’s a positive one, you’re leaving room for a poor experience. In turn, you’re increasing the likelihood of customer churn or poor conversion rates.

Take Groove, for example. The customer support platform conducted an audit of its own onboarding practices. They found that designing an onboarding experience that helped customers respond to an orchestrated series of prompts increased their free-to-paid conversion rate by nearly 80%!

With a carefully constructed onboarding process, you can win over your customers from the very first interaction. Even better, you can nurture customers into lifelong brand advocates that provide even more value to your business in the form of referrals, larger purchases, and positive reviews.

Customer onboarding drives revenue – period.

If you want to build a better, more consistent, and automated customer onboarding process, this article will help you understand how to pull it off.

Continue reading “Building a Better Customer Onboarding Workflow: How to Hook Customers from the First Interaction” →

Every organization has many moving parts. Just like an orchestra, it’s essential to make sure everyone is playing the same tune. Business process management (BPM) tools are designed to help you analyze and optimize your workflows, so that all sections work in harmony.

There are dozens of business process management platforms to choose from nowadays, each offering something a little different. To help you find the right solution for your organization, here is a closer look at what BPM is and the top BPM tools on the market today.

Continue reading “6 Top BPM Tools for Growing Businesses” →

Sharpen your pencils — we’ll have the contract over to you by Friday. 

Generally speaking, when the conversation turns to contracts, both sides are happy. A contract might represent a new job or employee, a new home or vehicle, a new vendor or customer, or any number of other legal relationships. 

Contracts are often accompanied by a sense of satisfaction and even relief. 

However, those who work with a large number of contracts — vendors, lawyers, property managers, education administrators, and any business that outsources work to contractors — know that reaching this stage is just the beginning. 

Continue reading “How to Automate the Contract Approval Process” →

Every minute counts. For small businesses vying for growth to stay alive and thrive, saving/losing time equates to profit/loss and the difference between success and failure. 

As a small business owner or manager trying to balance resource efficiency with growth, you may have considered cutting employees to save money as you grow. The problem with this model is that fewer resources can also result in being understaffed and hinder your growth, so it becomes a vicious cycle. 

If you need to cut costs and fuel growth, there is a plan C. Instead of hiring (or firing) more people, or figuring out where the money will come from, consider automating some of your tasks and processes. With even light automation, you can speed up operations, reduce labor costs and increase profits (in a matter of days).  

Small business workflow automation not only reduces costs, but also facilitates working seamlessly with remote work and teams. Even if your employees currently work in-house, events beyond your control may necessitate employees working from home temporarily. Being prepared with automated processes will make this transition easy and prevent employee dissatisfaction and decreased productivity during these times. 

Let’s take a look at the benefits of automation, what small business workflow tasks you can automate, and a step-by-step guide to automating a simple business workflow. 

Continue reading “Small Business Workflows: Five Everyday Tasks to Automate” →

What is Business Process Management?

Business process management (BPM) refers to the practice of streamlining and optimizing the various strings of repeatable tasks that need to take place in order for a business to operate successfully. Business process management takes a process and breaks it up into the smallest parts or steps possible in order to answer the question “Is this the best (and fastest, most efficient) way to do this?”

Business process management often leverages automation to simplify and streamline the execution, monitoring and optimization of business workflows and typically focuses on repetitive manual processes. BPM is not to be confused with task management, which refers to the overseeing of individual tasks as opposed to workflows.

BPM software that enables process automation is like a navigation system for your business, digitally routing information to the people who need it, when they need it. Because the software does this automatically, you don’t need to worry about who is responsible for performing the routing or remember under which conditions the routing takes place. For instance, business protocols may dictate that an additional approval stage is required when sums higher than $10,000 are involved. 

BPM allows you to increase efficiency, reduce errors, cut costs, and better serve your customers. 

Careful planning lies at the heart of successful business process management. While individual departments in any organization can certainly benefit from managing their processes, you’ll see the best return on your investment if you conduct an audit of all the processes in your business to determine which ones are most suited to automation and implement solutions collaboratively.

On the surface, BPM may seem like the domain of large corporate enterprises. The truth is that organizations of all sizes such as mid-size businesses, K-12 schools and higher education institutions like universities and colleges can also benefit greatly from proper business process management, freeing staff from the burden of administrative tasks and allowing them to finally achieve a degree of work-life balance.

Continue reading “Business Process Management: The Complete Guide” →

Has your team made the switch to remote work? With a plethora of virtual collaboration tools available, adopting a remote work model has never been easier! 

Yet, many organizations find themselves struggling to adapt, often because they simply don’t know how to best coordinate their team members to ensure optimal productivity for their remote teams. 

Worried your team won’t get as much work done from home? Don’t be. Sixty-nine percent of employees say they’re more productive when working from home.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can equip your remote team to do their best work, no matter where they are.

Continue reading “Workflows for Remote Teams: How to Keep Work Flowing from a Distance” →

A decade ago, a Google search for the term “cloud” would return images of white billowy objects and weather-related terms. Today? The term “cloud” has taken on a new identity, becoming a vehicle for people and companies to store and manage data on the internet. This has fueled the growth and productivity of expanding organizations—sans a weather icon in sight. 

In fact, cloud-based communication, sharing and organization is pretty standard among modern workplaces. As of April 2019, the cloud-based G Suite (Google Suite) serves five million paid business users and millions more that use it for free. 

Continue reading “How to Automate Your Google Apps Workflow Approval and Docs for Increased Productivity” →

In our highly connected business environment, it’s increasingly vital for businesses to embrace digital transformation and increase their efficiency if they want to remain competitive. 

This may seem like an insurmountable challenge for organizations that are still bogged down in legacy systems and paper-heavy processes. However, the light at the end of the tunnel is that digitizing and automating your business processes can save you a significant amount of time and money while freeing employees from repetitive, mindless administrative tasks, so they can focus on doing the work they were hired to do. 

Everyday business processes are the lifeblood of all organizations. From approving purchase orders to authorizing travel to on-boarding new hires to processing student applications, these processes define what employees do every day. They might be three simple steps or may be a complicated 10-step workflow with conditional routing but the general principle is the same: deliver information from Point A to Point B with all the required signatures, approvals and authorizations in place.

According to Forrester, business process automation has the potential to reduce operating costs by up to 90 percent.

Continue reading “Business Process Automation Explained” →