Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
5 Workflow Optimization Tips to Streamline Your Business Processes
Guest Post | Sep 8, 2021
If your business doesn’t run as smoothly as it should, you could lose customers and boatloads of money.
Sticking to manual and repetitive tasks, using outdated tools, and poor task management are some of the things that can slow down your business processes.
That is why it’s crucial to optimize your workflows to increase your business operations’ efficiency and even reduce your business costs.
Nail this, and you’ll meet your targets, deliver services promptly, and get results faster.
In this guide, we’ll share five workflow optimization tips to help you speed up your business processes and streamline your operations.
1. Use cloud-based solutions
You could have a large number of employees, but there’s only so much they can do since they can only work an average of eight hours a day.
If you stick to manual processes, you’re bound to overwork your staff, and they’re less likely to finish their tasks with optimum efficiency.
For instance, if you own an equipment rental company and your staff uses paper-based methods to inspect 50 to 80 trucks daily, then you’re looking at a tedious, time-consuming inspection process.
Your teams would be buried in mountains of paperwork, and accessing any tools means traveling to your physical office, which costs more time and money. Leverage Record360’s cloud-based solution that includes an online equipment inspection form for simple and quick asset assessments.
The software streamlines your workflow by letting your staff perform inspections, document damages by capturing images and videos, and send the records to fleet managers from the app.
Your staff can also use the app to create custom workflows based on the specific equipment for inspection, saving you from laborious, time-sucking assessments.
A powerful cloud-based solution simplifies and speeds up your workflows, allowing you and your team to act promptly and complete tasks efficiently.
2. Leverage AI technology
Including Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology in your existing systems is an excellent way to make your workflows more efficient.
AI tech can make your lives easier while supercharging your business processes with minimal effort from you and your teams.
For example, client support tasks, such as gathering lead information and addressing basic customer queries, can eat up a chunk of your team’s productive hours and energy.
To automate key aspects of this process, use effective AI chatbot software such as ActiveChat.
The platform uses decision-tree chatbots and AI natural language understanding to automate your customer conversations.
Image source: activechat.com.
You can build a no-code, flexible chatbot for your website, email, Facebook messenger, SMS, and other platforms and communications channels.
The chatbot platform facilitates a seamless multi-channel customer service experience. It lets you start client conversations using ActiveChat’s native website chat and continue them on the channels clients use.
AI chatbots can handle simple, repetitive customer service tasks, easing your team’s workload and allowing them to deliver client support services faster.
It’s an excellent way to streamline your time-sucking, laborious tasks for more efficient and productive customer service operations.
3. Utilize automation
Managing your online store on top of running email campaigns and other marketing initiatives requires A LOT of work, especially when using manual methods.
Take a huge load off you and your team’s shoulders by automating repetitive tasks such as email automation.
You can set automated workflows so your team won’t have to manually respond to every person who subscribes to your email list.
For instance, Wix, one of the popular ecommerce platforms for small businesses, allows you to configure and deliver automated emails and automate other tasks to help streamline your workflows.
Choose triggers to automatically set off designated actions, such as sending a Thank You email when visitors submit a web form.
Supercharge your email initiatives and marketing campaigns and other business-critical processes by automating your routine tasks.
This allows your team members to speed up performing jobs while getting back time better spent on core tasks that improve workflow efficiency.
4. Centralize customer management
Managing customer relationships is crucial to your company’s success, but it also requires some elbow grease.
Handle it poorly, and you’re looking at slow, inefficient workflows that can seriously hurt your processes, from lead generation to closing deals.
Handle client relationships effectively and efficiently by using top-of-the-line Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
A reliable CRM software has the tools to streamline gathering customer data, including those linked with from your Electronic Point of Sale or EPOS system.
CRM solutions such as EngageBay give you overall visibility into your sales, marketing, and customer service client data, relationships, and interactions.
It also speeds up engaging your leads and managing client relationship tasks from one central location.
Accessing and using customer data and contextual information is quick and easy with a CRM, allowing your teams to handle tasks such as upselling and cross-selling efficiently.
Image source: engagebay.com.
Your sales and marketing teams can also prioritize leads and opportunities quickly since they can easily track clients as they move through the customer journey. This allows your reps to identify sales-ready leads in a jiffy.
Additionally, CRM systems give you a central business data repository, expediting your data analyses and reporting to boost your company’s performance.
5. Deploy a project management platform
Seamless collaboration plays a huge role in optimizing your workflows.
Use project management platforms to improve your team’s collaboration and communication and, in turn, increase their productivity and efficiency.
Dependable project management software ClickUp offers features that help members across your teams get a close view of your targets, phases, and tasks (among others) throughout the entire project cycle.
The software lets you manage your resources and to-dos using a Gantt, calendar, list, or board view and build your workflows.
Its other essential project management features include checklists, task templates, and dependencies, priority tagging, custom statuses, sorting and filtering, task assigning, and more.
You get a user-friendly interface with functionalities that allow your team to simplify and automate performing and completing tasks.
As such, your team can streamline workflows, improve collaboration, and ensure you stick to the project time-frame. This helps optimize your business processes for better efficiency and productivity.
Additional tip: Build a productivity boosting app
While there are countless online tools that can seriously drive up your workflow and business process productivity, they don’t always offer the perfect solution for your needs.
So why not build your own app?
Creating an app based on your exact business needs and adapting it to your unique workflow dynamics gives you a tailor-fit solution to fully optimize your business processes.
For instance, you could create an app that streamlines your internal workflows such as client portals, document management, and team collaboration tools.
You can also create a business app that helps you showcase your story, products, and brand to improve your customers’ shopping experiences while allowing you to promote offers such as coupons and sales easily.
It’s a great way to facilitate faster workflows while delivering memorable customer experiences that foster brand loyalty.
Make your app available across channels and easy to use and navigate to optimize its purpose.
See: Getting tangible about intangibles: The future of growth and productivity?
If you use Azure DevOps to create your app, ensure you backup your data, codes, work items, repositories, and more with Backrightup.
An Azure DevOps backup using Backrightup’s flexible service is crucial to running regular, automated backups to keep all your business app codes and data safe.
Doing so saves you from doing tedious, manual backups that can take up tons of time and effort.
Manual backups can also be open to errors and are at risk of causing you to lose your data during server crashes, malware attacks, and even negligence if you forget to run backups.
Backrightup simplifies the process by running automated backups of your Azure DevOps instances and other data as soon as you sign up for an account.
You can turn on (or off) automatic backups of the specific items in your repository and restore them with a few clicks.
Backrightup also lets you backup your code to your preferred storage location without maintaining backup scripts and back up everything from your pipelines to your wikis.
Keep your app codes safe by adding a layer of protection through regular, automated backups. This gives you the security and peace of mind that your app codes and data are secure.
It also helps you avoid interruptions leading to app crashes that can slow down your workflows or worse, ruin the customer experience.
Optimize your business process workflows today
Efficient business operations translate to increased customer retention, improved service delivery, and better performance (among others).
Follow the tips in this guide to help you optimize your workflows and streamline your business processes.
With the right tools and strategies, productive, efficient, and ultimately profitable business operations can become a reality.
Learn what works best for your teams and company and leverage them to drive business growth and success.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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