It doesn’t matter how simple your business is. There are a lot of moving parts involved in delivering something to the customer.
Not only must you produce the product or service, you have to keep track of supplies and expenses, often maintain a complex supply chain, and listen to both individual customers and the overall marketplace so you can adapt your business and continue growing.
What goes on behind the scenes is just as important as what you deliver to your customers. Both of these things affect each other, and problems with one will often result in problems with the other. But with the right workflow software, you can manage both the behind-the-scenes work and the customer-facing work with skill, precision, and professionalism.
Innovation of Form
Maybe your business bakes bread, or maybe it draws up legal contracts. Whatever it is that your business does, there’s a metaphorical “assembly line” of all the tasks involved in getting it done. And when any part of that “assembly line” is inefficient or broken down, you have a harder time delivering that amazing product or service.
It’s no mystery why businesses invest in consultants to evaluate how they take care of the countless processes that go into running a business. Being able to see bottlenecks and cumbersome processes is the first step to changing them so they’re more efficient.
Innovation of Substance
Few businesses get away with selling the exact same product year after year. Coca-Cola may not have changed its formula (except for the one disastrous time in 1985), but it has certainly changed the ways the product is delivered, in terms of can design, bottle shape, and new offerings incorporating additional flavors or diet-friendly sweeteners.
Most businesses know they must continually evolve to meet the needs of customers, and today, listening to customers through social media and web analytics is crucial to continuing to provide what consumers want. It’s too expensive for businesses to operate on hunches concerning consumer wants, and that’s why big data and data analytics have become so important in a world where businesses are expected to be responsive.
How Automated Workflows Bring Them Together
Both the form and the substance of your business can be improved through the use of automated workflows. Inefficient back-office processes cost money by slowing things down and frustrating employees, which is why automated workflows are constantly being designed and fine-tuned. Order numbers copied down by hand gave way to order numbers being entered into computers, and many of those have given way to order numbers entered by quickly scanning a barcode. Paper processes have largely given way to automated, electronic processes that save resources and time while cutting down on error rates.
On the customer-facing side of things, automated workflows can step customer service reps through consistent processes for taking care of customer needs, while other automated workflows gather analytics data for the generation of actionable insights. Last month’s Facebook analytics can be used to tailor this month’s social media campaign, and last quarter’s website analytics can show the web development team exactly how to improve the user experience for site visitors.
Can the choice of workflow software address both innovation of form and innovation of substance? Yes! PerfectApps is workflow process software that allows for creation of fully-customized workflows with no programming required. Whether you want to set up a workflow for timekeeping, order processing, or collection of online analytics, PerfectApps lets you do so by dragging and dropping workflow elements into place.
PerfectApps interfaces with web forms as well as databases, spreadsheets, and Salesforce CRM, so you can gather data and direct it to exactly where you need it with minimum hassle. The bottom-line result is a business where back-office processes are smooth and efficient and customer-facing processes adapt quickly to customer needs. Best of all, you can try PerfectApps for free by signing up for a trial. Don’t let inefficiencies in your business keep you from wowing the world with your outstanding products and services when you can create the workflows that will ensure everything runs optimally.