One of the best things you can do for your business is adopt new process management trends that will streamline your workflow. After all, as an entrepreneur, you have countless responsibilities on your plate. The right process management systems can simplify your workflow and give you access to better information, ensuring that you are better equipped to lead your company. The following process management systems can automate and simplify your workflow
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Process automation
Automation will continue to help streamline routine business tasks, giving you more time to focus on higher-level strategic work. Indeed, AI has already seen widespread implementation for tasks like sending marketing emails and lead nurturing, as well as tracking supply chain and logistics data.
Automation can be especially beneficial for more mundane tasks, like data entry. A properly programmed automation tool can perform tasks faster, while also reducing the errors associated with manual entry. The results speak for themselves. Towards Data Science notes that top-performing companies are twice as likely as their competitors to use AI in their marketing.
Brett Cheloff of ConnectWise notes:
“It takes 5 to 7 minutes for (IT) techs to open up new tickets due to manual steps like assigning companies and contact information, finding and adding configurations, and more. With automatic ticket routing, you can reduce the time spent on tickets to just 30 seconds. For a tech that works on 20 tickets a day, that results in 90 minutes a day, or 7.5 hours a week, in additional productivity.”
Related: 4 Ways to Improve Your Client Relationships Through Automation
Support-driven data
While there are many resources startups can use to gain data insights for their business, few are more valuable than their customers. Finding a way to quantify data gained from customer conversations and other interactions can provide crucial insights regarding your products and services. Even more significant, it can give you insights into how you can better communicate with your customers.
This makes using data gleaned from customer support resources more important than ever. The more sources you use to collect and analyze data, the more insights you’ll glean.
A case study from Wix Answers on Yotpo shows just one example of how this can be done. Using information it gleaned from previous customer support tickets, Yotpo built a customized knowledge base featuring over 600 support articles. In addition to this customer-facing resource, the company also built an internal knowledge base to help streamline the work of its support agents.
This data-backed solution quickly delivered meaningful results by helping customers take on a “self-service” approach to their questions. The company estimates that their knowledge base has helped deflect tens of thousands of support tickets from its 400,000-plus customers. Most noteworthy is that the number of support tickets actually decreased even while monthly signups grew.
Cognitive chatbots
A recent survey from Oracle found that roughly 80 percent of businesses plan to use chatbots in 2020 as a means of further streamlining their customer support systems. Advances in AI and machine learning are making chatbots increasingly capable of addressing common questions and concerns from customers.
Chatbots are primarily being used to answer frequently asked questions and resolve basic inquiries. This frees up your human customer support staff by ensuring that they only have to deal with more complex issues. This results in faster responses and higher customer satisfaction.
As just one example, CIO reports how one bank deployed 85 bots to handle 13 different claims processes. The bots were able to handle over 1.5 million requests in a single year, adding capacity “equivalent to more than 200 full-time employees at approximately 30 percent of the cost of recruiting more staff.”
Predictive and prescriptive analytics
Automatically collecting information from customer support requests and other data sources is one thing. But generating actionable insights from this information is where everything ultimately comes together.
The good news is that predictive and prescriptive analytics tools are making it easier than ever for entrepreneurs to gain crucial insights and implement a course of action. Predictive analytics tools use statistical models and algorithms to use data to predict future trends and potential outcomes. Prescriptive analytics takes things even further by leveraging this data to suggest potential strategies.
By speeding up the decision-making process and helping founders form data-driven strategies, these analytic tools can reduce risk and drive profitability. In fact, a study from Nucleus Research found that companies achieve an average ROI of $10.66 for each dollar spent on such analytics tools.
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New resources
No matter what goals you have set in order to run your business better in the coming months, one of the best ways to ensure that you achieve your desired outcomes is to start using better process management systems. Adopting technologies that give you access to better information, help you save time and reduce errors will allow your business to reach its full potential.
As you take advantage of resources that will streamline your operations and make your daily grind just a little bit easier, you will have more time for the growth activities that matter most.
