Every business spends a vast amount of time and energy selling, otherwise known as winning business. We all talk about being client-centric, but does that apply only to your sales-facing teams?
A major killer of Australian small and medium-sized businesses is internal processes that are damaging. There are plenty of examples showing how bad internal processes can have a massive detrimental effect, not only on your staff, but also on your clients.
Many of you will have worked in places with this issue or had a supplier that’s left a bad impression on you, simply because they haven’t worked out their processes. There are some key areas you should examine to determine if a harmful process might be affecting you and your clients.
Manual, duplicated, disjointed processes
Even in the digital age, there are still many firms with poor, manual or duplicated processes in operation. For example, do you have the same information stored in different systems? Often, business owners create the problems ourselves by overcomplicating processes, which in turn makes it difficult for clients and employees. For example, one of our clients recently found a process breakdown that was causing service delays, stemming from a recent phone system update. The problem was created by how they were handling certain types of inbound calls and the impact this was having on fulfilling service orders. It turned out to be an easy fix, but it highlighted how disparate, manual processes can affect your client experience and undo all the good work.
Paper storage
Manual file storage is still huge in Australia. You’d think with the digital revolution that paper would have almost disappeared but the exact opposite is true. Manual storage often means lost information because it’s not easy to locate critical data quickly. There are plenty of statistics that show employees spend more than 20 per cent of any one week looking for information. This kills your productivity and can frustrate your clients. Think about leaving a client on hold to go find some key information buried in a filing cabinet – not a good look in 2017.
Invoicing and accounting
Nothing frustrates people more than a bad billing process. I left Telstra last year because of their hopeless billing systems. Inaccuracies, time delays and incomplete records are not just a frustration for you. They create client pain as well.
Streamlining your billing processes doesn’t have to drastically change the way you do business. It can be as simple as how you load information into your back-end accounting systems. Do that in a uniform, consistent manner and you’ll see an improvement in the way you do business.
Test it yourself – be a client
For me, the best way to identify any gaps in your back-office process is to adopt an undercover boss approach and take a walk in your clients’ shoes. Call your business yourself and test out how your team handles a sales call, a client billing enquiry and so on. If you don’t want to do it yourself, ask someone you trust. Tracing the journey from the clients’ point of view can be your best strategy and enable you to quickly identify where it’s going wrong.
Remember, if it’s not easy for a client to do business with you, you’ll find it’s pretty easy for them to walk away and find an alternative!
