Poor business process efficiency has serious ramifications for your profitability and growth potential. In short, bad process often leads to lost money, missed opportunities, disengaged staff and a poor customer experience. It’s pretty hard to grow your business when all your daily tasks take longer than they should. Here’s why it’s so important to identify broken business processes.
Poor business process efficiency costs you money
It’s probably no secret, but if processes aren’t working effectively, you’re losing money. Either it costs you more to get things done, you need more staff to achieve results. Even worse, it takes longer to meet your customers’ needs, resulting in poor customer satisfaction.
If you identified broken business processes and invested in technology to make those time-consuming tasks easier, think of all the time you could spend on servicing more customers? Or, at the very least, servicing your existing customers better.
Leads are slipping through the cracks
It’s hard to focus on turning leads into sales when you’re dealing with inefficiency. A sales team without the right tools to do their job is going to be nowhere near as effective as it should be. And that costs you money.
Every sale you miss is a chance to generate income gone begging. However, if you identify why those leads are falling through the cracks, you can implement better processes and technology. This leads to more revenue and faster business growth.
High staff turnover and poor engagement
If you think you’re annoyed by business process inefficiency, spare a thought for your staff. They’re the ones who deal with re-work, mundane tasks that a computer should be handling, and clunky technology on daily basis. Before long, they reach a breaking point.
When your staff are constantly under pressure, or performing boring, repetitive tasks all day, they become disengaged. This leads to lower performance and eventually, staff turnover. Finding and retaining top talent is hard, so don’t push them out the door with bad business processes.
Increasing business process efficiency when your customer experience is clunky
Let’s not forget about your customers. They’re the ones who bring in the income you need to survive, and broken processes affect them too. Whether it’s slow fulfilment of orders, inefficient customer support, or lack of communication, your process can make or break a business relationship. There’s plenty of competition out there, so don’t make it easy for your customers to look elsewhere.
You don’t have time to grow your business
Finally, as a business owner or leader, you should be focused on growing the business, not working in it. Poor business process efficiency often means you’re doing too much of the heavy lifting yourself, and your day is spent putting out spot fires. If you want more time to work on planning, strategy, networking and creating opportunities for growth, it’s time to improve your processes.
There is plenty of technology out there designed to make your and your team’s day easier. So, if you want to free yourself up to do what you do best, speak to a business process efficiency expert and take control of your time.
