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Reinvent your unstructured processes
Messy processes that lack cohesion tend to be complex and manual in terms of day-to-day operations. They often require touchpoints and collaboration across multiple people and departments, and using tools that don’t necessarily lend themselves to a high degree of business process automation and management.
Ever heard the common complaints of “you’re not using the latest version of the spreadsheet” or “I sent an email to the mailbox, has no one even looked at it yet?” Using shared mailboxes and spreadsheets to manage your business workload can lead to inefficiencies and be painful for teams to manage.
While these methods certainly have their time and place, as your team grows - and their workload increases in line with that growth - more efficient ways of managing your processes will be needed.
How many of the following do your team relate to?
Unnecessary time spent completing a request
How often do your team receive email requests with all the necessary information needed to complete it upfront? Our guess is not very often. Chances are, the request will take a bit more back and forth to gather everything needed before anything is actually actioned.
Imagine the time saved if your team received everything in one go and subsequently how much more they could get done. With the Workload Management app, this becomes standard.
Poor customer experience
A key aspect of customer facing interactions is that your customer feels reassured that their request has been acknowledged and is being actioned. The last thing you want is for them to double the workload by growing impatient and contacting your team through a different channel for a response.
And that’s just the responses. What about status updates?
Your internal business customers won’t have access to your team’s mailbox, so they have no visibility on the progress of their request or query.
Before you know it, you’ve got another mail in your inbox. Let’s hope they at least replied to the email trail and didn’t start a new chain with a different subject line!
Unable to sufficiently capture progress
What happens when a team member goes on annual leave, or worse, is off sick not having completed a handover?
With incoherent procedures it’s difficult to determine how far a request has been taken through its lifecycle, or which discussions and activities have taken place since the request. The unfortunate person covering for whoever is off will be left struggling to work out where the request stands and what needs to be done next.
Poor reporting capabilities
How easy is it for you to track your team’s workload? If you’re spending a lot of time every month collating this information, it’s likely to be a manual and repetitive task.
Now if you’re using spreadsheets, this might be easier with the magic of macros, pivot tables, and formulas. However, tools such as spreadsheets do also leave room for human error, and many people only know how to do basic formulas in Excel. It’s not the easiest to gauge productivity this way, so it’s very possible that you aren't capturing all the data needed, all the time.
Team inefficiencies
How often do emails get left in an inbox because team members have either assumed someone else will pick it up, or just because it’s too complex a request and it's quicker to address the simpler ones? Or worse, how often have multiple team members collided in picking up the same email?
Generally, managing a shared mailbox can become frustrating very quickly, particularly if countless emails are being sent to it every day. If this is the case, it might be the sole responsibility of one poor team member to manage the inbox themselves!
Poor auditing capabilities
Depending on your organisation and the type of work you manage, you may need to keep a detailed audit trail of activities and actions.
With the potential for emails being deleted, inability to track who closed which request or the lack of telling who last updated a document, keeping an audit trail is likely to become time consuming and erroneous.
Governance and process adherence
Are your team members adhering to the process every time? How could you tell if they weren’t?
Not having clear procedures in place make it difficult to ensure protocol is being followed, and thus ensure your customers are receiving the same level of service and quality every time.
The benefits of automated processes using Workload Management
If any of these have struck a chord, it may be time to consider a solution which can provide you with optimised workflows to deliver your services.
Unifii’s Workload Management app helps businesses address the above issues. Some key benefits of the app include:
Seamless workflows
Item and task management for managing customer requests and queries, whilst using a dynamic data model to give your team the flexibilities needed to help with management.
Self-Service & Knowledge
This is the ability to drive self-service from a service portal integrated with catalogues and knowledge articles. It’s your starting point to successfully deflect queries by pointing your customers to consolidated information in a single place. Customers can also view and track the progress of items they have submitted, as well as communicate information directly through the portal.
