Business process digitalisation

You have no reliable way of measuring progress and tracking results. For example, you can’t easily track which employee made the most sales, which customers bought you the most income, which marketing strategy was the most effective at bringing in new leads and other important kinds of information.

The data you collect, because of human error, can get lost, have inaccuracies or become damaged. Plus, because different data is stored separately, searching for the information you want can take a lot of time.

Not all kinds of data can be collected. For example, you can’t track which employee is handling which case – and how well they are performing. You have to manually search through your messages or emails to track the activities going on within your company – or have to painstakingly set reminders and to-do lists.

For example, suppose one of your employees works in AR (Accounts Receivable) collection. They use email and phone to deal with all their cases. In this situation, how will you track this employee’s progress? How will you know how many cases they handled? Which ones were handled successfully or unsuccessfully? What stage of collection is a specific case in?

Exactly.

There is no way for you to track all this crucial data – unless you invade their privacy by reading their emails and recording their calls.

The result?

You don’t know what’s going on within your company. There’s no way to measure performance, mark progress or get an idea where things are going. Cases are lost, tasks are left pending and there is company-wide confusion as to how to make things better.

‘Business Process Digitalisation’. As complicated as this sounds, the meaning of this term is quite simple:

Business process digitalization simply means converting your business’ manual data, workflows and assignments into digital records which you store inside a single easy-to-use database.

There are three main reasons why should digitize your business data:

1. Your data will be more secure: In manual record keeping, it’s easy for a file to get deleted, lost or tampered with. But when you digitize your data, it’s stored in the cloud. This protects your data from being stolen, destroyed or edited. Plus, you control who gets access to which data.
2. You’ll reduce the discrepancy between different datasets within your business – and sync different kinds of data together. For example, your marketing department will be able to look at sales data, your customer support team will be able to look at marketing data and so on.
3. You will be able to track and measure activities and results across every single department within your business – and get a bird’s eye view of how your company is doing . This will help you quickly identify weak spots in your company that you can improve upon, thus increasing the efficiency of your business.

Let’s take a look at this example to get a better idea why this is important:

Suppose you want to increase sales within your company. For that, you need to identify your least selling product in order to boost its sales. To make sure it sells effectively, you have to give it to your best performing salesperson.

If you have digitised your business records, you can easily find which product has sold the least and which employee has made the most sales – all in one place in a few minutes. This way, you can assign your least selling product to best performing salesperson for effective promotion.

But if you were keeping manual records, finding this information i.e. least selling product and best performing salesperson wouldn’t have been an easy job.

This argument is further backed by a report by McKinsey Analytics, who state:

“Data and analytics are changing the basis of competition. Leading companies are using their capabilities not only to improve their core operations but to launch entirely new business models. The network effects of digital platforms are creating a winner-take-most dynamic in some markets.”

Similarly, recognizing the value of digitally backed data, they also say that:

“Data is now a critical corporate asset. It comes from the web, billions of phones,sensors, payment systems, cameras, and a huge array of other sources—and its value is tied to its ultimate use.”

When you start the process of digitising your company’s processes, it will require you and your team to shift to a completely new software. In this situation, there are three main challenges you might face:

1. You and your team will have to move out of your comfort zone: Chances are you and your employees have been using email and spreadsheets from the start. This means using a new software to keep track of your records and to communicate will be a totally unfamiliar experience for many. As such, there’s a possibility your coworkers (and you, yourself) will try to talk yourselves out of using this software simply because you aren’t aware how it might benefit your business’ bottom line.
2. There is a new learning curve to go through: A software that is capable of keeping track of all your business activity and can digitize your workflows means it has a lot of powerful tools. Learning how to use it, can therefore, take some time and might get in the way of your company fully adapting the software.
3. It requires the company’s decision-makers to make an investment: The software associated with digitisation isn’t free. Rather, it requires you to pay a small fee for each user every month as long as you use it. This forces top decision-makers within the company to think whether the software is worth the investment or not.

While these concerns are valid, they are also easily addressed.

In the next section, we’ll take a look at what software the world’s top businesses (both fortune 500 and SMBs) use to digitise their processes – and exactly in what way it benefits them.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. With this software, you can digitise all your sales processes. You can store your contacts, assign and track activities, and view reports and analytics on company performance.

There are three main departments within your business a CRM can digitise:

1. Sales: With a CRM, you can manage your sales activity. You can assign tasks to the appropriate sales agents based on different metrics. You can create workflows which guides your agents on how to make a sale. And finally, you can see the results of your sales activities by looking at your analytics. It helps you digitise your whole sales process right from when you get a lead to when they become a paying customer.
2. Marketing: With CRM, you can add steps and create workflows to manage your marketing activities. You can set up a procedure as to what kind of emails are to be sent to a contact depending where they are in your buying journey. You can also build customer profiles, segment different customers in different lists and send targeted messages to each – all using a CRM.
3. Customer Support: Your CRM software puts all your communications within your company and with your customers in one place. Using a CRM’s built-in email capabilities and ticketing system, you can handle customer enquiries and process them effectively. You and your support agents can also view the full history of conversation each of your customers had with your company.

This since these three activities make the most of your business, this means a CRM has the capability to digitise nearly all your records, workflows and data.

The biggest advantage you get by using a CRM is that you integrate three of your most important departments in your business, namely sales, marketing and customer support.

Before, all this data might have been stored separately.

But now, within your business, all this data, whether it’s of sales, marketing or customer support, is integrated and revolves around one thing: your customer.

What this means is that a CRM software lets you build extremely comprehensive customer profiles. You can see:

Buying History: How many products they’ve already purchased and how much money they spend during a period of time.

Who They Are: Which industry they belong to, what professional they hold and which income bracket they’re from.

Their commuinication History: When was the last time they contacted you for support and what they talked about with your agents.

Using this wealth of data, you can divide and segment your customers based on their identities, behavior and relationship with your brand. And as a result, you can become more effective selling your products and services – and improve your bottomline dramatically.

In fact, according to Business Wire, for every $1 you spend on a CRM, you make $5.60 back. That’s means your ROI is more than 5x than what you invest in a CRM software.

But now, within your business, all this data, whether it’s of sales, marketing or customer support, is integrated and revolves around one thing: your customer.

What this means is that a CRM software lets you build extremely comprehensive customer profiles. You can see:

That’s because, as we’ve said above, using a CRM allows you to gather data about your customers.

Why is that important?

Because the more data you have on your customers, the better the relationships you will have with them. You’ll know which products they’ll like, what kind of promotions and ads they’ll respond to and what’s the best way to solve any problems they’re facing.

And the more your customers have a positive experience with your company, the more likely they are to do more business with you.

This is further proven by Capterra’s recent survey of CRM users.

Companies who use CRM for business process digitalization retain nearly 50% of their customers. And not just that, using a CRM also improved customer satisfaction by 47%. And most importantly, companies which adopted CRM experienced a 45% increase in revenue as well!

As you can see the numbers from various surveys speaks all. Adopting a proper CRM / BPM platform for your organization will improve performance, brings efficiency and in turn will boost the profitability.