Efficiency is your biggest challenge. It’s an ever evolving behemoth that includes numerous departments, moving parts and duct-taped together processes. But you’ve got it under control and things work like a well(ish) oiled machine. So, do you actually need help?

Truth: It’s not ‘Efficiency’ that is your biggest challenge - it’s ‘Robust Efficiency’.

• Efficiency = When you’ve got a process in place and it works really well, but probably won’t cope with any real complications or exceptional cases

• Robust Efficiency = You can throw most things at your process and everything still functions relatively well i.e. your output doesn’t deviate greatly
  
  

If you answer ‘yes’ to more than 1 of these 9 statements you should start re-evaluating your processes and potentially seek help. 

1. You’re still waiting for those figures you asked for - last week

2. You’re not entirely sure how many customers you have, or how many you’ve lost

3. It takes more than 1 hour to complete your monthly bill run

4. Some people owe you money. You know they do. But you are not sure who they are, how long the money has been outstanding or exactly how much is owed

5. Your Sales team can tell you how many new leads they generated last month, but not where those leads are now in your pipeline (without scratching around in their inbox for a few hours)

6. You don’t have a Dashboard to view your key business metrics in a single, easy to read place

7. You are unable to track and escalate customer faults and queries through a single database

8. Your Provisioning process involves either a long string of complicated emails (where important steps are routinely missed) or physical pieces of paper that need to be moved from one desk to another

9. Your Call Centre staff spend more than 60% of their time answering customer invoice queries due to either incorrect or unclear bills

This is by no means an exhaustive list, merely one based on the most common complaints we’ve heard. 

Conclusion

The highest level of robust efficiency is something we all aspire to achieve, but often we end up making do with processes that ‘just work’. To know if you truly need help or if you’re fine working with the processes you’ve got - review the above 9 statements to see if any apply to you.

If they do, you may find this eBook interesting: 18 Typical Business Processes that can be Automated to Save Mega Time.