Working from home used to be a novel experience that triggered amusing questions from curious minds: Do you wear pajamas all day? Do you work from your couch? How often do you have to video chat with your boss?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that nearly 30% of Americans can work from home, and with our current public health crisis, the experience is no longer the unicorn it once was. Millions around the world are setting up shop at their dining table for the very first time.
Not only is the shift an adjustment for individual workers, but many companies and universities as a whole are newcomers to efficient remote management. The swift plunge into full-fledged work-from-home status can quickly expose clunky processes within your organization—and slow your team to a grinding halt. But, if done right, well-oiled digital process automation can save time and money across your entire organization.
Approvals via email eliminates time-consuming manual processes
Even in ordinary times, communication is of utmost importance. Your company’s communication culture often starts and ends with how you interact internally. When you’re not able to pop by a team member’s cubicle to ask a quick question or pass off a paper file, you have to start looking at every process from a fresh perspective.
Now that your workforce is distributed across town and maybe even time zones, physically walking paperwork up to the next rung on the approval ladder is an impossibility. Platforms like ProcessMaker can digitize the stroll to the dean’s office and condense the process down to a few clicks of a button within a single email.
Even day-to-day forms like a leave of absence request can pile up into a half dozen emails. Drag-and-drop tools train ProcessMaker to direct the request to the correct person’s inbox and allows them to click “accept” or “reject” without leaving their email client.
Approvals via email improve customer convenience
Customers value convenience more than ever. In fact, 97% of customers have backed out of a purchase because the process was too inconvenient.
Does your new user workflow require a lengthy phone call for your team to manually capture customer data? Keep in mind that your customer is not only balancing a host of new uncertainties, but they’re likely working from home as well. Potentially surrounded by rambunctious out-of-school children or fellow WFH housemates, they might not be able to find the quiet time to focus on extra phone calls. Subsequently, if your onboarding process forces customers through cumbersome workflows, they’re likely to move onto a competitor.
Convenient customer-facing workflows can automate traditionally time-consuming steps like identity verification or credit rating checks. Using ProcessMaker, you can route form inputs through the necessary validation systems. You can even extract and verify information from a customer’s submission of a driver’s license or other important paperwork.
Automated workflows automatically pass the request through the next step in your process. The system can either green-light an automatic approval, or pass an error-riddled request along into the inbox of the appropriate staffer for manual review.
By focusing on customer convenience, you can increase customer satisfaction and drive new business.
Approvals via email digitize the customer journey
How does your team currently check in on a case status? Do you exchange back-and-forth voicemails or heaps of emails to check in on simple questions? If so, email workflow automation can help cut down on these productivity-draining bottlenecks.
With the right reporting tools in place, everyone on your team can have a crystal clear view into the journey of every customer in your system. They can see its current journey through your workflow and see who or what is responsible for the next step. Managers can easily see gaps in the system and trigger email reminders to necessary staff.
COVID-19 prompts us to shift our lifestyles in a lot of ways, and companies and universities need to apply this new thinking to each process in their workflow. Outdated, manual processes drained productivity under the old model and the proliferation of remote work only underscores the importance of digitizing your workflow. If you’ve fallen into the rut of doing things because that’s how they’ve always been done, this workplace transition is an eye-opening time to transform how your organization does business.
