Streamline business processes automation-ally

There is a huge rush to streamline operations as a result of the current economic situation. However, every company should be looking at ways to run the business with less cost and higher efficiency at all times. It helps to prepare a company for lean times and ensures it will get the most reward during up cycles.

When margins get thin or revenue starts to fall, action needs to be taken. What is the right action? Should staff be cut? If so, when? How many? These are hard decisions. However, now is the time to make the right decisions, so future decisions become easier.

Perhaps the most overlooked way to improve business conditions is by optimising and automating business processes. Even focusing on just a few processes can have a dramatic effect on a company's bottom line.

Everyone is cutting staff now because they didn't optimise their processes years ago. In 2004-2005, they could have been running with 10%-50% fewer staff members. They would have made more profit and been in a stronger position to handle either a significant increase or decrease in sales volume - or they could have pursued additional markets. Like a bucket full of holes, valuable resources are being wasted instead of being used productively.

Now is the time to review processes for automation. Here are the reasons why:

Now is the time to make the right decisions, so future decisions become easier.

Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.

First, automating repetitive manual, tedious procedures focuses staff on making money. Most jobs have some repetitive tasks. For example, the initial review of an insurance claim could look up the policy details of the claim and examine whether it meets one of the hundreds of criteria that generate an automatic approval. Claim history could be examined to determine if the deductibles have been reached. Instead of agents looking at every claim, they could review the smaller number of claims that don't qualify for automatic approval. That represents a potentially huge savings in the number of employees needed to complete that task.

Second, businesses risk losing staff with valuable knowledge and experience. Documenting and incorporating that knowledge into system processes protects the business from losing valuable operating information. Systematising the best employees' processes will increase the productivity of other employees. Imagine if the successful techniques of the most profitable salespeople could be utilised by new or less experienced salespeople. Sales performance could be evaluated with a more balanced measurement.

Third, many tasks function much better as automated processes. Processes like expense report approval or initial insurance claim review both require a complicated matrix of overlapping criteria to be properly applied. The work of building these complex matrices can be done once, tested, and then released for use by all employees in an automated workflow. When changes or corrections occur, only one update is needed.

Communications-based process automation (CBPA) offers a unique ability to automate most (if not all) of the business process. Most existing business process automation “solutions” serve a particular niche or act as an extension of another product, such as imaging/document management solutions. With CBPA, the all-in-one IP communications system becomes the process automation platform for the company. Instead of creating a dependency on complex programming, application development and customisation, CBPA offers organisations a single system capable of providing everything needed to easily automate just about any common process.

Knowing the skills and availability of each employee, routing and queuing work to the next available employee and recording the time for each step (including latency) are vital techniques the contact centre has developed, and that businesses should be adopting without delay.

ACD technology is recognised as one of the most powerful in the world to handle distribution, management and reporting of work activity. Contact centres use it to distribute calls, e-mail, Web chat, and other communications. When this intelligent tool is used with work activities, managers receive insight into workflow and status. It can point out gaps to help management improve processes and reduce cycle time. Workforce management can predict the headcount necessary to complete the anticipated amount of work, and historical data can be used to predict how much work there is to complete.

All these advanced technologies result in dynamic work “push” instead of static work “pull”. This reduces the human latency inherent in many other solutions, where work simply sits waiting for an employee to pick it up and take action.

Having these capabilities can help organisations automate business processes, respond faster, control costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

* Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.