Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Jen. In the last video, we looked at three steps to create your first business process. Today, we're looking at streamlining business processes or making them more efficient as you build them. We'll focus on the most effective steps to improving your business processes based on my 15 years of experience helping companies improve their efficiency and their profits. If you watched the last video, you'll remember I focused on three key steps to building your first business process. This video walks you through evaluating those processes as you build them or in retrospect to refine and improve them and really optimize the processes that you have in place. We'll reevaluate what's there and question whether it's really the best way that we could be doing the work or if there's some other better way that could streamline our operations. Just because you've always done something in a particular way doesn't mean that it's always going to be the best way to do it. That's where streamlining business processes comes in. Let's look at four simple steps to help you streamline. The first step is to identify the end result or the goal. What do you want to accomplish with this business process? Here, we're not focused on the actual mechanics of accomplishing it. We're talking about the high level, what needs to happen. So if you're in a service business, the end result is delivering the particular service to the customer. If you have an e-commerce store or a product based business model, the end result is delivering that product to the consumer, to your customer. Really focus on the what, not the how. Step two, evaluate your process for opportunities. Now that we have the end goal identified, let's look at the whole process. If this is your first time working on streamlining business processes, there's three key things I'd recommend that you look for here. Look for areas where an activity is repeated more than once. Look for areas that tend to take a lot of time or resources. And look for areas that don't clearly connect to the end result. Let's stick with the same example I used in the last video about setting up a process for how someone should answer and respond to different customer calls. In this case, you may identify times where there are multiple phone calls needed with a customer. Maybe they call the first time with a question and you need to get back to them. But when you call them back, you need to get more information from them. And maybe that means you then need to go create a quote for the work that they want done and call them back a third time to give that to them. So the opportunity here is to identify what questions could be asked up front in that first call so that you consolidate the number of calls you have to make. Maybe there will still be two phone calls needed. When the customer calls, you collect the information you need, all the information you need to generate a quote, and then you call them again when the quote's ready. But this already takes out one step of the process and makes it more efficient, not just for you, but for your customer as well, leading to a better customer experience. You may also find that there are certain questions that customers don't think to ask ahead of time that you can go ahead and include when you talk with them. So if there's a service business, you could go ahead and answer questions like whether they need to be home or if there's anything that they need to do to prepare for your visit before you arrive. This will preemptively address concerns that may come up later that would either lead to you needing to have more communication through a phone call or maybe an email or confusion when you or your technicians arrive at the service site. Step three to streamlining your business processes is to refine and automate. This is quite similar to what we talked about when it came to just building the processes in the first place. Here we're really fixing things that we found as potential issues or areas for improvement in step two. This refine and automate in the case of the phone calls would be identifying the specific questions that you need to ask in that first phone call to avoid a second or third call on the same topic. Document them and add them into the process. Perhaps you get the same questions repeatedly from customers no matter what the form, whether that's a call or an email. In this case, adding an FAQ to your site could minimize the number of calls and emails that you get. This won't eliminate all questions on the topic because there's always going to be someone that doesn't read the FAQ or something that the FAQ just doesn't cover their specific concern or question. However, instead of focusing on how should someone respond to these questions that come up repeatedly, how about if you eliminate the majority of these questions in the first place or you find other ways to answer them? That's even better than having someone that's prepared to respond to emails or answer questions via phone because you eliminated the need for anyone internally within your organization to do work on this question, to spend time dedicated to it. Again, you'll occasionally get the question, so you may still need that, but rather than that being a large portion of what someone's done, it should continue to shrink over time as more people reference that FAQ list that you've already put together. Step four is to track and identify successes and failures. Now that you've taken steps to streamline your business processes, how did they work? A lot of times you'll find they worked really well. You may also find that there's additional steps you could take to make things work even more smoothly. Or you might find that the process that you use to make improvements in your business could work similarly on another topic within the business. There may be times where you find something just didn't work. It didn't make the difference you expected or it actually ended up leading to the same amount of work or more work. In these cases, you need to be open to adapting. You could switch back to the old process, or since you already identified that the old way was probably taking longer than it needed to or was more work than it needed to be, think about other creative ways that you could implement a fix. Say that FAQ isn't working. How about if a customer reaches out, you have a default template email that goes back to them saying you'll respond to their questions as soon as you can and linking them to the FAQ page that maybe they're otherwise not finding. Try to think through how you as a customer might interact with a site. Get feedback from your customers about what's working and what's not working. Then implement fixes that really address the core concern, not just how a customer might think that they want to interact with your company, with your site. As I've mentioned before, treat your processes as living documents. Constantly be open to updating them. This doesn't mean you should be going in every week and making changes to your process, but as you find new opportunities, be open to changing how you're working. Be open, especially if these can lead to the same level of performance, but require less energy, less time, less resources to accomplish the same end goal. This can lead to saving dozens, hundreds, even thousands of hours. Even when we're talking about relatively small businesses, businesses that maybe only have one, two, three employees. Then with this extra time, you're either working less in the business, or you're able to do more things in that same amount of time because you're doing the things that you're doing in a more efficient and effective manner. It's also important to think about your processes in relation to one another. Don't just optimize individual processes and forsake the entire picture. So if the end-to-end experience is you delivering a product or delivering a service to a customer, you may take snapshots of different pieces of that. The initial customer interaction, and your delivery method, and maybe a follow-up process that you have with customers. Focus on how each of these pieces of the process can be best optimized, but also spend some time looking at how you can make the entire process better. Are there things you could do at the first step that would make the second or third step easier? Are there things at the third step that could give you good information to include in the first or second step in the future? These are things that you should think about as you strategically think about implementing good business processes within your company. If you need more help streamlining your processes or your business, or leveraging your data, use the link in the description to reach out to me so we can talk about how I can help you build your business in a more efficient way. Thanks so much for watching. Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com