Evaluate These Processes For 2019 Success

You keep thinking about it. Now is the time to put it into action!

Consider this blog post the call to action for your business process New Year’s resolution.

We want you to stress less about the little things that add up to big things when you have slower than necessary business processes.

Human Resources

Now Hiring: A very common complaint from job applicants is their distain for companies who have poor employment application processes. Applicants take the time to apply for your open jobs and the process is lacking consideration for their time.

One of the culprits is the application itself. The online application requests that the applicant upload their resume to kick off the workflow. Many complaints are about the steps that follow. What sense does it make for them to upload their resume with hopes of it extracting the data from the application only to have the next screens ask them to enter their personal information and work history. It’s double work.

Another complaint is what happens (or what doesn’t happen) following the submission of the applications. Many understand that you can’t personally follow up with each and every application, but at the very least, a confirmation email that the application was received and the closure if that job is no longer available is something that can be automated entirely. LiquidOffice is what we’d recommend taking a look at to optimize your HR department. The software is also great for processing PTO and expense reports.

Accounts Payable

Invoice Processing: Accounts Payable is one of the biggest pains in organizations working with outside vendors. Peak times of the year can be extremely challenging. When a company uses an increased amount of services from a vendor, that also leads to an influx in invoices to be processes. If your company isn’t staffing up for these times, the payment process will likely be delayed. Delayed payments to vendors can damage relationships, lead to staff burnout, and missing out on early payment discounts.

The automation of the invoice processing steps can alleviate the majority of these pains. When you automate the data capture and verification with purchase order matching, you can severely slice the errors that can occur while invoices are being collected, entered into the ERP for payment, and paid. ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices is an amazing software to kick-off this initiative.

Marketing

Forms: There are a few different ways in which you can begin optimizing your marketing processes. If you don’t yet have your website set up with forms that have auto-responders set to acknowledge receipt of an inquiry, this is a big, yet very easy one to start with.

Chat: Another great addition that is really making an impact in the way we communicate is the addition of a conversational marketing app on our website. We use Drift and love it. In the “now” society which we live, giving our website visitors the opportunity to chat quickly rather than submit forms has been a shift for us, but has been one that our visitors have welcomed.

Social Media: Social media scheduling tools are great to help your team load up and schedule content that they’ve created on your website. Spending the time being active on social media is beneficial because it drives traffic back to your website organically. We love Buffer for scheduling.

Sales

Having a CRM to manage your contacts, opportunities, and all the engagement that goes on surrounding your leads and customers is critical to maintaining your sanity with regard to sales. We use Salesforce which is a really robust sales platform. A few of the perks that we like are the additional email tracking that we get by having our Outlook (Office) 365 connected to Salesforce Inbox so we don’t have to manually log all of our touchpoints to our leads and customers. That simple connection indicates that the contact has been touched, and we can see the detail within a few clicks – even if it was a team member who sent the email.

The other great thing that we love about Salesforce is that we have our web forms on our website connected as Web To Lead forms. This means that when we get a new lead on the website, the lead is automatically entered into Salesforce and we can follow the origination of that lead from the very first touch. We can even see the page which the lead was visiting when they submitted the form which is really useful when following up.

What about you? What have you already automated? What do you plan to automate? What are your biggest hurdles for automation?

Tweet us and let us know! We are on Twitter @optiform. See you there! 

Schedule a call with our team to learn more about ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices or OpenText LiquidOffice. We’ll gladly give you a demo and share other examples of use cases! 

Get scheduled here.