Businesses strive for efficiency across many of their processes – in marketing, sales, finance, IT and other areas. As your business grows, however, you need to ensure that your communication processes are primed for success as well and that you’re scaling any workflows to make sure they continue to work as you add on more people, offerings and ways of working.
Communication is essential to both everyday tasks and long-term success – it’s how cross-functional work gets done. Therefore, it’s imperative to create a scalable solution that’ll save you from implementing various modifications down the road. But how can you become more efficient without making a mess of your current communication processes, especially when it comes to something like email?
Assess Your Email Efficiency
Old email workflows to customers can be a great area to revitalize. With tedious processes and siloed data, companies lose the upper hand when it comes to productivity and utilizing important customer information.
Efficiency becomes compromised when the majority of people who have access to integration tools fall under the IT team. By limiting access to those with a technical background, you’re halting the transformation of your company. Finding a solution that can accommodate both IT and business users will alleviate the congestion of data and necessary work in the process.
Step 1: Address Your Communication System Challenges Head-On
The first step is to actually take a step back and review your current situation. This includes looking at your existing environments and software. To justify changing your company’s communication processes (or at least elements of it), you have to determine if the new tool or product can bring tangible results and serve your use case.
Encountering challenges during change is inevitable, especially when it comes to your systems and processes. Here are six things to consider when establishing a modern communication process (both what you’re bringing into the system and what you hope to accomplish).
- Having an existing email process and workflows that the company is familiar with (but slightly tweaked)
- Fixing siloed customer data
- Having a large number of emails being sent
- Ensuring that the new process is easily adaptable and can be used by non-tech users
- Making sure the new process is GDPR compliant
- Verifying that you have access to comprehensive data analysis
These considerations underline the goal of finding a solution that enhances the process but keeps the tools familiar. Changing the entire system will prolong adoption. By selecting tools that strengthen your existing system, you can avoid an entire re-haul and get people working faster. Joining your existing system with an integration and automation tool friendly to business users can ensure that processes remain familiar and work isn’t completely uprooted.
Step 2: Determine If Your Communication System Is Scalable
When selecting a new solution, you should always plan with the future in mind. Finding one that scales enables you to prepare for growth. For example, instead of creating an entirely new email process or revamping your whole email system, you could introduce a self-serve communication tool that can access key customer data across disparate databases, leverage your core email product functionality, and scale to support your growing customer base (meaning that processes can be changed, get faster and house more data as more customers come in). Furthermore, simply limiting any updates to email can pigeonhole you as may prefer a different mode of communication in the future.
Step 3: Democratize Your Data
Piggybacking off of the above idea, creating a self-serve solution not only ensures that the product grows as you grow, but also that everyone has access to the same data.
In the case of creating a scalable communication system, you should be able to capitalize on your data. Having siloed data prohibits you from making decisions that could benefit the company based on trends, opinions on current offerings, demand, etc. Democratizing your data lets you provide a better customer experience by letting you access that information (which abides by compliance). In turn, you can use it to leverage product benefits and drive for higher adoption of product, better UX and the chance to increase revenue.
Use Case: How a Leading Growth Platform Democratized Its Data
In an effort to socialize its data, a leading inbound marketing, sales and services platform used Workato as its low-code integration and automation solution. In looking for options, they found that Workato was scalable, could aggregate the appropriate data at the right speed, and could intelligently leverage benefits from their existing tools.
Create a Communication Engine That Capitalizes on Consumer Behavior
It is not enough to have visibility into your customer data. Automation is part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is well in progress. By using an automation platform, you can open up your systems and aggregate data. To increase productivity even further, you must contextualize customer data. By setting up consumer tracking and action triggers with your communication/marketing systems, your team will know when to engage with customers, what message best suits the situation, and who should be handling the interaction. With this actionable insight, you can revolutionize your customer experience and tailor it to their specific needs.
