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A common belief in business is growth comes with doing more. Make more calls, find more prospects, spend more on marketing. Whatever processes your team is doing, if they can do more of those same things, your bottom line will grow.
Savvy businesses know that the real key to success is finding what’s already working and operationalizing it. Being able to identify and repeat best practices so that each person on your team is doing better, more productive work is how you take your business from good to great.
The problem is, many businesses do not have visibility into the data they need to find those best practices. Their workflow data is spread across various platforms and multiple teams. Without a single source of objective truth, organizations are putting their business goals at risk.
Here are four ways your data fragmentation can put your revenue growth at risk.
1. Inconsistent reporting leads to inaccurate information
If someone asked what time you ate breakfast this morning, it’s likely that your answer would be pretty accurate. It would be reasonable to trust the information you provided.
But imagine someone asked you to list the time you started eating breakfast and the time you finished. That’s a little more difficult. What if someone asked you to list the times you started and finished breakfast every day for the last week? The last month?
How confident would you be in the data from three weeks ago? Would you make a business decision on that same amount of confidence? Probably not.
But that is exactly what organizations are doing when they use self-reported data across all their teams. A developer might have worked on a problem that solves the main problem of one account, but they would report it as a general task because the work they do will serve every customer. An account executive, on the other hand, might forget about that spontaneous phone call they had with a prospect, and the data from that call is lost.
One main reason companies struggle to identify the best practices they need to do their best work is there is not a standard, automated way to report on workflow. Performance metrics reflect what each individual deems important rather than their actual behavior. With consistent, accurate workflow intelligence, best practices reveal themselves through data you know you can trust.
2. Risk of data loss switching between platforms
Let’s face it, downloading and merging spreadsheets is a nightmare. Not only does it take longer than it needs to, but the data in the reports from each platform rarely align perfectly. The time your leaders could spend pulling insights, asking questions, and collaborating on the processes you need to optimize, you’re cleaning up columns and hunting down missing information.
In a market where everyone is asked to do more with less, this kind of inefficiency is not sustainable. Your team must be able to make decisions swiftly and with as much information as possible.
Using a single source of truth for your workflow data makes your team more productive. What’s more, it allows your leadership team to make decisions based on a complete picture. Without blindspots in your data, teams can move faster and be better equipped to anticipate obstacles that might arise.
3. Duplicated efforts create disjointed customer journey
As we mentioned earlier, the customer experience can make or break your business, particularly in a competitive market like the one we’re experiencing right now. In the past, your customers might only engage with a customer success manager (CSM) and a sales executive. Now, customers engage with board members, other customers, product people, and team members in marketing.
No matter how large your organization is, your customers expect that you’re sharing information between teams. If a new customer explained what they want most from your product during the sales process, they assume that information was shared with their onboarding team once they become a customer. But often, teams don’t have an efficient way to share that information. The details get lost in the sales person’s notes and the CSM is forced to make the customer repeat themselves. Not a great impression on day one.
When each engagement in an account is visible to your entire team, you can optimize the entire customer journey. Rather than duplicating work or missing key steps in the journey, your team is able to identify exactly what action to take next in order to make that customer successful and drive revenue for your company.
4. Missed opportunities due to lack of visibility
The final, and biggest, threat that fragmented data poses to your growth as a business is the opportunities your team misses due to lack of visibility. If you can’t see the steps it took to reach the top, it’s much more difficult to do it again. If you can’t document how your team saved a big account from churning or how they upsold a big customer faster than ever before, you won’t be able to operationalize that process. Without a repeatable process, your team can’t scale.
Your team knows what to do to be successful. They can sell to big organizations and turn customers into advocates for your product. With a workflow intelligence tool, you can identify the best practices they are already executing and use it to reach your biggest goals.
As we said, you don’t have to do more if you can do better. To see how Retain.ai uses workflow intelligence to operationalize your business processes and help you do more with less, schedule a demo today.