Businesses: declare war on unnecessary admin!
“I don’t have time for this!”. It’s a phrase that flashes across the cerebrum of every business owner on a daily basis. Often, more frequently than they’d care to admit. All too often, their proactive and can-do attitudes lead them to roll up their sleeves and work away at the proverbial coalface with their employees. All the while knowing that there are other things that they could and should be doing. Like looking at the business analytics that paint a picture of how their business is doing, and charting a path to success and growth in an increasingly hostile and competitive business landscape.
But it’s not just entrepreneurs who can find their hands tied by tedious admin. Their employees can find that they are too bogged down in administrative procedures to be proactive and deliver outstanding performance in all the ways that matter to your customers. In an age where COVID-19 restrictions are changing how you do business and competitors are trying harder than ever to relieve you of your customers, the last thing you need is to have your hands tied by unnecessary and inefficient administrative processes. Here are some ways in which businesses can declare war on unnecessary admin…
Outsource all your transcription needs
Businesses of all kinds need to transcribe audio. From the creation of meeting minutes to more complex tasks carried out by a legal or medical transcriptionist to transcribing your podcast episodes for content marketing and SEO purposes. For obvious reasons, you may not want to entrust these to an automated service (which tends to offer accuracy of around 85% and can struggle with complex words and jargon). But does that mean you have to do it in-house? Outsourcing it can be much more cost-effective in the long term, freeing up your team members for activities that can make a bigger impression on your clientele (as well as using their talents to the fullest).
Invest in chatbots to take the pressure off frontline employees
Chatbots get an unfairly bad rap. However, as they grow more sophisticated and affordable, they’re becoming increasingly ubiquitous. And for good reason. They’re an extremely cost-effective way of easing the pressure on your frontline employees. So that they don’t have to stop what they’re doing to answer the phone every 15 minutes. This can make them less stressed, more focused and better positioned to deliver operational excellence.
Keep communications to a single platform
We have so many ways to communicate in the digital age, it can sometimes create as many problems as it solves. A conversation can start on email, migrate to text messages, then be carried over onto a Slack group. This isn’t necessarily a problem… until you need to access a key task, fact or stat from that conversation. Then time is lost trawling different platforms for the key data.
Keep your conversations to a single platform to avoid this time wastage.
Revise your processes from the ground up
Finally, your business is only ever as efficient as its processes. If you find that you’re dedicating too much time to admin, maybe it’s less a case of investing in the right tools and bringing in an outside consultant to help you to revise and reimagine your processes from the ground up.