When your sales reps are on the road meeting with potential customers, they need to arrive prepared with the right information to close the deal and with the tools to conduct business with speed. To ensure customer satisfaction, your reps also need agility to adjust to changing circumstances and react in a timely way.
If your reps are slowed down by time-consuming manual processes, that opens the window for a competitor to out-price them or respond faster to a customer, stealing your business before the sales reps know what hit them.
People naturally grow attached to their own ways of working, even if those are manual processes that ultimately hinder their work and have a negative impact on customer retention and satisfaction. They develop whatever workarounds necessary to get the job done in the short term, but these manual processes are seldom efficient. Often, people end up working twice as hard as they need to, because they’re so focused on the short term and resistant to adopting new processes.
A major factor that slows down the sales process is when reps need to get multiple approvals quickly to close a deal.
Let’s say that a sales rep needs three internal signatures before they’re able to move forward with a deal. In a typical process, that would mean sending a proposal to each approver, who would then need to download it, print it, sign and scan before sending it back to the rep. If those approvers are out of the office, the process slows to a crawl. As the weeks go by, the prospective customer may grow dissatisfied with the poor responsiveness and consider offers from competitors who are able to turn a quote around in days.
The electronic signature is one of the best examples of how technology improves customer retention and satisfaction. With electronic signatures, all of those manual steps in the approval process could be done with the click of a mouse or the tap of a touch screen. The technology doesn’t just make the process paperless — it makes it faster and simpler, improving efficiency while maintaining compliance.
Automating an existing process and recreating it in digital form may improve your efficiency to some degree, but there’s a larger opportunity. Digital workflows also allow you to improve the process itself and eliminate unnecessary steps in ways that weren’t possible in a manual process. When you compare electronic signatures to paper signatures, the workflow is dramatically more efficient.
If you want to leverage technology to improve your processes (and ultimately, improve customer retention and satisfaction), start by envisioning how the process could be different. Make sure you understand any unique business needs (security, compliance, reporting, etc.) and how the technology works, and show how the technology helps you to meet those specific needs in a better way.
When you’re trying to move employees to more efficient workflows, they tend to resist at first. It’s human nature to stick with what you know, so change management plays a vital role in making these kinds of process improvements. The bottom line is that the more you automate your processes, the more responsive your organization becomes. That responsiveness contributes directly to a better customer experience and helps you improve customer retention and satisfaction.
