Fix your business process problem with web forms
This post was written by Maggie Tharp, Content Marketing Specialist for FormAssembly, an enterprise form solution built to streamline processes and drive quality form conversions.
It’s cold and flu season, so chances are you or someone you know has been hit with a myriad of symptoms from a sore throat to stuffy nose to fever. Sometimes your only choice is to treat the individual symptoms and wait for sickness to run its course, but this isn’t the case when it comes to working through problems. Why? Because business process problems don’t fix themselves.
If you have an overarching business process problem, you’re probably all too aware of the symptoms: employee burnout, unnecessary costs, resource waste, etc. But are your attempts to fix the problem just aimed at alleviating the symptoms or are you trying to identify what’s really at the root of the problem?
The medicine that always seems to help is mixing your technology with a form solution. This combination helps increase efficiency, improve your communications, and get started on fixing your process problems.
Diagnosing your process problem
Process problems can sneak up on you in many different forms. Here are some common examples:
- You’re addicted to paper. You print it, make multiple copies of it and file it away even when you don’t need to.
- You’re relying too much on manual data entry. The only way your CRM gets updated is if you or someone else, types in the information manually.
- Your email communication is messy. You’re using long email chains to complete an exchange that could be done with a simple web form.
- Nothing is centralized. All the information you work with gets collected using a different method.
All of these issues have one thing in common: they’re inefficient.
No, they’re not just something you have to put up with in business. They’re inefficient and potentially unnecessary if you have a tool that can help you formalize and centralize your processes.
The cost of bad business processes
All of the pain points we listed above are probably causing a lot of issues for your business. Issues like employee stress, unnecessary costs, endless amounts of data entry, you get the picture. At first, you might think that these can be solved with more employees, longer hours, or more money poured into supplies. And that may indeed be what a lot of companies do.
U.S. companies spend $1 billion on printed documents each year, and data entry eats up hours of sales reps’ time each week. Bottom line: There are real costs to letting inefficient processes run free in your office.
Healing your business processes
What’s the antidote to inefficient processes? Structure. A web form and data collection solution can be the tool you need to transform a broken process into a smooth workflow.
Overhauling your outdated communication styles with a new structure can help you create efficient business processes. What’s more, a good form solution can sync to your Salesforce instance and improve your data, while saving your staff stressful long hours of manual data entry. In fact, web based forms can help your organization in a variety of ways, from hiring to tracking marketing ideas to collecting donations.
Looking to find more ways you can use web-based forms? Keep an eye out for the joint whitepaper from Idealist Consulting and FormAssembly on how to use web forms across all your nonprofit’s departments.
Looking to change your paper-based forms to web-based forms? Read our 8 tips for getting started using web-based forms here.
