Standardization is nothing new for businesses. It has been used for years in manufacturing, operations, human resources, finance, and even sales. It means unifying the different ways an organization solves the same problem across several stages or branches.
Process standardization helps businesses be more efficient, remove ambiguity, and provide quality control, ultimately improving quality and productivity.
That being said, this article will take a look at precisely why and how process standardization helps you scale your business by improving your company’s quality and productivity.
#1 Using Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
Businesses in any industry can benefit immensely from using written instructions to describe how employees perform a task or activity. Known as Standard Operating Procedure, these in-depth rules help organizations standardize processes by providing step-by-step instructions that anyone can follow. This way, leaving very little uncertainty around what needs to be done.
SOPs allow companies to secure consistency of their work and the quality of their products to satisfy their customers. When there are no procedures in place, it is easy for employees to forget key actions, make mistakes, and gradually reduce the quality of what you produce.
Moreover, SOPs can eliminate many issues that can slow down essential business decisions. Having an SOP, on the other hand, makes it easier for employees to follow directions and get things done right.
#2 Taking Advantage of Employee Engagement Tools
Established practices such as employee/manager reviews or feedback surveys or sessions are valuable for securing employee engagement in teams of all sizes and growth stages.
And while it might be tempting to craft your own surveys, we strongly advise you to use customizable templates made possible by employee engagement software. This type of software allows you to automatically send out anonymous surveys to your employees, that can help you to:
- Track progress;
- Ensure critical issues are not overlooked;
- Catch negative trends in advance;
- Get a truth on which you can act.
Ultimately, implementing standardized feedback processes will enable you to retain your best employees and secure your company’s overall quality and productivity.
#3 Improving Customer Service Quality
Customer service is one of the most crucial aspects of any organization. Without it, it is almost impossible to be profitable in the long run.
Standardizing processes in this department can greatly improve the response time to customer queries and concerns. For example, you can standardize customer service procedures like ensuring product availability, responding to repeat customer queries, instructing callers to troubleshoot software, and even safeguarding branding consistency.
More importantly, every approach you want to standardize needs to have a corresponding, separate SOP. This way, you will ensure that your customer support representatives provide consistent quality service and that your customers receive consistent quality care.
#4 Data Standardization
As competition increases, the need for businesses to enhance performance while reducing costs is now driving demand for more use of data and detailed analytics.
Still, even though data helps companies understand and improve business processes to reduce wasted money and time, many organizations struggle with how to process and best use data? And this is where data standardization processes can help.
Data standardization is transforming data taken from different sources and various formats into a consistent form. The primary goal of implementing data standardization processes is to ensure that data is consistent and clear so that anyone in your company can access and utilize it in their work.
By using data standardization, your marketing department, for example, can quickly compare and contrast the value of leads, lead sources, marketing assets, marketing tools, ad costs, and so on. This way, they will be able to bring better-informed decisions and provide forecasts with greater accuracy.
#5 Reducing Operational Costs
High operational costs can largely influence a company’s short and long-term profitability. Standardizing processes, whether as simple as creating service level agreements, responding to repeat customer questions, or an overall customers journey can help your company utilize the same data models and definitions between different departments within your organization. As a result, it will help you lower production or service costs and significantly minimize trial and error practices.
The Bottom Line
The primary purpose of process standardization is to make sure that all tasks and documents in an organization are handled in the same way, even if they are performed by different people and departments. By standardizing both internal and external business processes, a company can secure a higher quality of its work and increase overall productivity.
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