What defines a high-growth business, and why do high-growth businesses need workflow automation software?
A high-growth business is generally defined as companies generating a return on equity of greater than 15%. But there are many other indicators that a company is experiencing a high-growth period: these businesses will be prioritizing areas of change, scaling processes, integrating and automating applications with workflow automation software, likely implementing greater data storage and usage, implementing increased use of business intelligence insights, and trying to achieve digital transformation.
Taking the right steps in company growth, and making smart investment choices with growth capital, equips everyone from HR, to SalesOps, to MarketingOps, to Finance and IT with the tools they need to maintain the same consistency and quality of communication, efficacy, and service that they would be able to handle on a smaller scale.
Related: 4 tactics that can help your SaaS business grow faster
Challenges and Speed-Bumps For Scaling High-Growth Companies
Challenge: Delivering a quality, repeatable customer service process.
Solution: Use data warehousing and automated business intelligence integration to deliver customer data to both Sales and Support teams.
Creating an effective, automated and personalized customer journey is key to building and maintaining a loyal customer base as you scale. As you move beyond the amount of business data and customer information that teams can handle on a personal basis, implementing workflow automation software makes it possible to design a customer service process that can be consistently repeated while upholding standards.
Gladly’s 2019 Customer Expectations Report reveals that “a company stands to lose up to 84% of their customers after three poor experiences—17% of them after the very first one. In fact: 63% of respondents switched to a competitor that provided them better service, and 52% left without warning the company, or giving them a chance to make amends.”
Maximizing the value and use of data by making sure that the teams who need it, have it, makes it possible to deliver quality and consistency at a larger scale. For example, companies can implement a cloud database that stores customer data including order history and support tickets, and create an automated workflow that delivers customer data in an actionable Slack notification to the business user. This processes standardizes quality, professionalized service.
Challenge: Scaling processes collaboratively
Solution: Role-based collaboration in developing new automations to allow different users to engage in the process with different levels of access.
In order to scale, you need to allow more people in your org to be “builders.” A builder is someone who can create automated processes. If only a few integration specialists are empowered to create integrations and automations, you will inevitably run into bottlenecks with moving projects forward. . Look for workflow automation platform that allows multiple personas to build without compromising security and governance. It should allow different user permissions for each role so those with the most expertise can govern builders with less. Workato’s Enterprise Automation Platform offers 3 default collaboration roles, as well as options for customizable collaborator roles.
Challenge: being competitive in a digitized business landscape
Solution: know customer expectations- and exceed them.
Amazon started out by making books easily and quickly accessible online. It solved a problem that’s effectively solved by digitization: organizing disparate information into a central database and making it instantly available to end-users in different locations. It also altered customer expectations; no-one wanted to walk down to the local Borders and spend an afternoon looking through the shelves for a specific paperback. Since then, consumers not only prefer, but expect, things like one-day shipping and a personalized digital experience.
According to Gladly’s 2019 Customer Expectations Survey, customers want immediate responses. “While traditional thinking has been that consumers will wait 12 hours for an email response, what we found in our Report was that actually, consumers expect an email response in 3 to 4 hours instead. Which makes us suspect that email’s fall in popularity may have some correlation with the usually higher wait times associated with it. We also noticed similar, high expectations around live chat and SMS as well, with consumers expecting answers in minutes or less. Consumers expect a response on live chat in less than a minute. Consumers expect a response on text message in 4 – 5 minutes.”
Knowing When To Introduce Workflow Automation Software
As Ryan Robinson of Forbes notes, “Many startups fail because the current staff gets spread too thin trying to keep up with customer growth. While hiring new personnel is essential during this phase, business owners should also consider how they can use automation to reduce their burden.” He continues, “Even something as basic as automating data input can save your team several hours each week, giving them more time to focus on the big picture aspects of scaling your business.”
Workato’s Enterprise automation platform makes it possible to implement both enterprise application integration and workflow automation. Learn more about how Workato can help your business scale by requesting a demo with our team.
