Do you have a brand that you go back to, time and time again?

If you do, what is it about this brand that’s captured your loyalty?

I do not doubt that an exceptional customer experience plays its part. That is, think about how that brand makes you feel. Good huh?

According to Bain & Company, businesses that invest time and effort to optimize their customer experience (CX) flows, experience above-market revenue growth between 4-8%. With the vast choice of products, services and brands available, exceptional customer experience comes as the ultimate seduction and differentiation for businesses to stand out above competitors.

In this Process Street article, you’ll learn how to engage your customers at every point in their journey with you. You’ll learn how to consistently create a service with a smile, a product to praise, and a beloved brand.

Learn from the best as we take a glimpse into the CX operations used by the likes of Netflix, Microsoft, and of course Process Street. You’ll then be given 5 tips on how you can optimize your CX flows, taking into account the changing business landscape, and the impacts of digitalization on customer behavior and experience.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all for an in-depth understanding of CX.

• What is CX?
• Case studies: How top tech companies deliver excellent CX
• How to optimize your customer experience flows
• Using checklists to optimize your CX flows in 5 steps
• Understanding customer experience flows in a digital world

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Procurement directly impacts an organization’s bottom-line and can be responsible for 70% of revenue. With this in mind, it’s important to get procurement right.

The world of procurement has undergone tremendous changes in the past couple of years. Changes of particular importance when thinking about procurement management include:

• Digital transformation: With 85% of organizations believing that this digital transformation will change the way they deliver services over the next 3-5 years.
• Thinking about suppliers beyond price: With a greater focus on supplier synergies. The importance of supplier visibility regarding the procurement steps is realized.
• Moving to effective change management: Organizations focus on a smooth change management plan, with procurement leaders agreeing change management is the biggest roadblock to achieving procurement goals.
• Risk management and preparing the unexpected: With transparent procurement systems reducing risk exposure. Only 65% of procurement leaders have little or no visibility in their supply chain.

With this in mind, in this Process Street article, we explain how you can create a procurement management solution that leverages a digital transformation (using Process Street as your procurement management software), thinks about suppliers beyond price, and incorporates effective risk and change management.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say on procurement management.

• What is procurement? A re-cap of the basics
• Examples of procurement gone wrong
• What is procurement management (+ benefits)
• Procurement management best practice
• Procurement management plan in 7 steps

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This is a guest post by Ray Slater Berry, a freelance writer for Chameleon with over nine years of content marketing and social media experience. He specializes in product tech, travel, and SaaS. Ray is also a published fiction writer, with his first novel titled Golden Boy.

“Every dollar invested in ease of use returns $10 to $100.” – IBM, The ROI of UX

The above statement was made by the global business powerhouse, IBM. The company explains that it’s far more economical to consider user needs early in the design process than to try and solve them later. Based on the returns given in the above quote, we can calculate an ROI of 9,900%.

And considering the user needs early is exactly what a user experience (UX) map does, meaning creating an effective UX map has the potential to bridge the gap between business success and failure.

By understanding your user’s needs in the early stages of a design process, you’re more likely to consistently meet those needs, meaning a happy customer and reduced churn.

This is why we at Process Street have produced this article, your practical guide to user experience mapping.

Welcome and gather around the user experience campfire. Grab a marshmallow on a stick, a cup of something hot, and relax. Today you’ll learn the ins of outs of user experience maps and how you can create one in the leanest way possible.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding user experience mapping.

• What are user experience maps?
• The benefits of UX mapping
• How do you create a UX map?
• Examples of user experience maps

Once upon a time, in a land not so far from here…
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Every 20 seconds, $1 million is wasted globally through poor investments that don’t align well with a given organization’s goals and strategy.

This is according to a 2018 Pulse of Profession (PMI) report. The report also indicated that organizations waste 9.9% for every dollar invested due to poor strategic goal delivery.

Yet, as a solution to these business woes, 89% of executives say BizOps could significantly improve strategic decision-making by improving collaboration between IT and business teams.

The startup bizOps buzz is reimagining older, already pioneered bizOp practices used by the likes of Yahoo, Google, and LinkedIn. Startups are using bizOps (otherwise knowns as business operations) in a more generalist role demanding rapid execution and a larger scope of responsibilities.

Tech startups such as Slack, Dropbox, Ziprecruiter, and (of course) Process Street, are recruiting for and building out their Bizop teams.

But what exactly do we mean by bizOps in this modern world, and how has the concept been reimagined for the startup culture and mentality?

In this article, you’ll learn what bizOps is, from the day-to-day operations to the core activities. We’ll then discuss the importance of bizOps, using real-world examples to display the role in action. Find out how to apply BizOps as a startup or as a large enterprise to significantly improve strategic decision-making in your business.

Sound good?

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say:

• What is bizOps?
• Key concepts in bizOps
• BizOps activities: Maximizing profit, performance, and growth (with free templates)
• The importance of bizOps (+ business operations examples)

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Joseph Juran, the Architect of Quality, paved the way for the active pursuit of quality in Business.

The Juran Trilogy redefined quality management; reducing chronic defects and the costs associated below a 20% industry expectation.

The Juran Trilogy has been shown to give benefits across multiple parameters, increasing productivity, reducing cycle-times, improving human safety, and reducing product failure rates – with a 80% reduction in some cases.

For us as Process Street, the Juran Trilogy is one of our favorite tools for improving business operations. It’s a straightforward methodology that brings results.

Learn how to apply the Juran Trilogy for your business, and improve the quality of operations. Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say:

• What is the Juran Trilogy?
• Using the Juran Trilogy for quality control: Quality planning, control and improvement
• Implementing the Juran Trilogy using Process Street
• Juran Trilogy examples: Quality improvement in the real world

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This is a guest post by Katerina Mery, a marketing specialist at Fond. Fond is a rewards and recognition company dedicated to building places where employees love to work. Mery authors articles about how to leverage recognition programs to drive company success.

Think back to the last time a colleague acknowledged you for a job well done.

How did you feel?

Did the experience have an impact on your behavior moving forward? Did the exchange affect your relationship with the person thanking you? What about your relationship with the company in general?

63% of employees who are acknowledged for the work they do are unlikely to look for a new job. Expressing gratitude at work takes relatively little effort, but it can create an incredibly memorable professional experience. Knowing that you did a good job is one thing, having a colleague call out your great work takes the experience to another level.

Business objectives can sometimes feel at odds with an enjoyable employee experience. Employee acknowledgment, however, is a practice that effortlessly supports both.

From this Process Street article, you’ll learn how employee acknowledgment simultaneously caters to your organization’s business objectives. You’ll also learn how to meet the emotional needs of your employees using fantastic positive feedback loops that generate continual improvements across the board.

We say employee acknowledgment is a smart initiative a company can adopt – but before you take our word for it, allow us to explain why.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• What is employee acknowledgment?
• Employee acknowledgment and its effects on workplace psychology
• How employee acknowledgment benefits employee wellbeing
• The organizational benefits of employee acknowledgment
• Use Process Street for your employee acknowledgment strategy

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“To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.” – Benjamin Franklin

Is your sales team prioritizing their time and channeling their efforts for the highest return? Are you sure you have the systems in place to take advantage of every sales opportunity that presents itself to you, from outreach to closing the deal?

Over the years, our sales team has built a few processes that help them maximize the impact of their daily recurring tasks. In turn, these processes are partially responsible for helping us along the way to over 450,000 registered users, including likes of Colliers, Salesforce, Accenture, Spotify, and Airbnb.

In this Process Street article I’ll share some of those sales processes with you.

We’ll cover how our sales team has used checklists to:

• Identify & lock-onto our highest value leads: According to the CMO Council, lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year. We don’t want to even lose $1 due to lost productivity. By using Process Street our sales team can manage leads efficiently.
• Quickly and easily respond to requests for trial extensions, discounts, upgrades, and more: From trial extensions, pricing, product explanation, and demos, a Process Street checklist can be created and run for all sale requests, standardizing processes and keeping teams abiding by best practice.
• Capture important information during the sales cycle: According to Accenture, 42.5% of sales reps take 10 months or longer before they contribute to the company goals. Capturing sales data helps Process Street’s sales team create actionable sales insights, insights both the sales leaders and reps can refer to and rely on to better reach their goals.

These processes are mainly used by our Account Executives every day – and I’ll cover how each of the checklists map to each stage of the sales cycle.

• A day in the life of a Process Street Account Executive
• Where checklists fit into the sales cycle
• How our account executives use sales checklists to make their job easier
• 6 more top sales processes for you to capture and close high-value deals

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Readers, I’ll let you in on a little secret…

Between you and me, I was hacked; by my best friend no less! Thankfully, it was just an irritating prank, but it served to teach me a lesson.

Despite my grandiose beliefs that I knew everything I needed to know about all things digital, I hadn’t the faintest idea about how to spot a fraudulent message from a legitimate one. And this kind of threat is one of the biggest risks businesses face today.

In 2005, 157 data breaches were reported in the U.S., with 66.9 million records exposed. From 2005-2014 there was a 500% increase in data breach frequency.

That number almost doubled in 3 years to 1,579 reported breaches in 2017.

Although data breaches have since declined (1,506 issues were reported in 2019), IBM’s 2020 Data Breach report filed a 12% rise in data breach costs over 5 years, increasing to ~$3.92 million per incident.

The growing number of breaches and associated costs seems to be consequential of continuously changing hacking methods and an expanding number of entry points (that comes from digitization).

Security audits allow organizations to set up tougher walls of safety, as an adaptive defense against data breach threats.

With this in mind, Process Street created this article as your ultimate security audit guide, with access to our free security audit checklists and processes.

We’ll be covering:

• What are security audits?
• 4 security audit checklists for preventative risk management
• Security audit best practices
• Security processes for tighter security safety

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Glassdoor reports effective employee onboarding increases retention by 82%.

“Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%”

Now consider the cost of hiring a new employee is between ~6-9 months salary (the average salary for a customer success manager in the U.S. is ~$85,000 annually). When you do the math, it becomes clear how costs start to rack up.

If you’re a SaaS company dedicated to growth and gaining a competitive edge, this is an unnecessary cost that every team, including your customer success team, should avoid.

One of the best ways to improve retention is by focusing on your employee onboarding. That’s what we’re going to look at in this Process Street article.

We’ll explain how we, along with Salesforce, Netflix, and Intercom, onboard our customer success managers.

And if you’re going to invest in onboarding, making sure your customer success managers are onboarded effectively is a good way to effectively hit two birds with one stone. Your CSMs are in charge of customer onboarding, so by providing a solid employee onboarding foundation to orient them, you’re also laying the foundation for a solid system of client onboarding.

By the end of this article, you’ll have learned the 16 employee onboarding best practices used by these top 4 international tech companies. Although these onboarding best practices are specific to a customer success manager role, they’re applicable across most business departments.

• Why onboarding is important for retention
• 16 onboarding best practices (used by top tech companies)
• How to implement onboarding best practices in your company

Let’s get stuck in!
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This is a guest post by Michael Zipursky, CEO of Consulting Success® and Coach to Consultants. He has advised organizations like Financial Times, Dow Jones, RBC, and helped Panasonic launch new products into global markets. Michael is also the author of the Amazon Best Sellers ACT NOW: How successful consultants thrive during chaos and uncertainty, The Elite Consulting Mind and Consulting Success® the book.

You know the feeling; you’d love to take a vacation and a break from your business…

…but there’s no one to handle the day-to-day operations for you.

You’ve built up years of experience, and you feel like you’re the only one who can run the show. I know, because I’ve been there. Early on in my career, I was convinced I could do everything.

I told myself I was better than anyone at the work I did. It would take me too long to train anyone up to my level. I persuaded myself that this was true…but I was wrong. I could have certainly taught someone else – and it would have saved me a lot of time and energy to focus on higher-value work.

Studies indicate that business system documentation can boost productivity and save up to 6,000 hours per year, equating to 2.4 full-time staff positions.

On top of this, documenting systems and processes builds a foundation to train new team members so that your business can run without you involved in the day-to-day operations.

By the end of this Process Street article, you’ll understand why it’s so important to document systems and processes, see some real-life examples and learn how to do it in your business.

• Business system documentation: What it is and why it is important
• Business system development starts with organizing your business systems
• Documenting systems for clients: Network Reactivation Campaign example
• Frequently asked questions about business systems development
• Using Process Street and process documentation for business system development

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