Inefficient workflows quietly drain a large share of revenue every year. That is a third of your enterprise’s earning potential wasted on everything from a single missed email to a stock of excess inventory. Imagine what you could do with that money instead. You could hire new employees to scale the business further. Department budgets could be expanded so teams use better equipment. Automation is how you take that money back, and it is no longer optional: in McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey, 88% of organizations reported using AI in at least one business function, and Redwood’s 2025 Enterprise Automation Index found 73% of companies increased automation spend in the past year, with nearly 40% reporting cost reductions of 25% or more.
All of this and more can be achieved with business process automation. To demonstrate, let us walk through three core enterprise automation examples for processes that are riddled with the kind of waste automation removes, built in Process Street.
These processes are customer success (the client onboarding process), HR (the recruitment process), and support (the customer support process). Each is given in full, and by the end you will know how to eliminate inefficiency using basic, process, integration, and the newer agentic automation that AI agents now make possible. It is time to take that wasted revenue back.
Customer success automation example
Customer success is difficult at the best of times, but it is nonetheless vital to any successful enterprise. You have spent the time and money on marketing and sales to win your customers, but to make sure they stick around you need a strong client onboarding process.
The amount of time and effort you can waste during onboarding is massive, especially considering the number of programs and employees involved. Any mistakes can sour the relationship with the client, potentially causing them to churn or even spread the word that your services are sub-par and putting others off. In other words, it is a perfect automation example to show the tasks you can streamline and get rid of altogether using the different kinds of enterprise automation.
A quick note before we dive in: these processes will obviously differ slightly, and all will contain some degree of automation. That usually comes in the form of basic automation, such as using a CRM to manage your customer data, but for the most part the truly powerful techniques are left out to show the comparison.
Traditional client onboarding
A traditional enterprise client onboarding process might look like this:
- A lead converts into a client
- The CRM entry is updated or created to log the new customer
- Client value is assessed and an employee is chosen with proportional experience for the onboarding
- That employee is tagged in the client’s CRM entry to make them easy to find
- Client onboarding is performed manually
While this fulfills the basic requirements of client onboarding, it leaves far too much open to error and inefficiency. The Project Management Institute has indicated that 56% of all funding considered “at risk” in company projects, $75 million for every $1 billion, is due to ineffective communication. Information is lost, forgotten, or confused, and there is nothing in this traditional process to solve that.
Even if the responsible employee starts the client onboarding process as quickly as possible, the process itself is entirely down to that person. The success of the whole operation is left to a single person’s memory and the chance of human error. That might be okay for smaller organizations where managers have time to keep track of every employee, but in an enterprise dealing with hundreds or thousands of clients per team, it simply is not reliable.
Automated client onboarding
In contrast, an optimized and automated client onboarding process would look something like this:
- A lead converts into a client and the lead status is updated in the CRM (for example, Salesforce)
- A client onboarding workflow is automatically triggered to run in Process Street
- Client information is automatically pushed into the new workflow run
- Basic onboarding material is automatically sent to the client in an email
- The assigned employee checks their Process Street inbox to see what they need to do
- That employee performs the client onboarding using the instructions provided in the workflow
Immediately, much less of the process relies on inefficient communication and the risk of human error is limited. Communication is not an issue, because the steps that would require it, such as telling the employee to perform onboarding, are now taken care of automatically as soon as the client status is updated. No information is lost during these steps either, as the onboarding workflow run is automatically populated with all of the relevant information.
This also makes client onboarding easier to track and review as a manager. All you have to do is use the workflow overview to get a summary of every run. Human error is less of a problem too, because the employee is no longer relying on memory to carry out the process. Workflow runs are made up of tasks that can be as detailed as needed, including direct instructions, supporting materials, and much more.
None of this is difficult to set up. To automatically run a workflow and populate it with information, you can create a custom button inside Salesforce using workflow run links and variables (click here for instructions), or integrate Salesforce and Process Street using third-party software such as Zapier. To go a step further, an AI agent can read the closed deal and start the right workflow without anyone touching a button.
As for setting up your own workflow, try importing our pre-made client onboarding process. It is ready to use as it is and completely free to import. Plus, if it is not quite suitable for your needs, it still serves as a solid base you can edit to your heart’s content.
HR automation example
The US Department of Labor estimates the cost of a bad hire to be 30% of that employee’s first-year wages. Add the estimated cost of employee onboarding on top, and that is a heck of a lot of money to waste on bad hires or ineffective onboarding. Beyond that, bad recruitment practices, and therefore bad hires, disrupt your existing team and make them less efficient, doubling the overall cost in terms of productivity. That is why the hiring process is the next of our automation examples.
Traditional hiring process
A traditional hiring process might look like this:
- The current team needs to expand, or a new role is required
- The decision is made to hire a new employee
- One employee is assigned to write a job description
- The job description is posted in all relevant areas, such as websites and job boards
- Job applications are collected
- Initial checks are performed to eliminate unsuitable candidates
- Thorough checks are performed to assess the most suitable candidates
- Interviews are conducted
- The best hire is chosen, usually via manager decision
- Employee onboarding is performed
Again, this recruitment process will certainly fulfill the basic hiring needs, but the vulnerabilities and inefficiencies make it almost unsustainable at an enterprise level. To name but a few problems:
- There is no way to standardize or easily monitor the job description
- There is no guarantee the job will be posted in every relevant area
- Job applications have no central location and can therefore be lost
- The entire screening and interview process relies on employee accountability, which is not enforced
- The steps in employee onboarding are vague and inconsistent between employees
Automated hiring process
An automated hiring process would look more like the following:
- The decision is made to hire a new employee
- A hiring workflow is run in Process Street
- An employee selects the department and position being hired for using a drop-down menu in the workflow
- The workflow updates to reflect the tasks required to recruit and onboard this type of employee
- Pre-written job descriptions are provided, letting an employee copy them directly into all relevant locations, which are also documented
- Applications are stored in a central location, such as a set Google Drive folder
- Checks are performed as normal, but each round is automatically assigned to specific employees in Process Street
- The interview task contains a link to run a fresh interview workflow for every candidate
- Interview responses are recorded in the workflow to centralize all information
- The employee onboarding process runs automatically when the hiring process is completed, with all relevant information pushed straight through
As with client onboarding, this automated process relies much less on memory, is more consistent in execution, and largely eliminates human error. You can ensure both that you are hiring the right employees and that onboarding will be as successful as possible.
We keep both a recruitment process and an employee onboarding workflow ready to use for free. They work as they are, but can also be edited to suit your specific needs. Check them out below.
As for how to build a workflow that adapts to the information you enter, such as customizing the hiring process based on the role, conditional logic lets you set rules for the workflow to follow. For example, you could hide most tasks by default, then reveal the sections related to options chosen in an initial dropdown form field. The following also make the automated hiring process more reliable at enterprise scale:
- The workflow automatically assigns employees to their relevant tasks to enforce accountability
- Due dates are automatically set so employees know when to work on each task
- The process adapts based on the department and position being advertised to encourage more suitable applicants
- Current progress can be checked at a glance by the manager to ensure transparency
Support automation example
Bad customer support costs businesses more than $62 billion every year. Whether it is through inefficiency, slow responses, or unsatisfied customers, this is a problem affecting hundreds of thousands of businesses and enterprises. The top causes include a lack of proper training and customers receiving incorrect responses to their support queries. So let us solve those issues, shall we?
Traditional customer support
The traditional customer support process is as follows:
- A customer reaches out to your support channel with their issue
- The employee at hand receives their message through phone, email, in-app messaging, and so on
- They attempt to solve the problem to the best of their ability
- If unable to, the customer is passed onto a more experienced team member
- The customer repeats their issue to the new technician
- The technician attempts to solve it with their more specialized knowledge
This repeats until a solution is found, the customer stops responding or hangs up, or an explanation is found and the customer is notified that the issue will be worked on, such as when a new bug is discovered in your software. As with the previous examples, the problems are immediately obvious:
- The customer has to repeat their issue to every employee
- Response time is variable and entirely dependent on the support technicians available
- Individual support cases are not tracked, making it next to impossible to see where problems are occurring
- The hand-off between technicians is unpredictable, causing further delays
- Solutions depend entirely on the knowledge, experience, and understanding of the technician
Automated customer support
To solve these issues, the customer support process must be standardized and monitored, while giving technicians access to all the information they might require. An automated customer support process consists of the following:
- A customer contacts your support team with an issue
- Your customer support workflow is automatically run in Process Street
- Customer information and their message are automatically pushed into the workflow run
- The request is prioritized based on the value of the customer
- The workflow is assigned to a low-level support employee
- The employee categorizes the type of issue, such as technical, payment, or feature request
- Conditional logic updates the workflow to show instructions for dealing with that type of issue
- The employee replies immediately with either a solution or a note that they are looking into it
- If the employee cannot solve the issue, it is escalated to a senior support technician and the customer is notified
- The senior technician is assigned to the workflow and can immediately see all relevant information
By doing this, customers only have to state their issue once, which creates a much better support experience. Without chasing down relevant information or instructions for specific issues, low-level support employees give quicker responses and solve more issues on their own. This is also where modern AI earns its place: AI-assisted triage can read an incoming ticket, categorize it, prioritize it by customer value, and route it to the right workflow before a human even opens it.
Research has long indicated that employees lose a meaningful share of their time simply searching for documents and information. By keeping all of your instructions, solutions, and relevant context in a single location, you let your employees spend that time actually solving customer support issues instead. Low-level technicians handling and solving more issues also frees your higher-level technicians to focus on the cases where they are genuinely needed. That, in turn, provides a more successful and pleasant support experience and helps cement people as return customers.
The Bottom Line
Automation does not have to be intimidating, because there is no real downside to deploying it in your organization. It will not replace your team members. Instead, it makes them more effective at their jobs by removing menial, repetitive tasks and streamlining their processes. Each of these enterprise automation examples follows the same arc: take a process that runs on memory and email, turn it into a workflow that runs the same way every time, then let integrations and AI agents handle the busywork.
That is the idea behind Process Street, the Compliance Operations Platform. Docs holds your governed procedures, Ops turns them into automated workflows that execute and enforce every step, and Cora, our AI compliance agent, monitors each run, flags risk, and suggests improvements. The result is achieving end-to-end efficiency, where the work gets done correctly by default and you can prove it.
Not sure where to start? Pick the process that hurts most, whether it is onboarding, hiring, or support, and automate that first. You can sign up for a free account today, import a ready-made workflow from our library, and have your first automation example running this week.