NW Maids is a home cleaning company founded in Seattle. The company now serves multiple markets across Washington and Oregon and has earned hundreds of five-star customer reviews.
We spoke with founder Ilya Ornatov about how NW Maids used Process Street to improve its success rate, increase lifetime customer value (LCV), and reduce employee errors as the business grew.
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This guest post is by Whitney Blankenship, Content Marketing Manager for Omnisend. When not writing awesome content, Whitney is reading up on the latest in digital marketing, ecommerce, and social media trends. Obsessed with pop culture, art, and metal. Powered by coffee. Fastest Googler in the West. Follow on Twitter.
In the ecommerce industry, omnichannel marketing has been a prevalent theme across articles, social media, conferences, and general thought leadership over the past few years.
Everyone is talking about it, but how many retailers are actually using it? How much of this is just theory, and how can we put omnichannel marketing into practice?
In this Process Street article, we’re going to walk you through the ins and outs of using omnichannel marketing for ecommerce. We’ll cover:
Whether the number of possible business processes is finite or infinite is debatable. Needless to say, there are a lot.
You can start with a broad, complex discipline like operations, mapping out the general, high-level process, and go on to create a vast amount of sub-processes that fall under the same area.
How granular you go is really up to you, and depends on what is most suitable for the way you conduct business.
There are, however, a number of processes that are absolutely essential to efficiently running any kind of business, regardless of size, industry, or location.
Processes that, without clear documentation and management, will cause bottlenecks that stifle growth or at worst, force an organization to close its doors.
In this post, we’re going to be looking at what we, here at Process Street, have identified as the top 10 business processes that you should care about and focus on continuously optimizing.
These are the big dogs. The greatest hits.
Each process will be paired with at least one fully customizable template that will help you get started or evaluate and refine your current processes depending on what stage you are at in mapping out and implementing your own.
My hope is that you will not only extract valuable insight from this article, but also find ways to apply the templates that have been provided in a way that is practical and useful for your team or organization as a whole.
Let’s get into it.
Oh, and bear in mind, these are in no particular order.
We’ve all been there. A letter icon on your phone has a five-digit number in the top corner and your apprehension at tackling it grows stronger every day.
You’re drowning in emails.
“In 1993 I didn’t need a system for doing email… and yet, today, I feel like the only way you’re going to succeed at a job… is figuring out how to deal with a high volume of email.” – Merlin Mann, Inbox Zero Google Tech Talk
Lucky for you, there’s a handy method called inbox zero which you can use to blast through your messages and stay on top of your backlog.
Say goodbye to email hell; your easy (and free) solution has arrived.
Process mapping is a useful tool for what can be summed up as “seeing the big picture and little pictures at the same time”.
That may sound silly to you, but that’s really what it is.
The primary benefit achieved from mapping out your business processes is that you can accurately evaluate each of the steps needed to complete a certain workflow, while understanding exactly how each of them interacts with one another and contributes to the process as a whole.
This ability to evaluate all aspects of a process helps managers identify constraints, opportunities for improvement, and formulate strategies to implement changes without disrupting day-to-day work.
But how do you go about ensuring that the time and effort you put into constructing these maps translates into improved performance?
That’s the question we’ll be tackling in this post.
Before doing so, however, we must acknowledge that there is a huge range of complexity when it comes to methods for process mapping. If you are a small organization it can be as simple as drawing it out on a whiteboard, whereas enterprises use sophisticated mapping software tools like Appian and Lucidchart.
This point regarding complexity and different kinds of process maps leads us to another important sub-topic that needs to be addressed early on – the difference between process mapping and process modeling.
You can’t earn €38.8 billion in annual revenue by stumbling through your processes.
Specifically, the IKEA supply chain is the glue that holds the company together and allows them to flourish.
From their suppliers through to the product in-store, the supply chain is set up and managed in a way that reduces costs at every stage, makes the products more appealing to customers, and makes the brand as a whole seem more appealing.
It’s genius, really.
So let me show you how they do it.
I meet so many people who love writing.
Whenever anyone asks me what I do and they find out I’m a writer, they almost always say some variant of the same thing:
“Oh, I would love to write more!”
“I wish I could do that – but I just don’t have time”
“I’ve been meaning to start blogging, but haven’t gotten round to it”
These responses are pretty consistent whether they come from a regular Joe or someone whose business and professional life would benefit from them writing more.
So many companies build a blog and intend to use it properly, only for it to fall into disrepair and get forgotten.
Why?
Because writing isn’t anyone’s core task and is then seen as less valuable.
So what if I told you that you could finish a blog post in 3 hours?
Would 3 hours a week, or even a month, be worth committing to give yourself or your company a functioning and marketable blog? Is that a small enough commitment to open up a new channel or boost your SEO?
It is. You know it. So let me show you how I do it.
On September 23, 1999, NASA’s $193 million Mars Climate Orbiter was obliterated 57km above the surface of Mars.
What caused such a catastrophic event? Badly implemented processes.
“The problem here was not the error; it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes, to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.”
—Edward Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science
Despite all of NASA’s precautions, preparatory research and technical developments, the deviation from standard procedure for making sure their units were consistently imperial or metric was what resulted in the disastrous calculation error responsible for the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, and in turn huge amounts of time, money, and material resources.
There are numerous features of Process Street that make the platform as useful as it is for managing recurring workflows and processes.
Beyond the ability to create process checklists, features such as form fields, rich media, conditional logic, real-time tracking, and the ability to set up automation with 1000+ other applications, provide a huge amount of value.
In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at one feature in particular: form fields.
An essential component of our software, form fields allow users to safely store important data that can then be automatically passed to and from other tools in your tech stack.
The goal of the post is to show you how you can name your form fields so that they are as effective as possible when used by other team members, as well as suppliers and customers who may be interacting with your checklists.
First, I’ll run through a brief overview of form fields, the various different types, and what value they provide. Then we’ll take a quick look at some typical use cases that will give you a better idea of when they are used, before going through a set of naming best practices with examples.
Let’s get started.
Are you scrambling to keep up with your tasks and stay on top of priorities?
With tasks scattered all over the internet and no concrete place to see everything in one list, it’s not only difficult to manage your work — it’s nerve-wracking.
Enter Inbox for Process Street — making task and process management as easy as working through a single list.
Add an assignee to a task within a larger process, and the task will appear in their inbox. Due dates help you straighten your priorities, hit project deadlines, and show your team what they should be working on first.
Let’s take a look at how Inbox can make you more productive.
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