“Where there is judgment, there is noise – and more of it than you think.” – Kahneman, et al Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

The city I live in is home to a very old, very beautiful, and very famous cathedral. It’s been a hotspot for tourists since the days of Chaucer (of course they weren’t called tourists then) and still plays an integral role in the community.

No matter where you are in the city, you can see that distinctive spire above everything. If you managed to get turned out (not as difficult as you might think with many small, medieval streets), that spire will lead you straight back to the center of town. It’s pervasive and omnipresent in such a way that – ultimately – leads to it being utterly ignored.

The main thing you need to know about this cathedral, though, is that it has bells. Loud bells, and many of them. And these bells toll. A lot. Like a lot. Not that briefly pleasant trill of bells you might get on the hour or quarter-hour, either. Some days, I’d swear the bells never stop ringing at all.

The thing is, much like the spire, I never paid much attention to the bells – until they stopped. For the year+ of varying levels of lockdown during the pandemic, the bells remained silent. Lockdown ended and things started reopening, including the cathedral and the cacophonic celebration of every pigeon coo by those accursed bells.

Yeah, it’s become a bit of a thing.

This, dear reader, is an example of noise – both literally and figuratively. The cathedral has always been there – unobtrusive, in the background, subtly influencing my actions and habits without any conscious awareness on my part. It shapes the way I move through the city, my awareness of time, my mood, my memories; but, before lockdown, if anyone asked me if it had any impact on my life, I probably would’ve shrugged and answered, “Not really.”

Noise is everywhere, and it affects every decision we make – especially because we aren’t even aware of it. We all know to check our biases when it comes to important decisions, but how often do you check your noise?

At Process Street, we take good decision hygiene very seriously, so this post will examine the idea of noise presented by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein in their book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, and use those ideas in our very own Noise Audit Workflow.

Feel free to skip ahead for the workflow, or stick with me as I discuss the theory of noise:

• What do we mean by “noise”?
• Noise in action: Be quiet! I’m trying to think.
• Reduce noise by focusing on the process
• Check your noise with the Process Street Noise Audit Workflow

Let’s make some noise!
Continue Reading

Project proposals are how you can get management to act on your ideas. They’re the bottom-up version of a project request form.

Writing a project proposal isn’t rocket science, but it is a lot harder if you don’t have something like a template to give you a head start.

Using a template for your proposals gives you a document which you can reference throughout the entire project. It’s a great example of effective business process management – the proposal acts as a banner that your whole team can rally around to ensure you’re all working towards the same goal.

So, in this Process Street post, I’ll go through how to create a project proposal, that gets approved, by going through the following topics:

• Free project proposal template
• 12 more free project proposal templates
• What makes a good project proposal?
• Key tips for writing effective project proposals
• Writing a lot of project proposals? Check this out!
• More stuff to help you write amazing project proposals

Ready to get started?
Continue Reading

At Process Street, we serve over 450,000 registered users including the likes of Salesforce, Spotify, and Airbnb. We work with our users to help them get the best out of our software. With this goal in mind, we bring you this article detailing the top 5 secret hacks and tricks in Process Street.

We found out how the Process Street team uses our nifty workflow documentation software in their day-to-day activities. We gathered the responses given from every department and narrowed them down to present 5 top hacks and tricks you can incorporate into your Process Street experience today.

• Trick #1: Document your daily schedule as a checklist
• Trick #2: Automate date form fields to pre-fill
• Trick #3: Use saved views to summarize workflow data
• Trick #4: Order Conditional Logic instructions and use hidden admin tasks
• Trick #5: Embed webpages inside Process Street’s workflows

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
Continue Reading

According to ITSMA and Vision Edge Marketing, 74% of marketers don’t keep track of their efforts. This is problematic as it means marketing teams aren’t able to report on how their efforts impact the business as a whole.

At Process Street, we make sure our marketing operations are documented, tracked, and easy to understand, so we can stay on top of our marketing OKRs and ensure they align with top-level company goals. To do this, we utilize Process Street‘s saved view feature.

The saved view gives a summary of workflow data. You can customize these views and present the data to suit your needs. For our marketing team, this means work is tracked and can be easily correlated with internal OKRs. Saved views have helped our marketers gather data, detect patterns, and keep their work on track.

We’ll be covering:

• What are Process Street reports and saved views?
• How our marketing department uses saved views in Process Street’s reports

Let’s get started!
Continue Reading

Premier Claims is a public adjusting firm that secures an average increase on claim payments 700% greater than before their involvement in the negotiation. They represent policyholders and contractors when negotiating fair claim settlements from insurance carriers on property damage. This includes damage from hail, wind, fire, and smoke.

Premier Claims discovered Process Street in July 2020, and have since moved many of their processes to our platform. Process Street has given Premier Claims an easy and elegant means of collecting and securely storing client information.

One such process Premier Claims uses Process Street for is their Claims and Client Intake Workflow. When the Process Street version of this workflow was first beta-tested, the salesperson’s response spoke volumes to the reliefs Process Street brings the Premier Claims team.

“[Process Street is]…literally the easiest thing in the world.” – Premier Claims salesperson, Claims and Client intake workflow Demo

Premier Claims wanted to share their positive experience from using Process Street and decided to create a video demo of their Claims and Client Workflow.
Continue Reading

Burkhard Berger is the founder of awesomex™. His articles include some of the best growth hacking strategies and digital scaling tactics that he has learned from his own successes and failures.

Process mapping is almost always beneficial to those working within the process, and those working outside it. Not all processes should be mapped in the same way. A simple process run by only one or two people can be easily represented by a basic flow chart; a process that involves multiple individuals or cross-functional teams is going to need something more complex.

Like a swim lane diagram.

Designing your own swim lane diagram – or even just mapping a process for the first time – can seem daunting. Where do you even start?

I don’t mean to brag, but we here at Process Street are kind of experts on this whole managing processes thing, and one thing we definitely know how to do well is map out processes of every shape, size, and situation. This post will walk you through all the basics of swim lane diagrams, including how to create your own one step at a time.

You can either read on to get the whole history of swim lane diagrams, or just jump straight to the tutorial:

• Swim lane diagrams: An origin story
• Sink or swim: The pros and cons
• 5 questions to make sure you’re swim-ready
• How to create a swim lane diagram in MS Word

So, let’s dive in! 🏊‍♀️
Continue Reading

According to Deloitte Insights, advances in technology are changing the business landscape and they are calling this a digital disruption. This is altering customer expectations and demands, presenting critical challenges for customer success teams globally.

To successfully ride this wave of change, Deloitte – and us here at Process Street – believe businesses should rethink how they are measuring value delivered to the customer. The aim is to ensure these measurements are customer-centric to refine CS activities and enhance the customer’s experience.

Think of it as a customer success evolution in response to digital disruption.

This CS transformation has the potential to bolster positive referrals by 83%, lower costs by 20%, and increase customer lifetime value by x1.6.

What have you got to lose?

In this article, you’ll learn how to apply a customer-centric means of measuring customer value generated for your organization. I’ve split the process down into three steps based on the Customer-Centric Digital Transformation report by Deloitte.

• From churn reduction to customer value generation (applying customer success 2.0)
• Measuring value in 3 steps: Determining customer and internal success
• Determining value generated – Step #1: Measure the outside-in value perception
• Determining value generated – Step #2: Measuring inside-out value perception
• Determining value generated – Step #3: Measuring internal success using business outcomes

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
Continue Reading

“The truth is mistakes happen. The accepted data says that most mergers and acquisitions don’t work out.” – Martin Sikora, professor of management and editor of Mergers & Acquisitions: The Dealmaker’s Journal

Mergers and acquisitions are complicated. Like, really complicated. A simple mistake at any point can delay the deal, derail the process, and potentially cost your company millions.

No matter how highly trained or experienced a person is with M&A procedures, human error happens. In fact, errors are more likely to occur in processes we’re overly familiar with. Once we’ve performed a task so many times that we “know” the steps, we tend to run on autopilot, which means routine actions can be overlooked or forgotten.

Making a mistake during a process with as much risk and expense as a merger or acquisition can ruin one or both companies. This makes having a thorough, well-documented process is an absolute must for any M&A executive.

After analyzing the main reasons mergers fail, I’ve used that knowledge to build several Process Street workflow templates for essential M&A processes. Feel free to jump ahead if you’re looking for a particular template, or continue reading for a walkthrough of all the features these workflows use:

• M&A processes: Plan to plan – and plan again
• M&A Target Search Process
• M&A Strategy Checklist
• M&A Due Diligence Checklist
• M&A Acquisition Checklist
• Post-Merger Integration Checklist
• Process optimization & Automations with Process Street

Ready to acquire some new workflows?
Continue Reading

A recent Deloitte study found a mere 30% of respondents stated customer success was a strategic priority by the board of directors. Only 26% reported official business communications to regularly mention customer success.

At Process Street, we find this concerning. Technological advancements and the rise of Industry 4.0 are altering the business landscape. Businesses are facing new pressures, with changing customer demands and expectations as the biggest catalyst altering how business is done. To respond, organizations need to focus on customer success (CS).

Businesses need to lead a successful customer success transformation, one that means they’re more customer-centric. In this Process Street article, I explain how organizations should do this in three simple steps.

• Why we need to think differently about customer success
• The companies leading in customer success are making a customer-centric transition
• 3 steps to manage your customer-centric transition

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
Continue Reading

90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from could do better when it comes to how they experience onboarding.

Customer success is about helping your customers understand and leverage the value of your product; you’re basically helping them achieve their goals. In a sense it’s one step beyond traditional customer support, taking a proactive approach to understanding and addressing customer needs.

A key component of customer success is making sure your customers are effectively onboarded.

Onboarding provides a unique opportunity for the CS team to nurture and address the key needs of a new customer, and an effective onboarding program can mean the difference between a long-term customer and a rapid churn.

For customer success teams to succeed with onboarding, CS managers should drive clear best practices and use well-structured processes to make onboarding as effortless as possible for everyone involved.

In this Process Street article, we’ll dive into:

• Customer success onboarding best practices
• Designing your customer success onboarding framework
• The customer onboarding process
• Measuring success with key customer success onboarding metrics

Continue Reading