Inefficiency:

noun

plural noun: inefficiencies

the state of not achieving maximum productivity; failure to make the best use of time or resources.
"the idea is to eliminate inefficiency, creating a seamless manufacturing process"

Inefficiencies are everywhere. 

How many times have you sat waiting in a queue for something and thought, “There must be a better way of doing this?!”?

When was the last time you felt like that about your own business?

Inefficiencies not only cost you time and money, but they can negatively impact your teams moral and energy. 

Here are 5 ways to spot inefficiencies in your business:

Look for repetitive manual tasks

An obvious place to start!

Are you sending out the same email every time an action is completed?

Are you typing the same information into multiple different systems?

Look at your daily tasks and think, “can any of these be automated?”. If so, get them automated and spend your valuable time elsewhere! 

Top Tip - Use a unified CRM platform (like Zoho CRM) to make sure you have one source of truth for your customer information. One place to enter the information means less risk of human error or duplication.

Ask your team

Your team are the ones that are at the front line of your business, carrying out the daily tasks. 

Asking them where they feel stuck or where the problem areas are will get you to the real heart of the inefficiencies to fix them.

Top Tip - Create a safe space where your team can be as open and honest with their feedback as possible. Think about using something like Zoho Survey to anonymously gather team feedback.

Review Your Customer Journey 

From first finding out about you to becoming a paid customer, what are all the touchpoints in your customer journey?

How long does it take to respond to a new enquiry?

How quickly can you follow up with a customer question?

How many people need to approve a piece of work before it can get signed off?

There is so much room for inefficiencies to creep in in the customer journey because there are so many moving parts, so constantly reviewing your customer journey is a must.

Top tip - Ask your existing customers for feedback. It’s scary, but it will give you valuable insight that you won’t get anywhere else. 

Analyse your Data and Reports

Can the right people answer questions about the business quickly?

Questions like:

What does the pipeline look like for the next month?

What products/services are selling well?

Where did we get most of our business from last quarter?

If the answers to these sorts of questions can’t be found quickly, then you have a visibility inefficiency. 

When the right people don’t have access to the right information, decisions get made on guesswork rather than fact, and you risk wasting time on something that might not work.

Top Tip - Using something like Zoho CRM, collect the right data and build dashboards and reports that give you live, in-the-moment updates on your business to make well-informed business decisions.

Measure time spent vs value added

You cannot buy back time. 

There’s nothing worse than wasted time, and as business owners, time is something we’re all short of! 

We’ve all been in meetings that could definitely have been an email, spent hours on 1 task that should have taken 10 mins or spent time on something that doesn’t actually add anything to the business. 

Start asking yourself, “What tasks take too long and give too little result?” 

If something doesn’t drive you toward a business goal or improve customer satisfaction, then good riddance! Why are you doing it?

Top Tip - Start measuring the time taken on tasks. Just over a week or so. Give yourself and your team insight into how much time is actually spent on individual tasks. I promise the answers will be eye-opening!

So, have a go at hunting out inefficiencies in your business and start taking those steps to improve them. 

As always, if you want a helping hand or someone to come and find the inefficiencies for you, give us a call! 

Elle