People often get off on the wrong foot when attempting to identify your business pain points. They begin with rigid assumptions about what is going wrong, they conflate root causes and symptoms, and they prescribe ready-made solutions without first taking the time to understand how your business works and what the problems might be.
Let’s say that your company is having problems with invoices being sent out to the wrong customer addresses. Sure, the problem could be fixed by updating all the addresses on your system but this would not necessarily get to the underlying problem – the process by which names and addresses are recorded in the first place.
To solve the more fundamental problem in the long term, it is vital to take a deeper view, tracking the issue down at its source and fully addressing it.
The cornerstone of our approach when working with a new client to identify business pain points is to keep an open mind and enter into a collaborative relationship without preconceived ideas.
Start with an open mind
The best way to start the process of finding and alleviating your business pains is with an open mind and an open dialogue. Our specialists will bring together your key stakeholders for a series of workshops, interviews and scenarios to discover where the problems lie.
Speak up about your business frustrations
These detailed and focussed discussions are an opportunity to ask the right people the right questions, establish what the day to day issues are and what your stakeholders find frustrating. This will help us start working towards specific solutions.
Identify the affected processes
Through questions and conversations, we will reveal the end to end processes in need of attention. These could include the way that leads are collected, recorded and allocated; how sales are made; products and services delivered; invoices raised and payments collected.
Analyse your processes: Current Vs Desired State
How should these processes be performing and how are they performing now? Our team of process analysts can help to capture and map out how things are working, to find where improvements need to be made.
What is to blame for these pain points?
Another important thing to consider is whether your processes underperforming because of systematic or human error. You must understand all the pieces before you can put your processes back together again.
Create a plan of action
To resolve these pain points, you need to create a plan of action and aim to achieve results fast by starting with the processes that require the least effort, with the most output.
We work in accordance with Agile principles, which means we are constantly testing new processes to make sure they work and don’t cause problems further down the line. Working in this way means more projects get completed more quickly and efficiently, with complete buy-in from the stakeholders involved.
You can also read our other blog posts on data quality and customer hierarchy. Our CRM Health check and Data Diagnosis services are also great ways to discover and remedy your pain points at the root and make lasting improvements.
