I recently attended a seminar where this question was posed by the Presenter.

The presenter offered the following reasons:

• Reduce Errors
• Reduce Costs
• Improve Quality
• Keep Customers
• Win New Customers
• Improve Customer Service
• Create Jobs

With the ultimate goal being to increases your businesses value!

While I spend most of my time building and helping my Clients with their systems, this was a good reminder of the goals needed and the Clients underlying targets. Let’s take a quick look at each of these:

Reduce Errors

A well-constructed software system will enforce your business process and ensure that your data entry is valid and appropriate, entered in the correct order and even by a suitably authorised person. The system can then accurately calculate from your figures and present the results in the format that you need so you can make the correct strategic calls.

Reduce costs

It often amazes me how much effort is required to manually prepare monthly / quarterly and annual reports. A good software system can produce these for you at the click of a button! Further time savings can be gained by simply avoiding duplicate data re-entry on little things like an address etc.

Improve Quality

This follows directly form reducing errors as now your business Processes are enforced and monitored it becomes easier to follow-up those issues and pinpoint problem areas that need fixing, thereby improving the quality of the product or service that you provide to your customers.

Keep Customers

Improved quality, less errors and greater efficiency will make your Customers happy and more loyal, but there’s still a need for a good Contact Relationship Manager to ensure all Customers are contacted regularly and followed up in a timely manner.

Win New Customers

All businesses should be trying to grow and usually that means new Customers. There are many options here; Advertising, Promotions, Sponsorship, Networking etc. Good systems can track the results of your campaigns and help analyse the return on investment. How did they find us? What is working and what is not? If you don’t track it, you simply just don’t know!

Improve Customer Service

We all love to be pampered and hate waiting and errors. If you can pick up your game here, you help retain customers and improve loyalty. It is widely quoted that it costs between 5 and 10 times more to gain a New Customer than retain an Existing Customer! Good Systems improve your responsiveness and accuracy so you can better answer Customer questions and increase service levels.

Create Jobs

With your systems in place and now able to cope with the increase in Sales as well as providing higher Quality Service you will likely need additional Staff to support all the growth. This may need additional systems and processes to help manage their time, with systems such as Scheduling, Job Tracking and Time Capture further helping streamline the Business Processes.

Systemise Now!

It’s very compelling isn’t it?

Contact ProcessIT now to discuss how we can help you systemise your full business or just add a single stand-alone process to your existing systems… – Contact us now…

 

Tech Tip:

Windows Defender – the inbuilt and mostly overlooked antivirus program for Windows.

Finding the right antivirus program for your computers can lead to some serious headaches. What’s the best antivirus? What’s the cheapest antivirus? What’s the least invasive antivirus?

Windows Defender is one of the least ‘in your face’ free antivirus programs I have seen, with no need to download mysterious software, no adverts requesting you pay for the Professional version, no need to worry about losing your personal information to some third party company. The software is easy to use, built into Windows and best yet, it’s free!

Windows defender is good but has its draw backs. Tests vary but some have seen a 95-99% virus catch rate although others get just 80% whereas some paid antivirus programs are able to catch 100%. Another drawback, for some, is a lack of control over the program with little more than a ‘Quick’, ‘Full’ or ‘Custom’ Scan setting.

Overall Windows Defender is a good, free and easy to use antivirus program capable of protecting against the majority of internet threats while not pestering you for money and filling up your monitor with notifications all the time.

Remember, the first line of defence is You! –NEVER open email attachments that you are not expecting –even if you know who they claim to be from and ONLY DOWNLOAD files from reputable sites.