It’s not enough to just be competitive anymore. That’s only one element of the business environment. Sure, you have to get it right, but you also have to keep an eye on your processes and policies and make sure that they remain as efficient as possible.  Here’s how.

What Does Business Efficiency Mean?

First things first, let’s review the concept. “Business efficiency” refers to an operational goal of managing how much a business can produce relative to the amount of time, money and resources required.  The more optimal levels of efficiency that you can extract or create from these goals the greater the likelihood that savings made here can be translated into bottom line profits.  So this means that you want to know how to do all of these things better.

Now, these all refer to the nuts and bolts of business efficiency, but how can you translate the expenditure of resources like time and convenience which are harder to quantify, to your online business?

How To Improve Online Business Efficiency

 

Deploy Automation

This is a big word with all the major players, especially in product-based businesses. Automating the fulfilment of orders to as high a degree as possible removes many of the potential risks that come with “human error” as well as workplace health and safety.  But automation also makes fulfilment happen faster and with fewer breakages in the supply chain.

However, automation plays a critical part in service-based businesses as it relates to marketing, too. Automation helps to cut down on manual labor, which in turn decreases human capital expenses. From email marketing, to accounting and follow up, processes, automation helps to diminish human error.

Improve Customer Experience

There is always room for improvement when it comes to the customer experience. This is an “end to end” function that requires you to reverse engineer your online experience.  Start with the end or desired goal in mind and work your way back to how that end result needs to start, work from an assumed place of “best-case scenario” and then determine what you need to make it happen keeping costs, time and operations in the forefront of your considerations.

Put Yourself In Your Customer’s Shoes

Thinking about the global experience of your customer, imagine the day to day scenarios where your customer might engage or interact with your product or service and how lapses in your value proposition could be a detector to your customer.  This is a useful exercise and if you can handle some brutal, real-time feedback – ask your personal network to “mystery shop” for you.

Make It Easy For Your Customers To Spend

How many times have you searched for a great deal on a gadget or vacation and when it comes time to make payment, you either can’t access the “checkout” function properly, the site doesn’t accept your type of credit card or PayPal or the payment service keeps failing and this forces you to start the process, all over again?  You want to make sure that you have an efficient and effective payment gateway and you can find out more about the product gateway available here.

Marketing

It might at first glance seem strange to talk about online marketing as part of the efficiency process, but do you have the time to create email campaigns, collate data, analyze research statistics and feedback from focus groups?  If you don’t, then your business needs a digital marketing agency.

If your processes are tight and you’ve done the homework you’ll see how efficiency translates into profits and this should inspire you onwards to constantly reassessing your processes and policies.  You can always do better.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya