Keeping your telecommunications organization busy with your new BPM protocol is likely to turn some heads. It’s also likely to confuse and frustrate, like most changes do, unless you have a plan in mind. That plan, and the way it’s executed, should be made according to certain best practices in BPM.
BPM, or business process management, tools are software programs that help businesses make sense of their workflows, and the discipline behind them has a lot to do with planning. Telco businesses are no exception, and whether you know it or not, every business process requires a form of BPM. It’s just the manner of such management that winds up determining the outcome. Keeping in mind the following best practices for BPM in telecommunications, you’re going to find your business a lot more prepared for the unexpected, and a lot better primed for growth and change as BPM automation becomes a stronger part of your process.
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Make All Stakeholders Relevant To The Process
While it might sound like a bit of overkill to some, keeping all big players involved in a BPM strategy is key to long-term success. Not only will some stakeholders in the process have to weigh in on the feedback regarding the company’s performance and use of the BPM platform, but some will have to engage more directly with the BPM tool and with the process in general. This is because there will be valuable input and perspectives that differ from each other greatly depending on which type of stakeholder is weighing in. Understanding what works in a BPM deployment starts and ends with stakeholders, and especially those who are made to understand the process more intimately. Do you want to give your business an edge in performance? Learn from the original end-users and business users alike by asking them what needs are being met by the new BPM in place.
Employ BPM Automation To Provide Procedures And Exceptions
If you don’t have rules, an established protocol, then chaos often ensues, and this is exceptionally true in telco, where customer service is often reduced to various scripted outcomes. Thanks to the predictability of many recurring issues in the industry, automation in telecommunications can most definitely be applied to procedural implementation. Where a BPM software will gather information on each account case, there’s also a way for it to cross-check situational context for certain problems. If nothing else, BPM automation allows an aggregate pool of knowledge to form, one that consists of rules, exceptions, and so on — which help any employee determine the best responses and outcomes for the numerous situations that they come across in the customer service arena. Telco emphasizes the need for customer satisfaction in most cases more than usual since repeat business is the key to success in these companies’ workflows.
Analyze Automatic Insights To Drive Process Improvement
Whether it’s a first-time implementation of a new BPM solution, or whether you’re well past the transition period, measuring your performance is key to process improvement. You have to define certain deliverables for the BPM that you want to track and measure, of course, but once you decide on what KPIs will indicate successful business process management, you’ll be able to analyze these results and improve your process accordingly. Again, you can use deliverables to help measure the success of an implementation, or you can use them to simply measure the latest performance of the process long after implementation has proven successful. Either way, continuous improvement of the business process is what you’re shooting for, and thanks to automation, the most grueling parts of this (including data gathering and measurement) are handled completely within the platform, with unrivaled source accuracy as a result.
Build Your Process According To Real Business Workflows
You might find yourself wondering why anyone would do anything different, but many businesses make the mistake of forgetting minute details about their business workflows, many of which affect the flow rate, path, and even the capacity of a workflow to some extent. Whatever elements of your business process are left out graphically or otherwise, replace them and make sure they’re properly represented, so that every second of your process is a proper display of what happens in your real-life business workflow.
Use Information From Customer Journeys To Increase Profitability
BPM is a way of tracking the process from beginning to end, and when it’s powered by automation, it can even do the same for the customers that enter the process. Customer journeys can be tracked and mapped within a BPM tool to give any business a stronger and more specific understanding of their customers’ needs from Day One. By using this automatically gathered information to the advantage of your telco operation, you can work to address outstanding needs indicated by the customers through their journey, or even find other ways to increase profitability through the interactions you foster therein.
Conclusion
You will always have to manage your business processes in order to successfully provide your services. How well you do this, though, is up to you: if you’re implementing a tool that makes BPM all the easier, that’s a plus. If you’re using the tool to also automate certain business processes, you’ll find yourself benefiting even more than ever before. The merits of BPM software in telecommunications have much to do with the potential to make services better and to continually improve the process itself. If you’re using it to this effect, your telco company is going to start seeing considerable results.
