What is Workflow
*Workflow is defined as a “Progression of steps (tasks, events, interactions) that comprise a work process, involve two or more persons, and create or add value to the organization’s activities.”
What does this mean?
The key in this definition is that if two or more people are engaged in tasks that add value to an organization’s activities, then that is workflow.
For example, if you are a customer service agent, your workflow may involve receiving customer questions, complaints, and occasional compliments through email, social media, and phone. Then, resolving those issues after discussing possible solutions with the customer and other team members in the organization.
The workflow looks different in every industry, but the importance of maintaining a consistent workflow remains. The trouble is that workflow can be hard to create, and many factors can get in the way of maintaining a consistent flow.
What Causes Barriers in Workflow
There are tons of factors that can get in the way of a workday that flows smoothly. One of these factors that get in the way of true workflow is poor communication. Poor communication comes in many forms. Work especially does not flow smoothly when employees aren’t provided all the information they need to take action on the task at hand.
For example, imagine a customer service representative receives an inquiry about the sale price of a product via email from a fellow coworker without being provided complete information on the product. The customer service would have a multitude of questions that would lead to back and forth conversations between the coworker who asked them and themselves.
What product is the customer inquiring about? What location do they live in? When did the sale occur?
The customer service representative would not be able to answer the question before asking the coworker for more details. This leads to a bottleneck in workflow due to poor communication caused by lacking context. Now the time has to be spent unraveling the question to find out what this customer is actually asking about. Only then the representative can provide the correct answer to help the customer.
How Context Helps Clear the Bottlenecks
Normally to resolve such issues the customer service representative may email the coworker back asking what they were specifically inquiring about. The coworker would then reply back to the customer with more information and forward the original inquiry from the customer in need. Now since the customer service representative understands the original question from the customer, she can directly answer the question without asking any additional questions. The original customer email in this example provides the needed context, and in turn, solves the issue in communication.
Now you may be thinking to yourself that this was just poor communication by the coworker who didn’t send all the information in the first place. Well, you’re right! It was poor communication. But, events like these happen every single day! So how can we fix this reoccurring issue? Using combined communication apps is one way to start!
How Clariti Enables Smooth Workflow
Clariti is one application that combines chat and email in a single web-based platform. Users can set up their existing email accounts with Clariti and even import emails from the other email client. Users can then add their colleagues as contacts in Clariti and chat with them. This way with Clariti if the customer service representative and coworker in our example was to use Clariti, the coworker could have simply started chatting with the customer service representative from the customer’s original email.
This would have completely eliminated the need to forward the email, and to have a long separate chat thread about this one simple question. When the original email was separated from the chat, the customer service representative may not have known which email the coworker was referring to. However, when chat occurs directly from the original email, there is no confusion! The context is always clear and there is no need to get into a communication circle.
When the context is clear, there are no bottlenecks in communication and work flows naturally. Clariti enables a smooth workflow through context-based communications.
The answer to workflow is really simple. Use a tool that can assist in making your workflow! Clariti can be a great tool to try. Sign up for free here and start having more efficient work days!
* http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/workflow.html
