One of the best ways to eliminate stress when growing your venture is to hire a business operations support team. As you enter the growth phase, you will realize that you cannot manage to do it all. You have to delegate some functions.
If you’re in this phase right now, you need people who will work cross-functionally to drive projects and get things done in your business. That's where a business operations support team comes in.
The operations support team is like a Swiss Army knife to your business. They’ll contribute to almost every aspect of your business event. Like a soldier or a hunter needs their Swiss army knife, let's find out why your business needs an operations support team right now.
What is Operation Support?
In simpler terms, a business operations support team is the people you hire to assist other departments with their tasks and boost the organization's productivity. The team is a vital cog in your business machinery as they contribute to efficiency in your processes.
When you have an operations support team, you’ll be able to focus on critical tasks, such as decision-making, creating long-term goals, and communicating with stakeholders. In addition, they’ll enable your organization to:
Increase customer satisfaction levels
Increase productivity levels
Increase revenue
Sustain product quality
Decrease senior-level involvement in management operations
Ensure smooth day-to-day operations
Note: to better understand why you need a business operations support team, let's first understand their role in your business.
An Operations Support Team will Streamline Your Workflow and Processes
The operations support team is like a movie backstage crew. The team operates quietly across various departments but outside standard functional areas. The team will handle your day-to-day operations across various departments.
Most importantly, they are the people who bridge the communication gap between various organization teams and between you and your employees. They coordinate activities and communications between project teams. They also help teams to collaborate better by creating structures that stimulate progress and encourage productivity.
Imagine you’re facing the situation below in your company:
Your business aims to respond to customer inquiries on time. A customer asks a question that the customer service department feels can be best answered with some input from product development.
So, the customer service personnel forwards the same to the product development department for clarifications on how to respond to the customer.
Ultimately, the response may not be timely or never happen because the product development department is more focused on its core responsibilities.
Such a situation will not happen when you have an operations support team that monitors communications between the various departments. The team will ensure that feedback from the product development team reaches the customer service team to be relayed to the customer.
Support Team Handles Administrative Tasks
Research indicates that SME owners spend about 16 hours a week conducting administrative tasks. That is almost half your average working week on non-core business activities.
But what can you change to prevent this loss in productivity? After three years of studying how knowledge workers can be more productive, A Harvard study found that all you have to do is eliminate or delegate your unimportant tasks and replace them with value-added ones.
There you have it! Your business operations support team will handle administrative tasks, which are still the backbone of your business operations. The best part about it is that these are tasks that require minimal to none of your input; hence the decision-making is solely on the operations team.
Operations Support Team will Help You with Customer Relationship Management
As a for-profit business, you want future business from your current and potential customers. However, that won’t happen automatically. You have to give your customers a reason to stick around.
Hiring an operations support team will improve your customer experience in several ways. The first is by ensuring that the customer's needs are met. The team runs the day-to-day operations, hence they ensure business processes run smoothly so that products reach customers on time.
An operations support team also improves customer by automating your communication systems to achieve your timely customer response objectives. They also customize tools to ensure your customer service personnel have an easy time navigating complex CRM platforms. Therefore, the service personnel can focus on solving customer problems and minimize response wait times.
Your Support Team will Assist with Data Analysis and Decision Making
An operations support team is flexible and adaptable to changing business environments and requirements. They consider your overarching business goals and make decisions that meet the needs of various stakeholders.
An ideal business operations support team will also analyze situations and make decisions that serve your business's best interests. Therefore, hire a team that can make decisions fast without consulting you.
How to Build a Business Operations Support Team
As you’ve seen above, it is evident that you need a team of competent staff to handle the operations support tasks. So, how do you ensure you get it right when hiring this team?
Understand Your Business Needs
Your business operations and workflows are unique. Define your business needs that will form part of the job description of your new team. The needs will be the blueprint for determining the roles and responsibilities of the support team.
Be specific with your business needs to be on the same page with your prospective team. They need to be sure what you expect of them to deliver optimally.
Recruit based on Skills and Experience.
It would help if you had a team that would hit the ground running immediately. Therefore, hire a team with prior experience and skill set that matches your unique business needs. They’ll adapt to your business needs fast and be able to solve challenges quickly.
Create a Comprehensive Onboarding Process
A comprehensive onboarding process decreases the time your operations support team takes to adapt and familiarize themselves with your business operations. For example, it will offer the team a clue about the level of automation in your organization.
The team also needs to learn and understand your organization's culture. They will improve your business process efficiency if they are conversant with your culture and standard operating procedures (SOPs).
Streamline Your Business Processes Today
As a business owner, it is your responsibility to create a platform for success for your business operations support team. The team will perform their responsibilities better when working with a streamlined business system. Contact us today to learn how we’ll help streamline your business processes.