Your filing system is failing your staff and your customers

When looking for ways to make your customers happy, your filing system is not an obvious starting point. It won’t be listed in the user surveys, showing up in the competitor analysis, or being referenced in customer success proposals. Your sales team is probably pitching a robust increase in the travel and entertainment budget as the one-stop fix for both customer satisfaction and team morale - the morale of the team who get to spend it, at least. And hey, we’re not here to deny that Michelin-starred dining and offsite “strategy summits” at nice hotels boost the happiness of all who get to attend. But looking at your internal systems provides a more long-term boost to the happiness of all staff and customers, and we can prove it.

Recent research carried out by YouGov for Workiro shows that the majority of UK businesses are wasting time, money and morale fighting with their internal filing systems. The result is not only unhappy staff but unhappy customers - who then vote with their feet and leave, according to 32% of respondents. 58% said that their company’s reputation was being harmed by not being able to provide required information on time, and a whopping 69% cited filing issues as a source of unhappiness in the workplace.

Working with colleagues, broken filing systems are merely frustrating - the sense that everybody is working in different directions, and the haunting conviction that it shouldn’t be this hard to work together. Working with clients, it can be agonising - hanging team members out to dry in key meetings because they don’t have the information required to answer questions, solve problems or close deals.

The problem is the building blocks your filing system is built on. Static folder-based organisation doesn’t work for modern SaaS tools. As revealed in our recent webinar series, The Folder Illusion, folders are actively harmful to your business relationships. Good customer service demands that all team members need access to the data from and about each customer, and management and customer success teams need access to everything. Traditional filing systems simply can’t offer this, because they rely on every team member religiously maintaining central records - an impossibility in the age of remote work, virtual meetings, and chat-based communication. 

Using Workiro gives you a simple central repository for your documents, accessible from your existing tools like Office365 and NetSuite with no time wasted switching between them. You no longer have to waste time and focus thinking about version control, because there’s only one version, and you can track edits and comments all the way through its lifespan. You can securely share documents with clients and partners, including sending them out for one-click signing, while maintaining bank-grade security but sparing you the entirely additional headache of having to navigate external infrastructure as well as your own.

This translates directly into better customer service, because using Workiro means you can literally put the customer at the centre of your workflow. Simply open their client or project record in your CRM and you can view every document, contract and email related to them - automatically tagged and filed from within Outlook365 using our AI tools. It’s totally comprehensive and fully automatic, showing not only key files but their relationships to each other, along with every discussion along the way. It’s all supported by unlimited online document storage. 

Casting off folders, and the dozens of pain points they introduce into everybody’s workflow, is a significant improvement to the working day for everybody. As a manager, it’s an easy way to boost your NPS score that doesn’t require salary negotiation or outright cheating in Workday. As somebody running a business, it’s a way to know and serve your customers better and faster. And the account managers can still keep the Michelin-star dining, they’ll just have some much warmer conversations while they’re there.

To find out more about the problems that folders are causing in your business, take a look at the short videos from our webinar. To find out how Workiro makes those problems go away, get in touch with one of our specialists.