Best Practices for Planning Business Rules
Before you begin creating rules for your organization, it’s important to examine your business processes. This includes how you update contacts and organizations, handle incidents and answers, route requests for chats, follow up opportunities, and define targets for marketing promotions.
When you understand your organization's processes, you can develop an effective method for applying business rules to automate these processes. This section describes the essential steps to help you get started.
Identify and outline business processes—To create a more efficient system for handling routine procedures, first outline the procedures to determine what processes can be automated.
For example, if you routinely assign questions about one product to a certain queue, you can create a rule to automatically route those incidents to the queue. Or if opportunities aren’t followed up promptly, rules can escalate those opportunities after a certain amount of time.
Review this list of questions to trigger ideas for designing business rules that can increase efficiency in your organization:
- How do you handle incoming customer questions?
- What is the review process when answers are created?
- What happens when incidents are reassigned to other agents?
- How does management get involved when incidents remain unresolved?
- What happens when sales opportunities are identified?
- How are prospective customers contacted?
- How do you identify target groups for promotions?
- How can you group incoming customer questions and route them most effectively?
- Which inquiries are not being handled properly?
- What other processes can you use to automatically route and manage incoming questions, responses, and updates?
Develop a rules flowchart—Flowcharts are useful for viewing and grouping processes to determine the best way to apply business rules. Creating a flowchart can help you:
- Organize business processes.
- Gain process consensus between management and staff.
- Develop a blueprint for staff training.
- Develop thorough testing methods with less backtracking.
- Create an overview of the information management process.
- Provide a future point of reference.
Review functionality of rules—After mapping your organization’s processes, review what rules can do to automate them. When you understand how rules function, you can begin planning ways to implement them.
Create rules—Once you understand how rules work, you can create rules to automate business processes. Begin by reviewing the flowchart of current processes to determine the most appropriate methods for automating routine processes.
Prioritize processes for applying rules—You must consider the organization of states, functions, and rules to ensure that rules perform as you intend them to. Rules in a state are processed in order until all the rules are processed, or until a rule transitions to a function or a different state, or stops processing completely.
Verify and fine-tune rules—An important part of configuring rules is verifying that they perform as expected.
Train staff—Once you set up rule bases, you must train your staff. They should be familiar with how your organization handles routine business procedures. Staff must also understand how rules automate those procedures, and how their positions play a role in rules processing.
Evaluate processes and rules as required—Once you start adding rules to automate processes and become more familiar with them, you can consider more efficient and effective ways to route and manage data. Periodically re-evaluate your business processes looking for more effective ways to handle questions, responses, updates, and opportunities. Also reevaluate when your organization experiences workflow changes. For example, update routing rules when staff accounts are added or removed.
As you examine your business processes and think about automating them with rules, it’s helpful to understand how to design effective business rules. Elements of Rules and Rule Bases provides an overview of the elements of business rules so you can begin designing and working with rules.