There are several aspects of your business that you can automate. Automation has many ways it can help in different aspects of your business. This is why its value can no longer be ignored. Automation is the creation and application of advanced technologies to deliver goods and services with minimal human intervention when improving your business processes. When simple tasks are automated, it allows you to focus on more complex issues surrounding your business. Routine or repetitive tasks become more efficient and improve your company’s resource utilisation and cost optimisation.
Unlike what most people think, business automation doesn’t “destroy” jobs; it improves them. The“robots are coming for our jobs” rhetoric is as far from the truth as it could be. Small and medium businesses often work with limited human resources. One-man teams can’t accomplish fast growth – there’s only so much you can do in a day.
Even 5-10 people teams are quickly overwhelmed with internal and external communication, management, documentation, and marketing. By automating your business processes, it reduces the probability of errors in manual processes. Automation can optimise processes so that they are completed in less time and with more accuracy. Even scalability becomes easy; all you have to do is make sure that your systems can accommodate that growth. If not, minor upgrades are all you’ll need.
Customer Service:
Automated customer service gives your business a competitive edge. This happens when you leverage chatbots, to answer customer’s questions and queries. While this fosters interaction with bots, it helps save time and provides instant problem resolution for all customer challenges. Also, it provides 24 x7 customer support; inquiries about your business get answered around the clock with or without your customer support representatives’ efforts.
All these require lower average time per interaction, allowing you to support more customers in less time. Offers you a chance to improve customer experience due to instant and better support provided by chatbots. It also helps in cost savings in the long run as automation frees up human resources to be better utilised elsewhere.
Marketing:
Marketing is the biggest aspect of your business; gaining leads is an important part of the business. Content marketing and email marketing are two aspects that can greatly benefit from automation. When it comes to marketing, content curation is an important aspect that could involve creating your social media profiles or website.
There are a lot of content creation tools that exist and can help you automate the process and provide you with relevant content from around the web. With a tool like a buffer, you can schedule your social media posts to be posted automatically.
You can automate your email marketing, and send emails at strategic moments to retarget customers. You can also retarget your existing customers after a specific time duration and encourage them to purchase by offering them discounts.
HR Process:
Automation in your hiring process saves you a lot of manpower. The automation would serve as an employee time-tracking tool; for one, it makes the process accurate and error-free. Also, it is more convenient and saves time that employees spend on manually making time entries. It makes the onboarding process more swift, to guide new employees on the steps they need to follow to acclimatise themselves with their new company and work environment.
Sales and Lead Generation:
This is another area of your business process you can automate. When you are trying to gain leads, responding to those leads manually can be time-consuming. By automating, you can be more efficient replying to every lead generated via contact/registration forms on your website to instantly qualify your leads.
You can leverage chatbots for lead generation for your business. Bots can be used to make product recommendations, cross-sell, and upsell products and services. It can also be used to alert sales representatives to follow-up with new leads. You can score every interaction you have with a customer and rank customers. This can help you target each lead differently.
Reporting:
Your reporting process shouldn’t be cumbersome, and this happens when you do it manually. In today’s data-driven business world, automated reporting matters a lot. Report automation software takes advantage of various tools to integrate a company’s data infrastructure to pull a range of information with a few clicks.
Many services and software also leverage artificial intelligence to provide a level of efficiency and quality that is difficult to achieve through manual means alone. Not only does it save you time but resources too. While you improve your data imputing accuracy, increase your speed, and shift manpower to more important tasks.
Invoicing and Payment:
Automating this process means invoices get sent instantly, and payment arrives sooner. This means you can get to free up time and focus on other aspects of the business. Business owners are either handling this process themselves or paying someone else to send invoices and follow-up. Automating this process will either free up your valuable time or let your employees focus on more beneficial tasks.
Time Tracking Projects and Process:
To meet deadlines and timelines efficiently, there is a need to track projects and your business process. To achieve this, you would have to switch to automated digital tools. Apps like Timely and Hubstaff make it easier than ever to record logged-in hours, manage projects and tasks, and receive automated reports on each employee’s track record. Many of these programs offer free basic plans, perfectly enough to accommodate the needs of small businesses. You’re not risking anything, but rather, winning a lot of time and driving increased work efficiency.
Conclusion
As a small and medium business owner, it’s important to integrate automated processes. We have shown you different things to automate in your business. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments section.