With so many tools currently available to businesses, it is quite surprising how much time is still spent on manual tasks. Automation can save time, money, and peace of mind, yet some businesses have been slow to adopt this technology. On the other hand, businesses aware of automation are more willing to spend their money on a process like marketing automation. And why wouldn’t they? With the certainty that it offers across numerous business processes, automation is a surefire way to make any work more efficient.
Automation Areas
New businesses are slowly recognizing the need for efficiency and are building automation solutions from scratch. The goal is straightforward – replacing older ways of running a business with efficient automated solutions. Unfortunately, there are still many missed opportunities for automation. For instance, integrating data platforms instead of tedious manual transfer of data.
Think about this: how much time does your company spend manually entering data? How do you organize meetings? Consider how much time you spend going back and forth with clients and employees to arrange appointments and how much time is lost due to misunderstandings, communication errors, and scheduling conflicts.
Automation Opportunities
Automation is designed with people’s needs and wants in mind. The best way to discover automation opportunities for your business is to talk to your employees. They have hands-on experience with monotonous tasks and processes, and therefore know what can be changed and made more efficient.
The next step is to talk to your clients, customers, and users. Find out what elements of the experience of using your products or services take too much time and effort. Ask them what frustrates them and what causes potential customers to abandon the purchasing process.
Once you gather all this information, do some research in your industry. See how your competitors are thriving because of automation. If you can discover which procedures they have retooled, you can also reap benefits.
What Tasks are Ideal for Automation?
A task needs automation if any of the following is true:
The task involves a lot of data entry: There is no need for your employees to continue spending their working hours typing numbers into Excel sheets. If your business manages a lot of numbers by hand, you should definitely consider automating this process.
The task is repeatable and repetitious. Nobody wants to do the same task over and over. Aside from mailing and shipping, approving bill payments, and categorizing emails, automation can take more administrative tasks.
Your business can’t afford errors. People make mistakes. But when a typo poses a risk to security or customer privacy, it’s time to automate. Automation reduces errors such as mistyped names or numbers, incorrectly formated, missing, and duplicate entries.
When you automate your workflows, you spend less on people (less hiring and all other expenses that go with having employees). Automated processes can easily handle tedious and repetitive tasks, make fewer mistakes, make better, well-informed decisions, lower your operational costs, allowing you to do more with less.
Take Away
There is an automation solution or tool for almost every business process, from IT to bill payments and marketing to customer support. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to automate your business processes. If you do, you will save more money, have more time, and gain better transparency and control as a result.