When it comes to business, we believe in constant room for improvement. One thing that all successful businesses are doing is regularly looking for ways to help their company run better. Better performance leads to increased profits and growth and will help gain an edge over any potential competition. This is where automation comes in. Finding ways to automate as many of your daily tasks as possible will free up employees to use their skills for more important work.
Keep reading for everything you need to know about automating your daily business tasks.
Why Automate?
If you ask any office worker what their least favorite part of their job is, they will likely say something along the lines of data entry, paperwork, or scheduling. Just about any task that is repetitive, tedious, and recurring will fall into this category. Some may even see these tasks as “busy work”. Aside from being annoying, employees dislike this type of unskilled work because it takes time away from more important tasks.
If you have a high employee turnover rate, data automation can potentially address that. Employees want to have meaningful and rewarding experiences in their career. Data entry is far from meaningful and airs on the side of monotonous. Removing these dull tasks from their daily schedule will lead to better workplace satisfaction in the long run.
Automating the daily tasks at your business will help free up your employees to use their skills and creativity for work that cannot be performed by a computer. This way your employees can start focusing on the bigger-picture goals you have for your company. This will not only increase productivity but can also foster growth within the company.
And automating also reduces the risk of human error. Without the risk of error, your services will improve due to the predictable outcomes created by automation. Automation will also allow your business to perform any necessary operations 24/7. You can send out reminders, email campaigns or supply chain reports outside normal work hours without having any employees working overtime.
Another benefit you can gain from automation is reduced operational costs. Automation is an investment in the future of your company. While it will be an expenditure upfront, the savings your business will experience in the long run will make it a worthwhile investment. Not only will you reduce the cost of labor, but you will also experience minimized paperwork expenses, overhauling and maintenance costs.
Ways You Can Automate Your Business
There are no shortage of ways you can utilize software to automate your business. In fact, for 60% of existing jobs, 30% or more of their current tasks can be automated by available technologies. Here are some of the ways that you can automate some of the most common tasks employees have to perform.
· Email
There are tons of different ways you can better automate your email system. You can find software that will help integrate your email into your database. You can also do the same with SharePoint. Download a program that will do the extraction work for you so you have everything easily accessible in SharePoint. You can also integrate your email into a personal CRM. Autotask, Spreadsheet, and Dropbox are also popular integration tools for data automation.
· Phone
If phones are taking up a lot of time in your office, you’ll want to look into automation for those too. Automation of your phone system can include contact list creation, call routing, scheduling calls, click to call, call connections, and call to CRM.
· SMS
If your company uses mobile phones as well, here are some of the ways they can be automated. You can automate a customer support SMS that will respond quickly to customers. You can use it to automate marketing campaigns or use it for two-factor authentication that can be processed in seconds. It can also be helpful to send automatic support notifications when they are urgent. This way you are not missing any critical support requests. You can also automate your SMS messages being sent to your CRM.
· Social Media
If your company uses social media heavily in marketing, you should also be simplifying this process. Social monitoring is a popular choice to help process messages your company receives on their socials. If you have a large following, this can be an incredible time saver. You may also want to invest in software that can perform competitor analysis as well as sentiment analysis. And you will also want to look into automating your updates so you can post scheduled content.
Automation Advantages
Automation opportunities truly are endless as the ones we have listed here are just scratching the surface. Evaluate the types of automation that will best serve your business and start integrating them to reap the benefits.
