What is the meaning of automating a business? Automating a business means using a service to take a certain amount of workload off you. As you would know, the smaller things in a business take up a lot of time and mental bandwidth. By automating a part of it, most of your work gets done quickly and efficiently. Automation can be something as simple as using certain applications or online tools to complete important business tasks.
There are several advantages of automating important business tasks.
- Avoiding human errors – With one person doing a task manually, mistakes are bound to happen. Even if it is a data entry kind of work, errors are unavoidable. With automation of business, many such tasks can be done efficiently and with minimum errors.
- Better customer experience – By automating your business, you can have your team work on enhancing customer experience rather than doing manual tasks. Customer experience can be made better with a mix of automated tools and human interaction.
- Seamless workflow – Automating certain important business tasks, you will see the difference in workflow among your team members. Certain tools allow you to track your team’s work and responsibilities. With this, they will ensure all work is done on time and in a systematic manner. This will reduce your work on monitoring them at any given point in time.
- Faster turnaround time – With various tools available, you can automate most of your business related work for a quicker turnaround time. The quicker you have answers, the quicker your product or service sees the light of day.
Automation will make sure the work is streamlined and you achieve your goals in time. Sales projections are more accurate and operations are smoother. There are many important business tasks that you can automate on an immediate basis. Let’s take a closer look at them right here.
1. Communication at work
One of the key factors in getting work done a certain way in a certain period of time is communication. Colleagues tend to leave work-related messages to one another verbally which creates and adds to a lot of ambiguity. It’s best to have an automated communication tool that helps colleagues connect with each other on various platforms for work to run smoothly.
There’s video calling, in-house instant messenger, a platform to store projects online where a team can work on it together even remotely, and much communication based work that needs automation.
2. Customer service and support
Customer service and support are crucial to any business these days. You can give your customers a great experience with great service and support. But you need to have a room full of people for this job. There are many tools online that can help you with customer service.
You can have chatbots, feedback tools, software to track customer tickets, and so on. With such software and tools, you will also be able to track the kind of support your customers look to you for and enhance your product or service accordingly.
3. Social media management
Everyone knows how important social media management is today. Whatever your product or service may be, you must be on social media. But again, you can manage it more efficiently without giving it all your time with a suitable online tool like Hootsuite, EvergreenFeed or Buffer. They help you streamline your social media platform communication and campaigns. You can track your campaigns and tweak your plan based on its results too.
4. Email marketing
No, you don’t have to have a team sending out emails to customers anymore. There are plenty of tools online that enable sending thousands of emails at once for you. You can get free templates, design, and even content from some of these online email marketing tools.
Automate timings for when the emails go out and even track click-rate for them. With the right kind of tools, you can even get access to analytics to fine-tune your emails and the people who receive them. MailChimp is one such great email marketing tool available online today and helps you with important business tasks of email marketing.
5. Finance automation
Finance is a big part of any business. Be it internal or external, processing finance related work could be tedious. But with certain financial tools, you can lighten your work. Things like creating invoices, calculating taxes, customer reminders, and others can be automated.
You won’t need someone to do this work manually. All of them are important business tasks that can be taken off your hands and still be done well with tools like InvoiceBerry and Stripe available to you. They help you customize your financial work and give you templates for external finance related announcements and reminders too.
6. Payroll and employee enrollment
Enrolling employees in and managing payroll can be huge tasks. If you don’t have an HR person already, you must automate these tasks immediately.
With tools like ZenPayroll, all you need to do is send an invite email to the new employee and the rest is taken care of. It’s same for payroll too. Run them on autopilot mode for you to have more time and bandwidth for other important business tasks.
7. Training automation
Training employees take up a few good days and the effort of a few people. Instead of doing that, use online tools like Trainual to consolidate all the training data and then turn it into an online training manual. All the new employees can simply enroll themselves and then go through the online training manual. You can even track their learning and progress with such tools to know where they stand.
Starting a new business means doing a lot more than basic operational work. You can leave the important business tasks to automated tools, which get the work done quickly and efficiently. By doing so, you avoid manual errors and wasting time on correcting them. With a number of tools available online to you, important business tasks has never been easier to take care of.
