Automation has numerous applications and can help in many aspects of your business.
It can help you make routine, repetitive tasks more efficient. If you automate these tasks, your employees will be free to use their skills for more complex jobs. This improves your firm’s resource utilization and cost optimization.
Another benefit of using business automation is that it reduces the probability of errors in manual processes. Automation can optimize processes so that they are completed in less time and with more accuracy.
Here are 5 things your business should automate for better results.
1. Customer support
One of the most popular use cases of automation in business is leveraging chatbots to answer customer questions and provide support. Businesses from different industries around the world have started using chatbots for customer service. And, for the most part, customers prefer interacting with bots as it saves time and provides instant problem resolution.
Here is the level of acceptance of chatbots in customer service by customers worldwide.
Image Source: Statista
Automating customer support provides numerous benefits for your business, without any large investment costs. Here are some of the key benefits of customer service automation:
- Fast problem resolution for all customer challenges.
- 24 x 7 customer support to serve your customers around the world.
- Lower average time per interaction, allowing you to support more customers in less time.
- Improved customer experience due to instant and better support provided by chatbots.
- Cost savings in the long run as automation frees up human resources to be better utilized somewhere else.
Overall, customer service automation can provide a lot of benefits to your business. And, it is very easy to set up with the numerous chatbot tools available online.
Aivo is one such platform that can help you create a chatbot to support your customer service team. Their AI-powered, context-aware chatbots can handle even the most complex customer queries to improve customer experiences.
They can also help you cut down your customer service costs. Movistar, a major telecommunications brand, for example, used Aivo’s AgentBot to reduce their customer service costs by more than 30%.
Image Source: Aivo
2. Business processes
Automating day-to-day routine and repetitive tasks is a great way to improve efficiency and productivity. Using business process automation, you can improve resource utilization by leveraging employees for more skilled tasks. Business automation can take care of the tedious, routine tasks and employees can use their time to do more complex tasks.
There are several business processes that you can easily automate to make those more efficient. You can, for example, automate your procurement process using automation software like PurchaseControl. You can use it to automate tasks like invoicing, purchase orders, accounts payables, inventory and supply management, etc.
Automating these tasks removes the scope for human error and makes these more efficient, both in terms of accuracy and time. This helps you achieve cost savings in the long run.
3. Sales and lead generation
Another area where automation can help your business is sales. You can automate sales and lead generation processes that do not require much skill and are repetitive.
Here are examples of a few tasks that you can automate:
- Replying to every lead generated via contact/registration forms on your website to instantly qualify your leads. You can respond to thousands of such actions, which would not be feasible manually.
- 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.
- Automation software can also be used to alert sales representatives to follow-up with new leads.
- Lead scoring is another area where automation can help your business. You can score every interaction you have with a customer and rank customers. This can help you target each lead differently.
These are just some of the many tasks that you can automate to make your lead generation and conversion process more efficient.
4. Marketing
While marketing is definitely an area that requires manual input, there are some aspects that can be automated. Content marketing and email marketing are two aspects that can greatly benefit from automation.
Here are some processes where you can use marketing automation:
- Content Curation. You can’t always create fresh content for your social media profiles and that’s where curation helps. There are several content curation tools that automate the process and provide you with relevant content from around the web.
- Email Retargeting. You can automate your email marketing to send emails at strategic moments to retarget customers. You can send an email to retarget people who abandoned their carts, for example. You can also retarget your existing customers after a specific time duration and encourage them to make a purchase by offering them discounts.
- Content Scheduling and Posting. You can use a tool like Buffer for social media content scheduling and automated posting. This will save you a lot of time spent on these routine tasks. This is time you can spend on other marketing tasks.
5. HR processes
Just like other areas of your business, the HR department can also benefit from business automation.
Here are some of the HR processes that are ripe for automation:
- Employee time-tracking. This HR process can be easily automated and provides multiple benefits. 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.
- Employee onboarding processes. AI and chatbots can help automate this process. Chatbots can guide new employees on the steps they need to follow to acclimatize themselves with their new company and work environment.
- Payroll. This is another area that can benefit from automation and help you make faster, more accurate salary calculations. And, there are payroll automation tools that you can use for this.
Conclusion
Automating your business processes can offer you a number of benefits including cost-savings and resource optimization. Automation can be applied to all areas of your business especially the ones mentioned above.
This post lists just some of the many potential applications of automation in your business. Start automating your business processes and reap the benefits, if you’re not already doing it.
Guest author: Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is the co-founder of Attrock, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities. Find Shane on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Linkedin.