Everyone’s job has some degree of minutiae involved. Not everything can be exciting: I mean even a stuntman sits around for most of the day before his or her death-defying scene happens. This week, we thought we’d go through the importance of these seemingly rote tasks and how instituting technology that allows you to automate more of them can actually help a business accomplish a lot.
The Minutiae
When we discuss business processes, we generally consider the entirety of them; not really the individual tasks that make them up. A lot of the tasks that are carried out in the course of doing business are repetitive, and while they all serve a purpose, completing them may not be the best way for your employees to spend their time; especially if there is an alternative.
How Automation Helps
Some studies show that automating these rote tasks can save up to two hours of work per day per employee. That’s over a full workday per week per person that can be redistributed to focus on revenue generating tasks. That’s how automation works to make a business better. Not only can employees disengage from working on the business, that time can be spent working at advancing business initiatives, including further innovating processes and focusing on productive endeavors.
The way most businesses implement automation is through the use of software. Some manufacturers will deploy robots and other automated tools, but for the average small business, automation is done through applications that support Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). Essentially, you use the technology to build processes that are repeatable and easily tracked. This consistency can help every aspect of managing a business.
How to Build Better Automated Processes
There are some parts of your business that are easier to integrate automation, and then there are some where automation could actually have a negative impact on your ability to do business effectively. Let’s look at three ways any business can build an automation strategy that can produce beneficial results.
New Leads
One of the best automations your business can make without a lot of high-end resources is a way to manage your leads list. Doing lead lists manually is a major hassle and takes a lot of time. By automating these tasks, it can prove fruitful for both your sales team and your company as a whole. Not only can you automate the process of inputting leads into your CRM, you can also go a step further and automate the process of lead scoring by giving value to all the interactions a business has with a prospect. Based on these scores, you can segment each lead to ensure that they are placed in the best possible place on the sales funnel.
Notifications
One of the most difficult things to master for any business is internal communications. The better you do them, the more effective your business is going to be. With automated notifications, you can build a much more effective business by adding value through speed and efficiency. You can set up notifications for almost anything that can be integrated into your instant messaging platforms, your collaboration tools, your email, and even your telephone systems. You can set up notifications to help you more effectively manage inventory, provide better support, update the status of a task or project, and much, much more.
Customer Support
One of the most innovative ways small businesses are using automation is to support their current customers. With the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence-fueled chatbots more of the front-line customer support can be done without the need for your production staff to take time out of their day to handle it; a big problem for many growing businesses. Chatbots can be set to provide certain answers and to alter their responses as they learn what works best in supporting your clientele; a really cool tool that can save your business a lot of time and money.
Automation will continue to be a big deal for businesses and can really be a big benefit for smaller businesses in growth markets. Give North Central Technologies a call today at 978-798-6805 to see how we can help you integrate automation into your business.
