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Processes to Automate
Small business owners face many challenges, from intense competition to demanding customers. To stay successful, entrepreneurs must do everything they can to automate their operations and save time and money. The remarkable pace of technological innovation has led to the pervasive availability of robust tools to transform small businesses' capabilities, creating a tremendous opportunity for productivity improvements through automation. To assist your company in its automation journey, we have compiled six processes ripe for automation.
#1 Automate Your Meetings And Appointments
Say goodbye to those unnecessary back-and-forth emails trying to figure out what time works for both parties to meet. Rather than have to deal with the annoyance, it's a no-brainer to automate this. Doing so takes relatively minimal effort and will have you looking as professional as can be. There's plenty of adequate scheduling and meeting tools on the market that offer free plans. Below are three of the top options on the market for you and your team.
#2 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Marketing and sales are business areas that have been inundated with powerful technology products to allow for the streamlining of processes and integration throughout the entire sales funnel process. For instance, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is filled with products that provide assistance enriching the Customer Journey from the first contact point through the end. One of the most popular CRM's available, and offers a very generous free plan, is HubSpot. Overall, if you are not already, it is wise to transition to a CRM product offering automation capabilities. Automating the enrichment of contact data is a burden lifted off of your sales representatives and provides you with more accurate insights regarding your customer's behavior.
#3 Accounts Payable and Receivable
Along with automation comes paper reduction, which helps you stay organized and makes Mother Nature happy. Many businesses can start transitioning to digital and begin to minimize paper use in the accounts payable and receivable department. Automating your purchase orders, bill payments, and invoices all starts with a robust accounting platform, and of course, a talented bookkeeping team.
#4 Human Resources and Payroll
We're not quite at the point where your company should be hiring robots, but within processes taking place in human resources and payroll, there are discernible opportunities for automation. A few of the many possibilities are: onboarding employees, facilitating work forms, travel and expense reimbursement, and handling time-off requests.
Another process that can be automated is issuing payroll through direct deposit. According to the American Payroll Association, by automating payroll, your business could be cutting payroll processing costs by almost 80 percent.
Streamlining employee experience can cut costs and increase employee satisfaction; when your employees are happy, productivity increases.
#5 Bookkeeping
Much of accounting has the capability of being automated. Doing so, will allow your company to have real-time accounting insights that decision-makers can use to enhance their decision-making. Approaching the automation in bookkeeping starts with having powerful cloud accounting software (we use QuickBooks Online and Xero) and an organized chart of accounts. From there you can start linking your bank and credit accounts, and then begin creating rules to automate your transactions. One of our specialties is producing real-time accounting through our automation strategies, so we'd be glad to assist you and your company achieve this feat.
#6 Customer Support
Streamlining customer support will free up time by reducing the amount of time it takes to resolve customer issues. It will also make your customers much happier. To automate customer support processes, it starts by equipping your company with technology. There are many options to choose from, but one of the most potent and straightforward to use is ZenDesk. Once you have a reliable software in place, you can then use it to handle customer support tickets, track customer interactions, use chatbots with AI capabilities to interact with your customers, and provide your customer searchable knowledge base.
Final Thoughts
There are many more areas where you can find processes to automate to enhance your productivity. However, you will be more adept at creating a comprehensive gameplan for implementing automation by starting small.