Every business strives to improve profits by reducing operating costs, which can mean employees have more tasks than ever to attend to in the same amount of time. However, businesses now also have the ability to remove repetitive tasks through automation so they can maintain a lean workforce focused on revenue-generating activities. Below are 5 different areas where your business can do more work with fewer people by automating processes.
1. Phones
The days of the desk phone and the need to be in the office are long gone. Instead, we are living in the era of smartphones and flexible work schedules. If you want to ensure your employees are able to access files and work from anywhere, even if there is a power outage in your central office location, automate your business with a hosted pbx system.
2. Appointments and Reminders
If the best hours of your team’s workday are spent trying to coordinate calendars for an appointment or remind customers to show up for a meeting, it’s time to start automating these tasks. There are numerous software options on the market, each one allowing you to identify periods when you are available, and then offer others the opportunity to choose which of these times work for them. Once you’ve selected the package that suits your business and done the initial set-up work, you’re good to go and the program will even send reminders to all relevant parties to ensure no meetings are ever missed again.
3. New Hires
Adding new talent to your workforce can be time-consuming as you recruit and hire. The recruiting process can be simplified with software that helps you write job descriptions, source candidates and schedule interviews. Once you hire new talent, automation can populate new hire information into the appropriate systems, circumventing the typical pile of forms and manual data entry. With this type of automation, you can keep a minimal Human Resources staff that is focused on the interview process.
4. Marketing
One area where businesses have seen massive returns on investment is marketing automation. Every customer should be attended to as quickly as possible, so why not set up some triggers and rules to respond to emails and inquiries? You can even automate a series of emails to walk customers through the buying process. Or you can consider automating your social media posts so that human users don’t accidentally get lost in the latest pictures of their friend’s vacation. Some businesses have even found it lucrative to automate the ad-buying process itself. Automating your marketing and your customer emails will free up your sales and marketing team to focus on relationship-building and other strategic tasks.
5. Invoicing, Contracts, and Collections
Days can be spent creating invoices and contracts for customers. Once the documents are with their intended recipient, many more hours can be lost on follow-ups tactfully prompting for payments or signed contracts. You can click here to learn about invoice templates to fast track the process of creating invoice for your business.
Customers are more likely to respond promptly to electronic documents, so it can benefit you to not only automate the process of creating and sending these documents in the first place but also to automate reminders. You may find you no longer need a collector in your business if your automation software spurs the desired response.
Automation allows you to maintain a lean workforce of employees who spend their time on more strategic, money-generating endeavors. Enable your team to be flexible and do more with their limited time by automating your phone system, appointment scheduling, hiring process, marketing and invoicing.