Entrepreneurs can sometimes get a little confused by automation. To many, it means doing complicated things with computers to replace tasks once done by people. But it’s actually a lot simpler than that. It just means removing a task from your responsibility.
When you think about automation in this way, it becomes a lot more feasible. Businesses have been outsourcing the task of filing balance sheets and tax returns to accountants for yours. And now, thanks to our modern, advanced economy, it’s incredibly feasible to do it for a whole host of other activities.
In this post, we take a look at some of the ways that you can easily automate your business. While a few of these ideas might sound a little technical, you don’t actually have to do any learning yourself. You can outsource the task to third parties.
Automate Your Hiring Processes
Hiring people to work in your organization is a tremendously time-consuming task – something that typically takes up at least one regular working day per week, and sometimes more.
Trying to automate the process by hiring people in-house is one way to do it, but also incredibly expensive. You have to pay the market rate for salaries – and that’s a lot.
The other way to do it is to outsource the operation to a specialist recruiter – somebody who knows your industry and needs and can supply you with the right individuals. That way, you avoid most of the expenses and get to keep your time.
Automate Your Customer Support
If you run a small business, you often find that your customers take up an enormous amount of your time just talking to you via your website, phone, and social media platforms. Responding to every query is prohibitively expensive, even for organizations that have dozens of employees.
Automating customer support using virtual services for your business, however, is one potential way around the problem. Here you pay a subscription fee that scales with the number of resources you need. So small companies might need just a few hours of customer service rep time per week. But that has thousands of customers who might need an entire team.
Automate Your Project Management
Automating your project management is something that a lot of companies never even think about. How could you possibly automate something that is complicated and bespoke to your enterprise?
Well, it turns out that there are options here too.
Remember, when it comes to project management automation, it’s not the people you need to automate, it’s the processes. Luckily for you, there are all kinds of project management tools available like Monday or Asana, that provide the type of flexible working your people need.
Auditing Automation
Audits are the bane of every enterprise and usually an additional cost imposed by regulators. But there are ways around even this.
Remember, most auditing processes are simply routine things involving collecting, organizing, and storing data.
And what’s software good at doing? – Collecting, organizing, and storing data.
Now there is a raft of business management tools, designed to help you in this regard. This takes over the task of storing and processing core pieces of information so that your organization can ensure that it remains internally and externally compliant.
Chatbot Features
We’ve already talked a little about customer service, but it’s worth mentioning the value of chatbots on your website and social media when interacting with customers.
These helpful tools allow you to eliminate upwards of 50 percent of your customer inquiries simply by providing answers to frequently asked questions. They massively reduce your burden while, at the same time, improving your overhead. You need fewer reps, and your existing people become less stressed out. Their workload is more varied and less repetitive.
Marketing Automation
Because so much marketing today is digital, marketing automation is far more widespread and feasible than you might imagine.
The way it works is actually quite simple.
For instance, let’s say that you want to automate your brand management. Searching the entire internet for mentions of your firm is probably impractical. But you don’t actually have to go down this route anymore. You can just set up Google alerts to tell you whenever anyone mentions your brand in a post.
What about email marketing? There are automation tools galore there too, including MailChimp.
If you’re struggling to keep up with your social media posting (or would prefer to just rattle off all your blogs for the week in an afternoon block) then tools like Hootsuite are available. These post articles according to the times you set.
