A recent Gleanster report found that almost 80 percent of top-performing businesses have been utilizing automation for over two years. As a consumer, you come across it every day. From the chat bots that reply to your customer service requests, to the birthday coupon your retailer sends you, automation is becoming prevalent across all industries.
But this isn’t something only big corporations have the opportunity to leverage. Even smaller businesses can utilize automation to streamline daily processes. By incorporating automation in your business, you can eliminate repetitive tasks and gain more time for those that actually drive growth, innovation and profit. Here are 5 ways to do it.
Lead Tracking
One of the most essential places to incorporate automation is lead tracking. As your business grows, it quickly becomes impossible to nurture every lead and move them along the sales funnel. Salesforce and Zoho are popular solutions here, offering the ability to automatically capture, assign and track leads throughout the process.
Email Marketing
By utilizing features such as Sendinblue’s email autoresponder, you can eliminate the repetitive and time-consuming task of communicating with your customers. It also helps you build stronger relationships with your customers by allowing you to send tailored messages to specific recipients based on fields of your choice.
This helps to drive engagement and increase conversions. For instance, you can send welcome emails to new subscribers, special offers on their birthdays, and reminders to customers that didn’t check out after adding items to their shopping cart. Perhaps best of all, setting up an autoresponder is a dead-simple process.
Social Media
Having a social media presence on all the platforms that are relevant to your business is important, but keeping up can be a real time suck. This is where solutions such as Hootsuite come in.
With their software, you can schedule posts, reply to messages and mentions, find valuable insights through analytics and identify leads in your industry. There are many more tools in the social media automation sector worth checking out.
Time Tracking
This includes time tracking, payroll reporting, licensing, certification, policy changes, applicant tracking and leave approvals, just to name a few. Zoho People, BambooHR and Namely are all great options in this category.
Customer Service
Without a streamlined system for managing customer service enquiries, you can not only lose time, but also impact the quality of your support.
Fortunately, tools such as ZenDesk can simplify the process and automate a number of routine customer service tasks. For example, the Help Center feature allows you to build a knowledge base for customers to help themselves, while the support dashboard makes it easy to keep up with tickets and develop automated workflows.
Human Resources
Specific automation software can help your HR department eliminate countless repetitive tasks from their daily schedule. This includes time tracking, payroll reporting, licensing, certification, policy changes, applicant tracking and leave approvals, just to name a few. Zoho People, BambooHR and Namely are all great options in this category.
There is a near-limitless number of tasks that you can automate in your business. Get your team together and discuss what you’re doing that is repetitive. Chances are that there’s an automated solution waiting around the corner.
