How Automation Can Empower Your Team’s Best Work in a Small Business?

Attention and time are both finite resources. Your employees are only given limited hours of work each day. Within those hours, they need to select and decide what they focus their attention on. If you’re looking to increase productivity of your employees then you must allow your employees to concentrate their time and energy on tasks that truly need their attention.

One of the most effective ways to achieve this is Small-scale company automation.

Small-scale business automation is essential to increasing productivity and empowering your team members to do their most effective work. When you know how to leverage automation effectively within your company it could help in growth as well as scaling up your company to the next level.

How can you make use of small-business automation to enhance your employees and take your company into the future?

What Is Small Business Automation?

Before we get into how you can use automated systems to help empower your employees and increase the size of your small business, let’s explain what small-business automation actually is.

 

Small-scale business automation is the use of technology to automate the tasks of your company. Instead of employing an employee to manually handle the task, you employ an application, software or another technological device to manage it in a way that is automated. This saves time and energy that your employee would have used to finish the task the course of.

Basically, automation allows you to put different tasks, systems and processes within your business on autopilot–dramatically increasing efficiency and productivity in the process.

How Can Automation Benefit Your Small Business?

Once you know the concept of automation Let’s talk about the numerous ways that small-scale business automation can help your company.

There is a myriad of benefits of automating the processes and systems of your business, for example:

Automation will free up your team’s time so that they can focus on the most important projects. When you automate a task in your company, you eliminate the need for employees to dedicate their energy and time to complete the task. This frees their energy and time to concentrate on the most important tasks.

Automation can boost productivity… If you adopt automation this makes every aspect of your company more efficient. If your company is operating more efficiently it is easier for staff to complete their job.

If your employees don’t have to spend their time doing tedious repetitive tasks, they’ll be able to be more enthusiastic about their work. Therefore, automating those repetitive routine tasks could boost employees’ engagement.

Automatization eliminates the chance of human mistakes. It doesn’t matter what type A or over it all, if the employee is human there’s always the chance that a mistake is likely to occur. Automatization eliminates the chance of human error and significantly reduces the risk that something could be missed.

Automation helps you expand and grow faster. Automation helps you achieve more with less effort and time, which is crucial in taking your business to the next stage and reaching it quickly.

What Types of Tasks Can You Automate in Your Business?

It is clear that automating tasks within your business is vital for empowering your team to be productive and increasing and expanding your business along the way.

If you’re only introducing automation in your business What’s the best place to start?

There are a variety of various tasks and areas of your business that are the ideal candidates for automation such as:

CUSTOMER SERVICE

You’d like to provide the best possible customer service. However, there’s plenty of the service you offer that doesn’t require any human interaction and is easily handled by automation.

Let’s say, for instance, that a large portion of the requests for customer service your business receives are related to product concerns. In Brisk Logic of having your customer support representative respond to each of these questions one at one, which is a commitment of time, you can incorporate Chatbots to your site (using chat software such as ChatBot as well as ZenDesk).

Make the procedure easier by creating a bot that has written responses to your most frequently asked questions from customers about your products. When a customer has a question about one of your questions, the bot automatically offers the solution they’re looking for, freeing up your customer service representatives to concentrate on more complicated customer concerns.

You’re trying to provide the highest quality customer service and keep your team happy and productive. Automating certain customer service processes is the most efficient solution to do both.

INVOICING, PAYMENTS AND EXPENSE TRACKING

In the realm of financial management for your business, it’s essential to be organised and on top of the situation. This requires some kind of supervision by your finance department. There are plenty of financial tasks that you can automate.

Let’s take an example. For instance, suppose you are working with clients on an annual retainer basis. Instead of creating invoices manually and then sending them out at the end of every month (and then chasing your clients to get payment) You can utilise an accounting program like FreshBooks to send invoices automatically to your customers. Allow online payment to make it easy and easy for your customers to pay the invoices on receipt (no need for chasing).

Let’s say that your accounting team spends much of their time keeping track of and managing your business’s expenses. Instead of manually entering expenses into spreadsheets, FreshBooks expense tracking seamlessly connects to your bank account, and imports any new charges and sorts them into categories. Instead of having to keep track of receipts on paper the only thing you and your employees need to do is take the receipt and then add the receipt to your account.

What’s the bottom line? With the correct Accounting software you will be able to automate a large portion of the tasks related to money. This allows you to focus more on the financial image of your company.

LEAD GENERATION AND MANAGEMENT

Every business requires leads to find new clients or customers. However, identifying and managing leads is an arduous task until you automatize it.

Let’s take an example. For instance, you’re planning to make use of your website’s potential to attract new customers. Chatbots can be used as software to communicate with site users, collect the contact information of them and determine which products they’re most interested in. After that, you can make the sales representatives contact them directly to arrange a meeting.

Let’s say that you have an abundance of leads, but every lead is at a different place within your selling cycle. Instead of having sales staff attempt to remember the leads they should contact and at what time they should, you can utilise a lead management tool such as HubSpot for you to automate the tracking of each lead, then send follow-up emails and keep them moving from “prospect” to “customer.”

If you’re trying to find new leads or handle your existing leads Automation can improve your processes and turn the leads you have to new clients for your company.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Nowadays social media is almost a mandatory element of running a successful company. If you want your social media activities to produce results, you must be on the ball and keep posting regularly on your various social media platforms and profiles.

However, visiting several social media websites every day to share, post, share or respond to comments is stressful and time-consuming for your team. This can take productivity hits.

This is where automation comes in. With tools to automate social media (like HootSuite) it is possible to create Facebook posts in bulk and then schedule them to go live at an upcoming time.

For instance instead of having your Social Media Coordinator log into and publish to Facebook or Instagram every morning at 10am, noon and 4pm, you could assign them an hour or so on a Friday working on all the next week’s social media posts. They can then plan the posts to ensure that they are automatically published at your desired timeframes.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Projects are full of moving pieces; there are a variety of individuals working on various tasks with different deadlines as well as different deliverables. There’s plenty to manage–and even the most organised project managers may struggle to manage it all.

Utilizing a project management application (like Asana or Trello) can streamline the management of projects by automating various project-related tasks. For instance, instead of having a project manager keep track of deliverables and when they’re due they could set deadlines in the project management software and let the software remind employees of the deadlines a week, three days or 24 hours prior to the time when the deadline to deliver the item.

If your project manager is aware that the designs for your project must be approved by marketing prior to when they can be delivered to production instead of having to submit the designs by hand after they’re done they can arrange the task to automatically forward all designs to marketing contacts for approval right after they’ve been delivered.

There are many things to be done in the realm of managing projects. Automating some tasks can make managing your projects much simpler and productive for you and your staff.

EMAIL AND INBOX MANAGEMENT

The majority of people receive hundreds of emails each daily (sometimes more! )–and reading or responding to, and then dealing with emails can take hours which can distract your employees from most productive and crucial tasks.

Fortunately, with a small amount of automated processes, emails don’t have to be the sole focus of the employees’ working hours.

Tools for managing email (like SaneBox) can help employees to manage and manage their email inboxes by automating the process of prioritising and sorting emails and ensuring that only the most important emails get to high in their list (and that the less essential or urgent messages like marketing emails are tucked away to be handled later). So instead of wasting time sifting with endless messages, employees could be spending time, as you would expect … doing work.

RECRUITING

Recruitment is among the most crucial processes within your business, yet it can be among the most tedious. By using a recruitment automation program (like ZohoRecruit) it is possible to automate many recruiting workflow, like the sourcing and tracking of the candidates you want to interview, scheduling meetings and sending out candidate messages and follow-ups. Your recruiters are free to concentrate on interviewing applicants and securing the top candidates for your company.

Empower Your Team–and Your Business–With Automation

You’d like to empower your team members to be the most efficient and perform their best for them and your company. Once you’ve figured out how small-scale business automation can benefit the team and your business! .You’ve got everything you require to begin adopting automation, and taking your company and team to the next step in the process.