Businesses, especially small ones, benefit from automation. Investing in automating certain time-consuming business processes frees up employees and bosses to concentrate on personalized customer interactions and innovative approaches to products and services. Even the smallest tasks, like dealing with email lists, take up a lot of employee time; find out how much your small business could benefit from investing in some automation in 2017.
Email Marketing
Automated email marketing means you don’t have to remember to email your customers and clients. You also don’t have to sort through lists of emails to choose the right people to receive the right message. Depending on what company or software you use, automated email marketing can do a lot of things.
Many automated email systems send customers emails based on pages they’ve looked at or purchases they’ve made. Almost all email communication now is personalized in some way, so the customer gets real value out of the message.
Web Management
Using people to solely manage websites is a thing of the past. Instead, you want part of the process to be automated. Some software will monitor your website for problems. Other software tracks how people are reaching your website and what they’re doing there, and gives them assistance when they need it. Even low-level automation, like auto-posting blogs and social media updates, is helpful when you’re running a small business.
Customer Service
You can’t automate every aspect of customer service because part of making a customer feel valued is human communication. Start the customer service process with automation: give customers an online form to fill out. That online form automatically creates a file that your software can track. No customer inquiries fall through the cracks this way. Later, save customer information so you can send follow-up information and special offers once the problem has been resolved.
Thanks to information the customers input, the customer inquiries automatically get sorted. Further reduce the stress by managing your communication. Telecom expense management companies like Asentinel track how much you spend on things like phone lines and communication equipment, so you get a better handle on your budget.
Project Management
The purpose of automating project management isn’t to delete the role of managers entirely. Instead, you automate parts of the project management process to give managers more time to focus on the ideas and the results, instead of keeping track of who does what when. Automation benefits the teams working on each project, too.
Project management automation typically means using project management software. The software makes it easy to assign tasks and check progress. Within the software, employees can send files back and forth, leave comments, and mark tasks completed. Overall, it streamlines the project completion timeline.
Automation does not have to mean you spend a lot of money on expensive software. Instead, identify areas of your business that are eating up employee time. Invest in automating those areas first. Be sure you’ve got a productive way for your employees to spend that newfound time to take full advantage of automated processes.
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