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Having seamless operations is paramount to growing a wildly successful company.
If you’re stuck with manual, tedious workflows, your inefficient processes will eat up a huge chunk of your time and resources and seriously hurt your bottom line.
That’s why automation is important.
Automating your tasks can save you tons of work hours and money since it streamlines your business processes.
In this guide, we cover five business processes that you can automate.
1. Customer service
While it’s crucial to maintain personal interactions with customers to deliver excellent client support, it’s also vital to provide quick services and fast resolution times — which is almost impossible to do without automation if you have a myriad of customers.
Automating your customer service workflows allows you to proactively solve problems while reducing your client support team’s workload.
For instance, powerful customer service software Freshdesk provides AI-powered automation to streamline your client support team’s workflows.
The software lets you auto-assign tickets to agents based on their workload and skills, or you can automatically distribute them equally across your agents and team members.
Instead of getting stuck designating or escalating customer issues to the right agent, your team can focus on working from their inbox views and work more efficiently. This allows your team to resolve client inquiries and problems quicker, streamlining your customer service delivery.
Freshdesk’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Freddy can even do the heavy lifting for your customer service team members by learning from past tickets to automatically suggest fields for new tickets.
Image source: freshdesk.com.
This automates prioritizing, routing, and categorizing your incoming tickets, and your team members can focus on more crucial tasks within the process.
Automating your other repetitive, tedious customer service tasks can help you run a seamless client support process.
2. Social media management
One of the vital business processes where automation shines is your marketing operations, particularly your social media marketing.
After all, social media marketing helps you maintain a solid online presence, widen your reach, increase your followers and traffic, and engage and connect with your potential customers.
To achieve all this, you’ll need to churn out content to post regularly to keep your audiences engaged and your brand top-of-mind with your potential customers.
The key is to adopt automation into your social media management processes to streamline planning, creating, and publishing your posts.
Leverage reliable content marketing software such as Buffer that helps you plan your social media posts with a content calendar and automatically schedule your content to post at the best times.
Image source: buffer.com.
This helps ensure you publish your social media posts when your audience is the most responsive without waiting around for that best time to arrive before you post, saving you tons of time and effort.
The platform also lets you visually plan and set up Instagram and Facebook Stories reminders on mobile or web, so you’ll know when it’s time to share.
Streamline your social media management efforts by scheduling and automating your posts across your social networks. This will also optimize planning, collaborating, and publishing your social media content to generate meaningful engagement and, in turn, conversions.
It also helps to opt for an easy-to-use content management software to easily create, modify, and publish your website and social media content.
3. Operational tasks
Some of your daily tasks are crucial to your operations and your company’s ability to make money.
For example, if you run an equipment rental company, one of your most critical daily tasks is to conduct asset inspections before and after renting out your equipment.
If you’re still using paper forms and manual methods, you’d be bogged down with tons of paperwork. This can lead to inefficient inspections, which can also make your rental processes slow, and in turn, hurt your bottomline.
Plus, dealing with damages can be tedious when you’re using paper-based inspections since it’s easy to miss any damage caused by negligence or equipment misuse, and you run the risk of shouldering expensive repair costs.
To address this issue, there are equipment inspection software that digitizes your asset assessments and management.
These mobile apps let you perform asset inspections via an electronic equipment inspection form and checklist.
All the inspection records are then saved in the cloud for convenient access, storing, sorting, and sharing.
They even have automatic email triggers to alert concerned parties when there is damage to your equipment. This allows your team to act promptly — capturing evidence through photos and videos.
Your team can then complete and send off inspection reports quickly to management and liable parties so you’ll have irrefutable proof and avoid hefty damage expenses.
Integrate automation into your crucial daily operations to streamline your processes and save time and money.
You can also take this to the next level by adopting robotic automation processing to increase your efficiency and overall operational speed.
4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and sales
Acquiring leads from the nurturing stage to the closing phase is crucial for successful business operations, but it’s also often long and tedious.
After all, it takes communication with your prospects, knowing their interests, identifying their core problems, and providing solutions (and value) to turn them into paying customers ultimately.
An excellent approach to help streamline your lead acquisition to closing is to automate manual, time-consuming aspects of your CRM and sales processes.
With intelligent automation for marketing and sales platform Exceed.ai, you can automate your lead conversion journey into sales-ready meetings.
The software’s AI assistant can work with your sales team. It works by engaging incoming leads, responding to inquiries, and qualifying your leads (at scale) through real-time, personalized, and human-like two-way conversations via your website chat, SMS, and email.
Image source: exceed.ai.
Essentially, exceed.ai automates your lead nurturing to qualifying and hands off leads to your reps and team members when they’re sales-ready.
This allows your sales team to focus on closing deals instead of spending the bulk of their time and energy on repetitive tasks, streamlining essential parts of your CRM and sales processes.
Automating your lead generation to acquisition also helps bolster your inbound marketing efforts. This gives you more reason to leverage automation and increase your chances of succeeding.
5. Scheduling
Your operations can be a huge nightmare without a proper and well-managed schedule, and workflows can be thrown into chaos.
Automate your scheduling, from client appointments to meetings, to streamline your workflows and processes.
Some of the ways you can automate your scheduling include:
- Automatically syncing contacts across your CRMs and calendars
- Auto-sending meeting confirmations and video conference links
- Send automated follow-ups after meetings or online conferences
Automate your scheduling tasks and processes to ensure you don’t miss any critical meetings. This also helps ensure no appointments fall through the cracks that keep your business from running as smoothly as possible.
Supercharge your business processes with automation
Automation allows you to streamline your business processes while saving you tons of time, energy, and resources.
Automate your critical business processes to reduce your team’s workload while optimizing your workflows, helping you gain more and better results with less effort.
With automation, you can improve and focus more on your operations’ revenue-generating aspects, allowing your business to run efficiently, make more money, succeed, and grow.
