Automation and artificial intelligence are not here to replace people. Instead, their task is to make human labor more valuable. They tend to eliminate business processes at which humans are inefficient and keep your team more productive and motivated.
Here are a few examples of how automation can improve your workplace.
Reducing Labor Costs
Small businesses often allocate a lot of resources for hiring staff to perform labor-intensive processes that do not add much value to their company. By investing in automation, you can prevent that.
As mentioned above, automated tools will perform numerous repetitive and manual tasks for you, allowing you to reduce the number of workers and minimize costs.
One such example is customer support. To provide customers with real-time service, you will need to expand your customer support and schedule them for shift work. By using AI chatbots on your website, IM apps, and social networks, you will enhance your customer support without having to hire new staff members.
Streamlining Repetitive Tasks
By automating repetitive and manual tasks, your employees will finally have a chance to focus on more creative and challenging aspects of their jobs.
One such example is your HR department that needs to handle a mound of requests, forms, documents, and reports every day. Fortunately, there is an automated tool for almost any manual HR task, from candidate screening to payroll management. By delegating time-consuming tasks to the right tools, HR professionals will finally be able to build creative employee engagement strategies.
Another example is your marketing team. With social media management tools, account managers can schedule posts so that software can automatically publish them 24/7.
Improving Customer Relationships
Automation provides better insights into customer behaviors and lets you act on them faster. One such example is the customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Its main benefit lies in its integrations with almost any software out there, from email marketing and lead gen tools to your accounting software. It automatically collects customer data from these sources and stores them in a central location. That way, the customer information will be accessible to all teams, from marketing to customer support.
One of the most significant CRM integrations is the one with your virtual office phone system. Your CRM software will segment customers and create a detailed profile for each customer and send this data to your call center agents. Therefore, your customer support team will know the caller’s name, location, purchases, interests, and previous customer service inquiries before they even answer the phone call.
Your marketing teams will benefit from CRM, as well. Faster access to customer data lets them understand who their target customers are and what they want. That allows marketers to create targeted and individualized marketing campaigns that resonate with their audiences.
Enabling Mobile Workplaces
Apart from reducing business costs, work-from-home arrangements make employees more productive and happier. And, with the help of business automation tools, you will easily create a mobile-enabled team.
By switching from emails and complicated spreadsheets to automated project management tools, you can manage all projects irrespective of your location. Workers will automatically receive notifications about new assignments or changes made to their tasks and projects. Above all, all data and files will be accessible to everyone in the project. That way, it will eliminate the silos between your team and maximize team collaboration and transparency.
With the help of comprehensive workplace collaboration suites, you will be able to centralize different communication channels within a single workplace collaboration suite. For example, online phone services combine traditional call features with screen sharing, file sharing, IM, video conferencing, and video meetings. No matter if your employees work side-by-side or remotely, they will be able to collaborate with the team more successfully.
Minimizing Human Error
Another advantage of business automation is the reduction of human error. Let’s take the example of data analytics. To create performance reports, data analysts need to use multiple tools and extract statistics from them to confusing spreadsheets. That is an extremely frustrating and time-consuming process that often results in many data inconsistencies and inaccuracies.
To prevent that, you need to automate your data analytics processes. Automated systems will arrange and sum up the data manually, lowering the risk of human error and provide employees with the right insights to complete their tasks on time. There are automated analytics tools for almost any aspect of your work, from marketing reporting to inventory management.
Over to You
Automation makes your employees organized, productive, and more satisfied. It gives them a chance to do what they are passionate about and leave dull and repetitive tasks to machines. Most importantly, it minimizes the risk of human error, enhances the overall accuracy of your business processes, and lets you reduce business expenses.
Sure, those are just some of the numerous benefits of automated business technologies. Tell us, how do you use automation to improve your business?
By Raul Harman