Automation brings so many benefits to a company regardless of its size. By reducing its dependency on the human factor, it reduces the margin of error, makes your overhead substantially lower and provides more satisfactory results. Moreover, it gives both your staff and your customers a more immediate response, which raises everyone's satisfaction substantially.
At the time, these several saved minutes may not seem as much, yet, they might just be enough to make a difference between making a conversion and losing someone's attention altogether. All in all, here are six business processes you can automate to everyone's satisfaction.
Employee status changes
The first process you can automate in your HR department is the employee status change which might not seem as such a great deal, yet, it stands to improve the efficiency of your business and the validity of the information at the same time. In a situation where an employee gets fired, relocated, laterally moved or promoted, this information needs to become available as soon as possible. Not only will this update the information regarding the employee but also give you a simpler method of filing supplementary documents. Overall, you get one burden taken off the back of your HR department. Needless to say, further exploring these HR automation tools might be a task worth your while.
Subscription-based payments
Another thing worth considering is improving your payment collection method by turning it into a subscription-based payment system. This doesn't save any effort for your employees but it does so for your customers. For your business, this performs an even more important function, one of ensuring that you have a continuous stream of revenue in the most effortless way possible. In fact, it's completely possible that this will allow you to retain some customers who would otherwise fail to renew their subscription manually. If not this, you should look for any other tool to make the checkout and payment process more customer-friendly. IPSI simplifying payments options may help you do just that.
Social media responses
While it's completely logical that a brand that's followed by millions isn't responding to every single mention, you must never underestimate the ego-centricity of your average consumer. With platforms such as IFTTT, you get to pre-set responses to some of the most common occurrences on social networks. Moreover, this particular platform is optimized so that it lets you make social media combinations of your own. This allows you to automate your social media responses to be a perfect fit for your business.
Post-sale follow-up
While a handwritten note or a self-made email template may make a huge difference when it comes to engaging your customers, in practice, this is highly unrealistic. Moreover, sometimes, time will be of the essence, which means that with every minute you let slide, you'll get further away from converting a first-time customer into a regular.
Therefore, you might make a post-sale follow-up template and automate its sending to your buyers. Keep in mind that there are some variables here worth keeping an eye out for. For instance, the history of your audience on your e-store is one of them, as well as all the categories they've shown some interest in.
Leave Approvals
This brings us to the next HR issue you can automate - leave approvals. The problem with appointing leaves lies in the fact that it has to be coordinated with a schedule and be unbiased at the same time. Even if you manage to achieve both of these things, you stand at risk of being accused of favoritism. Think about it, all the reasoning in the world won't be able to help you if a bitter employee decides to start slandering your name, merely because they didn't get a leave when they decided.
Moreover, automating will help you impose annual vacation on workaholics who would otherwise find a way to evade it. Telling someone in person that they have to go on a leave might result in an argument even with the best of intentions. By leaving all of this for an algorithm to decide, you'll find a way to distance yourself from the potential confrontation.
Work delegation
In theory, work delegation is something that should be done by humans and in person, yet, this might turn out to be quite problematic and cause a scenario where a single person in your employ gets overworked while others barely ever get these extra tasks. So, why not automate this process, as well and ensure that everyone gets their fair share of extra duties? Of course, important projects and vital tasks shouldn't be delegated in this way but when it comes to some smaller, menial responsibilities, automation is definitely the right way to go.
Conclusion
While some fear that automation may lead to a lower need for an actual workforce, what they fail to realize is that there are two sides to every coin. By enabling these automated processes, we are giving small businesses a chance to compete against much larger enterprises, which means that all of these people may get a better shot at the business world. Moreover, instead of replacing them, most of these tools will merely help them get better and more efficient at what they do.
Guest Author
David Webb is a Sydney based business consultant and online marketing analyst. With six years of experience and a degree in online business strategy, he is driven to help the people in better understanding of this new digital age. In free time, David enjoys writing, travelling and occasional night out with his friends.