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Is Automation a Business Productivity Saver?

Written by Dmytro Zaichenko on January 13, 2023

Do you want increased productivity and efficiency in your business? You're thinking, is automation a business productivity saver?

In this article, we'll help you find an answer to your question. Then, we'll help you make the best decisions to enhance your business operations forever. 

What is business automation?

Business process automation (BPA) automates manual workflow to eliminate or minimize the need to devote human resources to repetitive processes and routine tasks. Instead, automation will conduct a process using a specific trigger, so you don't have to.

So, if you're not already utilizing business process automation software to streamline your operations, you should. Business automation can save you time and money.

6 key business automation benefits

The benefits of workflow automation are huge. Here, you'll find the top six reasons you should consider using automation to benefit your business. In addition, you'll learn how to save time and improve efficiency.

Increasing productivity

As a business leader, you'll increase productivity by automating tasks. If you spend a shorter time managing your business processes, you have more time to concentrate on other tasks. So, in the end, productivity levels will increase in other areas of your business.

You can speed up many tasks with project management, marketing automation, workflow management, and other tools, from project planning to A/B testing in marketing. So, the faster you process customer requests, the more business you'll do.

Saving time and money

As your business scales up, you must take on new team members if you depend on your team to work through manual tasks. And there are more manual tasks to finish. But if you automate those processes, you'll increase your output as your operations grow. So you'll don't need to expand your workforce. On average, automated processes can save around 360 hours every year for the team.

In addition, by implementing BPA solutions, you may be able to streamline existing processes. As a result, you'll reduce costs while maintaining the same work. Besides, you don't have to spend time fixing human errors.

Providing better customer experience

Automation provides customers with a better experience. Customers get quicker, personalized, and tailored communication wherever they are in the customer journey.

With the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence, you can use AI-powered chatbots to interact with buyers while they're on your website or app. These chatbots help you to answer customers' questions and help them buy without the need for a human salesperson.

Chatbots are extremely useful for online stores or businesses that receive a lot of web traffic but don't have the human resources to manage customer questions manually.

Make processes more efficient

Automation adds efficiency to your business process. Let's view a small example.

Suppose you're a sales team manager, and your job includes reviewing incoming leads and allocating them to different sales agents. This task takes you a couple of hours every day. 

The good news is that this process can be much more efficient with automation, using triggers in your CRM or prospecting software.

Standardizing your processes

Keeping everyone on the same page with your business processes is hard. Managing documentation can be problematic. Also, with a regular flow of inputs, meeting notes, and other assets, the problem of chaotic business process documentation may appear.

These processes aren't standardized. It can problematize things for everyone involved. This way, automation helps you easily standardize processes across the entire business.

In addition, you can regulate the entire creative process for everyone involved. It will help you better organize your workflow and track and document progress.

Stay on top of compliance

It's imperative to comply with current regulations like GDPR. Automation will make it easier to do that and keep your business respectful. 

For instance, you can only keep customer information for as long as necessary. After that, you need to remove it from your system. 

Using triggers and an automation software system, you can automatically remove contact information after a certain period from an email list, customer base, etc. There's no need to manually track each lead, customer, or prospect.

5 Business areas to automate in 2023

You see how powerful the impact of automation is in business. 

Let's view the main business areas that are worth automating in recent months:

Finance and accounting automation

Automating finance planning and accounting functions will release time for more strategically important things to focus on. You can have more time for analysis, strategy, and collaboration with colleagues and partners.

Your data capture is automated, and no more digging through miles of spreadsheets. You don't have to do invoices manually because they'll be automatically matched to relevant documents, and approvals are also routed. Using this automation will reduce the risk of errors and keep you calm.

Marketing automation

Instead of pressing the button "send" on every email, social media, or campaign you create manually, you can automate many processes in marketing. 

Using marketing automation software, you can automate the following:

• email marketing campaigns
• workflows in CRM
• social media posting
• SEO tasks
• content marketing efforts
• customer onboarding

Marketing automation will also help you streamline marketing data management, analytics, and reporting. For example, you can generate reports in many marketing tools using inner functionality. 

If you dive deeper into marketing analytics, you'd like to use analytics and visualization tools. Using a data visualization tool like Tableau for your marketing dashboards, you can save time and Tableau to Excel. This helps you to have a detailed overview of marketing activities, update marketing data automatically, and more.

Customer service automation

Imagine that you need to answer every question, for example, "How do I reset my password?" Here the help can come from several service automation software, such as chatbots, automatic FAQ suggestions, AI-empowered documentation, etc. In addition, it releases customer service agents, helping customers navigate more complex service situations.

Next-generation service automation can utilize AI and IoT to predict and correct service events through digital channels. With this, customers have a total service activity view for self-service support and automated monitoring. 

Human resources automation

HR systems can automate tasks, saving time and improving team productivity. You can automate many tasks: 

• job application posting
• response tracking
• scheduling interviews
• employer onboarding and offboarding
• and more 

Using these automation systems for HR, you can also provide insights into employer satisfaction, productivity, and engagement. 

Sales automation

The traditional way to automate sales processes is to use CRM and email outreach tools. This helps you to improve sales management and save time on routine tasks related to reaching out to prospects.

Except for using these tools, you can go further and empower other sales areas. 

Mainly, enabling automation tools will give you the following:

• better lead scoring and lead generation
• streamlined sales analytics that entails better planning and decision-making
• improved team productivity

Business automation is a saver

Based on the information presented above, we can state that automation is a saver for your business productivity.

Business automation could save you time and resources in many areas of your business, which impacts overall productivity. Using automation can also generate more income.

We hope this article will help you to think of automation in a broader context and start taking the first steps into streamlining and improving your business processes.

About the author: Dmytro Zaichenko is a Marketing Specialist at Coupler.io, a data integration service. He has over two years of experience in digital marketing. Apart from experimenting with marketing tactics, he's a huge NBA fan.