Automation is a great tool for increasing business performance, productivity, reliability, and reducing operating costs. Gone are the days when businesses considered automation a luxury for big companies because it has become necessary for all businesses to automate. Automation also saves time and avoids repetitive tasks so you can focus on achieving your business objectives. So what is the right way to automate a business? In this article, we will look at how to automate your business to help you overcome obstacles that may come your way.
1. Decide on what to automate.
First, you must identify goals for what you want automation to do for you. Choosing a goal helps you know the right tasks to automate.
Some goals for your automation can include:
- Shorten lengthy processes in receiving calls
- Avoid repetition in the customer contact process, etc
- Lighten the workload on key staff
- Reduce operational costs and more
As you automate, you will identify gaps in your workflow and communication between employees, departments, and customers.
You can therefore decide to automate the following tasks:
- Communication between people or departments.
- Invoice processing.
- Posting on social media at specific times.
- Reaching out to existing customers
- Scoring leads based on user actions
- File management
These are a few examples of areas to add automation and compile all you need to be done.
2. Choose the right automation tools.
After identifying your goals and the areas to automate, the next thing is to select the tools that will help implement the process. Automation does not only have to be a tool. It can mean outsourcing repetitive or lengthy processes to someone else. This could be by hiring a live receptionist answering service to take on those tasks that need a human touch.
Here are factors to consider before you make a decision:
- The tool needs to be user-friendly. The test process needs to be simple so that even employees without technical knowledge can run them efficiently.
- It needs to support the required languages.
- The tool should be able to support the three major user platforms that are web, desktop, and mobile applications.
- The tool must be able to work in a wide variety of browsers and platforms.
- It needs to have efficient technical support and assistance.
- For human involvement like receiving and making calls, consider a virtual receptionist service to outsource to.
Choose the right automation tool based on the factors above.
3. Implement the automation
With the right tools, begin the automation process in the following ways:
· Set up a virtual receptionist assistant service
You can automate your business using a virtual assistant call answering service that ensures you do not miss important calls. You, therefore, stay connected with customers and potential leads and help to resolve all customer queries.
A virtual receptionist ensures efficiency in office communications. All you need to do is give instructions on how you want the communication done with call centre scripting.
· Set up automated email campaigns
Email marketing automation is the easiest and most common way of business automation. Factors to consider in email automation. They include:
- Personalization of each email you send.
- Segmenting people in your email list into different groups like buyers, potential buyers and more.
- Triggering email-based actions such as webinar sign-up confirmations.
- Delivering requested information after users fill in forms.
· Set up an automated lead scoring system
Setting up an automated lead scoring system assigns a different numerical value to leads based on actions. This saves time for your sales team as they prioritize leads that are more likely to buy from your business.
· Set up an automated schedule for your social posts
Using a social media-scheduling tool simplifies the work of your content creators and busy marketing teams. With it, they can create meaningful content in advance and avoid a last-minute rush that sacrifices the content’s quality.
· Set up an automated SMS marketing system
You can consider adding automated SMS marketing to your business sales strategies. This helps to regularly communicate with customers and connect with potential ones about:
- Meetings and event reminders
- Promotional messages for deals and discounts
- Restock alerts for products in which customers had expressed interest.
· Set up an automated accounting system
Accounting is one of the areas where business owners spend much time that they could have invested in other objectives. With an automated account and expense system, you can manage your funds more accurately and efficiently.
Additionally, this system helps with receipt management, automatically categorizing receipts in your financial statements.
· Set up an automated sales process
Sales automation tools are an essential piece of software for any company looking to streamline and optimize its sales process. From prospecting to closing to relationship nurturing, sales automation tools help sales teams work more efficiently and effectively, ultimately leading to increased sales and revenue. The virtual receptionist’s duties can also include some functions of selling. Invest in quality sales automation process tools personnel.
· Set up an automated customer database
You can manage your customer data by using the CRM as the main database and then sync contact data between apps to automatically make changes when customers’ account information changes.
· Set up an automated notification management system
Automating your notifications management system protects employees from distractions by sorting the notifications and collecting those that are meaningful in one place. This helps your team to concentrate on roles that help the business achieve its goals.
Conclusion
Automation is vital for all businesses, regardless of their sizes. The benefits of automation are reliability, accuracy, efficiency, better time management, etc. You need to assess the current position of your business to identify areas where you need automation and then get the right tools for the process to be successful. In addition to automating your internal processes, you can also use virtual office receptionist services to automate your business. They will free up more time for you to focus on other important tasks and help improve customer service. Contact us today if you’re interested in learning more about our best virtual receptionist services. We would be happy to help!