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Business automation enables small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to focus on high-priority tasks. It’s the difference between spending a few minutes or hours each week inputting stuff and using that time to develop strategies to increase sales or generate new revenue streams. Additionally, 29% of small business owners surveyed by Incfile said “they are automating business processes as much as possible because it helps them avoid burnout.”
Automation tools exist in every department, from marketing and customer success to recruiting and human resources. Learn what business process automation is and how it works to understand potential use cases for your company. Then explore the benefits and examples to drive your automation journey.
Business automation: what it is and how it works
Business automation uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and rules-based software programs to perform certain tasks with minimal human intervention. Basic business automation can be as simple as scheduling social media posts or configuring an email autoresponder for a lead generation form. However, automation comes in various forms.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software program that uses scripts to perform operations across systems. It is typically not data-driven, meaning RPA does not rely on natural language processing, artificial intelligence, or machine learning. Instead, RPA performs rule-based tasks.
Business process automation (BPA) goes beyond the basics, enabling companies to automate more complex, multi-step workflows. With BPA, small businesses can automate most of the activities needed to achieve company goals, such as employee or customer onboarding. However, it requires deeper integration between software platforms and can support cross-departmental workflows.
Intelligent Automation (IA) combines AI and RPA technologies to automate processes, generate insights, and learn from data sets. Many business software tools use some form of IA to support software features such as conversational chatbots that can respond to customers, use historical data to improve chat quality, and predict purchase or return intentions.
[Read more: Automation Is the Future of Sales (Even for Small Business)]
Any repetitive or routine process can be automated, so consider that your company handles high-volume activities, such as work orders, expense claims, or time off requests.
Small business automation opportunities
Every step you automate is one less thing your employees have to do manually. Instead, they can focus on meaningful work that adds value to your business. For example, when your software proactively catches and corrects timesheet errors, your HR team will have more time to achieve high-level goals. A simple digital onboarding process allows new employees to be entered into the system before they enter the office.
You can implement business automation in the following ways:
- Hires: Most initial onboarding processes can be completed without human intervention. Your system can send a welcome email inviting new employees to review and electronically sign documents. Once the form is completed, the platform forwards it to the correct department, reducing manual data entry, paper filing, and back-and-forth emails.
- customer service: Many customer support activities can be improved through automation. Help desk software routes tickets to the correct department, while chatbots can answer questions about refunds and automate the return process.
- Marketing activities: You can automate many marketing tasks and workflows, including targeted emails, text messages, and social media campaigns. Customer relationship management (CRM) programs capture interaction data, and integrated systems can send responses at the optimal time and forward qualified leads to your sales team.
- recruiting: Applicant tracking systems use intelligent automation and artificial intelligence to post jobs, find and screen candidates, and process applications. Integrated platforms can facilitate interview scheduling and background checks.
- Sales Process: Many sales CRM and lead management tools can automatically qualify leads, assign leads to sales reps, and record deal-related interactions.
- Accounting and Finance: Automatic data capture and receipt matching reduce errors, while trigger-based approval processes streamline financial workflows. Most software platforms also offer reporting automation capabilities.
These are just a few examples of how to use automation in your business. The possibilities are endless. Any repetitive or routine process can be automated, so consider that your company handles high-volume activities, such as work orders, expense claims, or time off requests.
How business process automation can benefit small and medium-sized businesses
Automation helps companies optimize resource usage while improving customer and employee experience. According to a report by WorkMarket, “70% of business leaders believe that between 10% and nearly 40% of their time is spent on mundane tasks that are not core to their job description, which equates to approximately 45 minutes to more than three days. hours of work”. Work eight hours a day. Through automation, employees estimate “they save approximately 240 hours per year,” and leaders say they save approximately 360 hours per year.
The benefits of business automation include:
- Reduce errors: Reduce errors by using artificial intelligence and automation to automatically fill in forms (e.g., accounts payable, payroll, inventory, customer service, etc.) and automatically route them to the correct department.
- increase productivity: Automated tools reduce task switching, back-and-forth emails, and manual data entry. Every employee receives timely role-based alerts and automated reporting.
- Additional cost savings: Because your employees spend less time updating multiple software programs, fixing bugs, and other daily tasks, they can focus on their core responsibilities. Avoiding errors and improving operations can lead to additional cost savings.
- Enhanced customer experience: Automation can improve operations, reduce product or delivery errors, and speed response times. It allows your customer success team to devote more resources to customers. The result is increased customer satisfaction.
- Improve employee satisfaction: Employees are more engaged when they focus on purposeful work rather than tedious data entry. Higher engagement also improves retention rates.
- Expand sales: Software platforms that automate follow-up activities (shopping cart abandonment or lead form responses) can capture leads before they churn.
Business Automation Software Examples
Many platforms offer automation capabilities to assist your payroll, marketing, and customer success departments. In fact, Visa’s Global Back to Business research reports that “91% of small and medium-sized businesses say they are at least somewhat likely to consider using available automation and AI services, such as ChatGPT, in the next 12 months to help Improve their business competitiveness.”
Consider business automation tools such as:
- Production: Automate marketing, IT, sales and HR processes using a drag-and-drop visual interface and pre-designed workflow templates. Create free and paid plans.
- briefly: With email, SMS, chat and WhatsApp marketing automation, you can target potential customers at the moments that matter. Brevo has several free and paid options.
- distinctly: Improve your appointment and booking process with Calendly. It integrates with CRM to send reminders and follow-ups, and routes forms to the right employees.
- Expensed: Use Expensify to automate your expense approval workflow, automatically detect duplicate receipts and sync transactions to your accounting program.
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