Businesses are always in the market to reduce costs and increase profits, especially now that technology has advanced enough that it’s easy to upgrade your business to save time, improve efficiency, and prepare for the future – and there’s no better way to improve the way you do business than by automating processes.
How will business automation save you money?
By automating certain processes and tasks, businesses can cut down on their expenses. If you spend a lot of time at work doing everything but work – administrative tasks are one massive time-sink, and so are deliveries – then automating those processes makes the most sense for your business because you’ll be able to provide a faster and more efficient service to your clients, and free up your own time to pursue other business objectives.
Business automation isn’t a new thing to the industry, either; today, most businesses run with at least partial automation. Those chat bots that respond to you 24/7, accounting software that helps you do your payroll, and automatic delivery confirmations? Those are all facets of business automation that help streamline and push a business to the next level.
Here’s five ways how automating your business can help save you money in the long run.
Five ways automation can increase business profits:
1. Free up your team.
One of the biggest complaints that your employees might tell you about is that there’s just not enough hours in the day to do everything a day’s work needs. From filling out reports to answering the same four questions for clients, your employees are probably a little overworked if you haven’t automated at least some of your business processes – and where there’s overwork, there’s burnout.
By automating the simplest tasks, it frees up your team’s day to focus on what machines can’t do: brainstorming, intricate customer services, and selling your business to new clients. It also means that – if you’re prone to work stacking up – there might not be any more need to hire any other workers. If your employees are happy, your business will run a lot more smoothly, and automation can help you achieve that.
2. Faster client responses
In this day and age, we’re used to pretty much instant gratification, and that goes especially for businesses. Clients who want an answer about a product or a service won’t appreciate having to wait a full 24 hours for a response to something that’s pretty basic – and clients who have a serious complaint will really not appreciate having to wait longer for their needs to be met.
Good automation can help streamline the most commonly asked questions into a chat bot system, allowing you to give your clients an answer any time they ask, no matter what time it is. It also helps you with the first point we mentioned above – if less team members are spending time on basic customer service questions such as ‘how much does this cost?’, more of them can focus on addressing customer concerns that go beyond a simple answer.
However, there’s one thing to keep in mind: chat bots need to be designed with the client in mind, so they need to run faultlessly, and to be able to tell near immediately when a matter needs to be escalated to a human worker so that clients who are already annoyed with a situation won’t get even more frustrated by having to deal with a bot that isn’t well-planned.
3. Less risk of human errors
No matter how experienced your team is, there’s going to be mistakes made; it’s just the nature of humanity. Rather than getting stressed out about the potential for things to go wrong, it’s better to consider automating the things that you can’t risk going wrong, such as fulfilling customer requests and orders. Automating stock taking or supply management or even more complicated customer-facing processes can limit the risk that something goes wrong and an unhappy client takes it out on your social media.
4. Optimise the way you run your business
Most businesses will have one area where time tends to stop moving, and figuring out what that area is is key to increasing your productivity and to cutting down on any needless expenses. The way you will figure that out is through monitoring – but once you have a clear idea of where you’re going wrong, automation can help you smooth out a new way of working to work out the teething problems in the way you run your business.
For example, if you’ve noticed that a lot of your working day is taken up by administrative tasks and payroll, and your company is too small to have a dedicated department, automating the payroll and administration processes can clear a lot of time for you to address other issues. Similarly, if you work in an industry that has client fulfilment issues, automating a client-fulfilment process, such as sending orders directly to the warehouse or supplier, helps you maintain a better relationship with your client.
5. Waste fewer resources
Besides being bad for the environment, your business could probably do with less paperwork, and not to mention less printer ink! Most automation software pushes all your processes to the cloud, allowing for easier access to all the relevant information that you need while cutting down on expensive resources.
Conclusion
These are only a few of the ways in which automation can help streamline your business straight into the future, but there’s many more opportunities for automation that we haven’t covered! If you’re interested in finding out more, we’re always ready to help.
