How to save time and money with business automation

If you’re spending too much time on mundane tasks, you’re not alone. Sometimes 24 hours in a day doesn’t seem enough. Fortunately, more businesses are infusing automation into their operations for time and money-saving benefits. Before coronavirus, a Gartner report estimated 69% of a manager’s workload would be automated by 2024, and it seems the outbreak has only accelerated the move to business automation. But is it for everyone? And how should you use it for your business?

Let’s dig deeper.

What is business automation?

Automation uses technology to streamline and simplify your operations. It takes the manual labour out of daily tasks, such as reporting, sales, communication and marketing, augmenting some procedures or the entire end-to-end system.

Rather than replacing paper and manual systems with digital, the business automation process also factors in a company’s workflow to find a faster, cheaper and less error-prone way.

The result is a more competitive and resilient business. Because automation can eliminate human error and reduce costs and resources, it allows owners to do what they do best.

Some valuable ways you can use automation are:

Maintain your customer base

Customer retention is one of the biggest challenges in business. Yet many are often caught up with customer acquisition and admin to focus their efforts on it. If you’re looking to increase customer engagement, using automation reinforces customer loyalty while saving money.

Having automated campaigns running in the background helps you build these relationships with your customer base as marketing efforts are taken care of. This builds greater trust and satisfaction. It’s no secret that retaining your existing customers is cheaper than obtaining new ones either. Through automation, you can provide a more efficient service and reward those who support your business.

Smoother productivity

Automating the key workings of your business means smoother productivity. Track staff performance to find areas of improvement, pinpoint specific problems for better hiring decisions and automate workflows for quality and speed.

Business automation gives owners and managers increased control. You’ll be able to achieve more in less time, improve your bottom line and use a system that’s more reliable and responsive than manual handling.

Uncomplicate payment policies

Complicated payment policies can lead to poor customer satisfaction. It also means extra admin requirements, which take away your valuable staff. A lot of time goes into chasing late payments and payroll and invoicing activities. Automating these processes and setting up simple payment policies minimises this stress.

Automating payments allows you to:

• Reduce your paper trail by using an online invoicing tool
• Set up direct debit payments for customers
• Accept multiple payment options for payment ease
• Reduce processing times and costs
• Generate reports to capture data and end costly duplicates
• Improve security, authorisation and access control
• Free your admin team for more value-added tasks

Stay focused on your business

Automation is handy for any busy owner, manager or marketer. The business automation process benefits you and your customers by increasing efficiencies while you grow and run your operations.

A recent survey revealed that 78% of businesses are looking to automation for a competitive edge and greater agility to face coronavirus challenges. The desire to make the switch is helping businesses with faster decision making, task management and recovery, as threats grow with online security and data loss.