Innovation and Process Automation for Small Businesses

By: Emma Miller

In the world of small businesses, there are only three golden rules you need to keep in mind:

1. Save time
2. Save money
3. Make more sales

However, achieving these goals is not as simple as it may sound. As your small business grows, its demands and complexity will rise, too.

You will need to deal with lots of repetitive tasks on a daily basis, preventing your teams from focusing on the vital aspects of their jobs.

To meet the needs of your business’ growth and keep your clients satisfied, you will need to hire more people and invest in a bunch of tools. Still, your budget is limited and it’s highly unlikely you will be able to afford any of this.

Consequently, your staff members start experiencing burnout, the collaboration between your teams is poor, and the overall workplace performance suffers. Not to mention your clients’ dissatisfaction and the costs that are constantly adding up.

However, what if we told you that you can maximize your small business’ potential and grow it effortlessly, without turning to new hires?

Sure, we’re talking about business automation. It gives small businesses the opportunity to build a coordinated and centralized management system and take their business’ performance to a whole new level.

It Increases Workplace Efficacy

No matter how many employees your company hires, effective project management is the backbone of your success. It helps you streamline your workflow effectively, organize your teams, and increase the overall collaboration among your employees.

This is exactly why automating project management is incredibly important.

This process allows you to create a single, centralized online location for all your business projects, minimizing the complexity of using different platforms and allowing your teams to interact on a single dashboard. Your employees will be able to work together on solving problems, communicate in real time, and share and download files almost instantly.

Most importantly, everything one does on the platform is absolutely transparent and visible to everyone within the project. Automated project management tools will notify the assigned team of all deadlines, completed projects, comments, and delegated tasks. This is how an optimal efficacy is created within an organization.

The Focus is on an Uninterrupted Communication

We’re living in the era of hyperconnectivity, which allows us to work with our teams and communicate effectively without having to be physically present in an office. Project management tools, emails, live chats, collaboration platforms, and instant messaging apps have taken workplace communication to a whole new level.

But, the rise of these highly sophisticated tools has triggered a new problem and that’s people’s inability to focus on their tasks. Notifications, messages, and emails are constantly arriving, preventing them from continuing their work effectively.

With the process of automation, these problems are significantly minimized. You can choose which staff members you will add to different groups and projects, meaning that only those people who are working actively on a certain task will be notified about it. The rest will be excluded from these massive notifications and will be able to focus on those tasks that make sense for them.

The Growing Importance of Automation in Ecommerce

Automation has already become an essential part of the ecommerce website development.

Today, there are numerous ecommerce automation tools, with a clear role- to make the jobs of online retailers simpler.

With this in mind, here are a few aspects where ecommerce automation can do wonders:

• Scheduling sales for predetermined periods
• Adding new products to your site, social networks, apps, and other sales channels at the same time
• Identifying your top-priority customers
• Removing out-of-stock items and sending an email to your marketing team so they can stop working on those items’ promotion
• Tailoring payment options to your customers (the software takes their location, device, order history into account)
• Making website theme changes for seasonal promotions
• Offering large discounts, exclusive offers, and specific shipping rules to those customers labeled with “Loyalty Member”
• Instantly detecting and identifying those customers that use specific channels to make purchases, such as Facebook or Amazon
• Immediately detecting high-risk orders and notifying your internal security team about them

As you can see, ecommerce automation comes to shine when implemented company-wide and adopted by different, interconnected teams. Once you make it a part of your fraud prevention, operational management, marketing, web development, and customer services teams, you will manage to minimize the probability of human error, boost collaboration among these teams, and let them focus on more creative aspects of their jobs.

Automation Prioritizes Client Satisfaction

Today, we’ve been hearing a lot about boosting client satisfaction through transparency.

Transparency gives you the opportunity to build strong relationships with your clients, based on mutual trust.

And, automation processes help you implement all these ideas with your business-clients relationship management.

Workflow centralization allows both a business and a client to be involved in the same line of communication. Clients can track your company’s progress, leave comments, and request certain changes directly to your company.

At the same time, your employees can give real-time feedback and make changes instantly, making them visible to a client.

This way, multi-channel communication between businesses and their clients is replaced with simple, cloud-based storage and collaboration systems for ultimate efficacy.

That’s why we can freely say that automating client relationship management means spending less time on agreements about what to do and spending more time on actually completing the task within a given deadline.

Key Takeaways

Process automation isn’t optional anymore. It’s a necessity for every business that wants to maximize their performance and minimize operational costs. Most importantly, by leaving repetitive tasks to software, you will have more time to dedicate to your business’ growth strategies and focus on what matters the most- your customers.

 

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