Robots Will Soon Take Your Job- News For Those Who Don’t Know It. But all joking aside, there’s a reason businesses are turning to business process automation for everything they can. It saves time and generally pays for itself many times over.
According to McKinsey research, 31% of businesses have now fully automated at least one area of business. And 2/3 of companies are piloting new business process automation, as we speak. 72% of those using automation say it is instrumental in their business success.
So as an entrepreneur in the 2020’s, you should be asking one very important question with everything you do: “can I automate that?” Here are just some of the top types of business process automation you should certainly explore.
- Social Media Automation
Through automation, you can manage your social media reputation. Automation allows you to deliver a consistent, high-quality social media experience to your followers while building an engaged following. Automation can help you manage monotonous tasks like:
- Publishing
- Curation
- Following/Unfollowing
- Auto replies
- Analytics
But a word of caution: While many social media tasks can be automated, know that some automation activity may be frowned upon by the platform and detract from the user experience.
Overuse or improper use of social media automation can get you banned. So read the policies, use them with discretion, and check in on your accounts regularly to ensure you’re not experiencing unintended consequences.
- Accounting Automation
Accounting can be a coma-inducing set of tasks. That can make you error-prone and delay your access to important financial reports.
But a lot of these can be improved through automation. Invoicing, balance sheets, AP automation, and other accounting automation tools can streamline your workflow in addition to providing automatic checks and balances. Vendors get paid on time. And customers don’t get delayed bills, adding to balance confusion.
Accounting automation tools can work across financial documents, so you have the same accurate information in every form. Each one is always up-to-date. Compare that to someone having to manually cross-reference and transfer numbers to fill out different forms. Definite improvement.
- Client Scheduling Automation
Client automation software allows clients to schedule, cancel, and reschedule on your website, so you can keep your calendar more up-to-date and reduce unexpected cancelations if they couldn’t reach your receptionist.
You can also use scheduling tools to automatically send and receive documents clients may need to fill out before an appointment, as well as send reminders.
- Email Marketing Automation
Automatically share your latest products, blog posts, or videos to your subscriber list. Personalize and segment email content to improve relevance for each subscriber. Grow your email subscriber list while increasing the open rate and click-through rate by offering a consistent and perfectly timed user experience.
- Call Forwarding Automation
Some of the simplest automation tools are the best. Call forwarding automation automatically forwards your calls to various devices, so you never miss a call and don’t have to rely on voicemails or people taking messages. Many call forwarding services will also transcribe voicemails and send them directly to your inbox, saving you even more time.
- Email Inbox Automation
Get rid of the junk that’s cluttering your inbox. You’re probably already aware of native automation tools in your inbox like auto-reply and moving certain senders to a specific folder. But you can take this further with automation tools that help you identify emails you receive and never open. You can set it to junk or unsubscribe automatically. These emails never again overwhelm your box or keep you from what’s important.
- Collaboration Automation
From eSign to shared cloud storage to video conferencing software, collaboration automation can help everyone stay connected and on the same page, reducing duplicate efforts and frustration.
- Reporting Automation
Whether you need to see the current status of your Google rankings due to search engine optimization or get an expense report, many automation tools can now populate and send you reports on a schedule, so all you have to do is click and view.
Some of the best reporting tools pull data from multiple sources and present you with a single view that provides you with all the important key performance indicators, so you don’t just have more data to look through; you have the business intelligence you can use to make faster business decisions.
- Project Management Automation
Project management automation can help you track to-do lists across multiple projects all in one place and automate reminders, so you stay on track. Like many of these types of automation tools, you can sync tools across devices so you can access and receive alerts on the go.
And like all of these business process automation tools, this can save you time and help you get more done with less.
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