Automation is a true blessing for every business owner and entrepreneur – especially if they are bootstrapping their business. The automation technology is enabling them to grow at the rapid speed and get ahead of their competitors. Apart from amplifying growth, automation helps businesses eliminate repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Moreover, it minimizes errors, standardize processes, and improves employees’ productivity. Business automation is the next best step for every business – no matter how small or big
According to McKinsey, around 31% of businesses have fully automated at least one of their business processes. And based on a global survey conducted in 2020, around 66% of them are testing solutions to automate at least one business process. If you are a business owner who has been contemplating automating one or the other process, then this article is going to help you figure out the right processes to automate.
Top 4 Business Process to Automate Today
1. Customer Onboarding with Digital Adoption Platform
Customer onboarding is where you make your brand’s first impression. The kind of experience you create during the onboarding will stay with them throughout their time with your brand. More importantly, the customer onboarding experience can help reduce your customer churn rate and can also help you turn your customers into promoters.
So, you want your onboarding process to be as frictionless and informational as possible. You want your customers to feel truly integrated within your products and platforms.
Since humans are prone to make mistakes or it’s quite possible they might leave out small yet important details or functionalities, it’s always better to automate this process. And this is the first process you should automate since this is your brand’s first impression.
How to go about automation
By investing in a digital adoption platform like Whatfix, Appcues, etc. you can automate your entire customer onboarding process and make it more engaging. With such software, you can design interactive user guides, engage with your customers on different platforms and across multiple touchpoints, and track, measure, and analyze the effectiveness of your customer engagement.
And most importantly, these platforms will help you personalize all the customer touchpoints for better engagement.
2. Packages & Delivery with Digital Mailroom Management
Mailroom management includes inbound & outbound mail management, vendor management, pre-processing of mails, reporting, analysis, and more. There are many low-stake tedious processes like data entry, etc. in the entire mailroom management scheme of things. Any business would benefit greatly by automating the backend of the mailroom by using good digital mailroom.
A good mailroom management software will digitize your entire backend and would enable you to organize, automate, and operate your mailroom and its related processes with data-driven insights.
Here’s what to look for while investing in a mailroom management software
- Contactless pickups because it’s mandatory now
- Realtime notifications and reminders
- Zero manual data entry
- Removes unclaimed mail and reduces mailroom clutter
- Compliant with QR scanner
- Delivery management and tracking
3. Customer Support with Live Chat, Chatbots, and Ticketing System
Collectively, live chat, chatbots, ticketing systems are revolutionizing the way businesses approach customer support. These tools and software have made it easier for businesses to provide personalized customer support at scale. Around 50% of businesses are planning to spend more on chatbots than mobile apps.
Since consumer behavior is shifting from emails and calls towards chats and self-help, they also prefer live chat, chatbots, exhaustive knowledge bases, and ticketing systems.
Businesses are now able to provide customer support 24/7 without incurring the costs of hiring and training additional resources. Moreover, according to research, it is estimated that companies are going to save around 2.5 billion customer service hours by the year 2023 – all thanks to the revolutionizing chatbot technologies.
What’s more exciting is that the technologies used for such software are upgrading. Now the developers are using Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. This truly is going to automate the tedious and repetitive parts of customer support processes and will help businesses focus on creating unique customer experiences.
Since there are so many options available, we are going to list down a few must-have features that help you make the right decision.
Here are the must-have features in a chatbot
- A hybrid model with linguistic and machine learning capacities
- Should offer unique personalizations
- Should let you have control over gathered data and analytics
- CRM integration
- Simple and easy-to-interface
4. Marketing with Marketing Automation Software
Imagine sending emails individually to all of your customers, replying to individual DMs on social media, or calculating a number of reverts and conversions after an email campaign. This is literally every marketer’s hell – all these tasks are tedious, menial, mind-numbing, and endless and your marketing team would bore themselves by doing such tasks.
That’s where marketing automation comes into the picture. Such tools and software give marketers the ability to be consistent in their efforts, maintain brand image and quality of content, nurture leads, and whatnot. Marketers are also able to personalize communication across the touchpoints and are able to be present in the right place, at right time to convert leads into customers.
Most importantly, such tools help them generate more quality leads without incurring additional costs.
A good marketing automation software will automate all these functions:
- Email marketing
- Landing page creations
- Customer segmentation
- Lead nurturing and scoring
- NPS and customer surveys
- Tracking, measuring, and analyzing marketing campaigns and ROIs
- Lead generation
- Cross-channel integration
- Personalization across customer touchpoints
- Customer retention strategies
The worst way to utilize a marketing automation tool is by spamming your customers with irrelevant content and recommendations which can negatively affect your brand’s image. The key to successfully utilizing a marketing automation tool is by being very clear about the goals, the processes you are automating, and the kind of experience you are trying to create for your customers.
Over to You
There are many benefits to automating business processes and almost all businesses are experimenting with the technology and solutions right now. The best way to beat your competitors is by staying ahead of the curve and be an early adopter in this. Otherwise, it’ll be really hard to catch up when automation becomes the new normal of conducting businesses which is quite a possibility.
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