Business Automation: What It’s All About and How Small Businesses Can Benefit
Usually, small businesses don’t have all the capital in the world and often must do a lot of things on their own. This sometimes slows down the production or delivery process and can be quite frustrating for customers and clients. However, one of the benefits to living in a world where innovation in technology is constantly being pushed to the limits, is that small businesses can now free up valuable time for tasks which require their hands-on attention by automating elements of their business and day-to-day operations. In this post, we’ll learn about business automation — what it really is, why it’s important, and how small businesses can use it to their advantage.
What is Business Automation?
Business automation is the broad term used to refer to technology applications that carry out repetitive tasks and free up employees for higher value work. It can be broadly categorized into the following groups:
● Basic Automation: These are simple tools that typically require little or no coding at all. They are used to carry out repetitive albeit rudimentary tasks.
● Process Automation: This kind of automation helps businesses maintain transparency and uniformity. They are often handled by dedicated software to produce business insights and increase efficiency.
● Advanced Automation: This category combines human and machine effort to absorb multiple applications across an organization. It helps specialized workers make better decisions and promotes knowledge management.
● Intelligent Automation: Intelligent automation is primarily driven by AI, where machines can not only learn, but also make decisions on previous experiences which they’ve analysed. A great example of this is virtual assistants used in customer service to provide smarter interactions between customers and agents.
Why Business Automation Is Important For Small Businesses
Business automation is not just for small businesses alone, but the added value it brings to small businesses achieves great results that cannot be ignored.
Primarily, the biggest advantage to implementing business automation is that it helps you replace human labor with machine effort so you can utilize those precious human resources elsewhere in the business. This is especially true when you consider that small businesses typically employ a small number of employees. Think of how much time you can save by having AI take your orders via an e-commerce website while your workers are engaged elsewhere down the chain.
How Small Businesses Can Use Business Automation to Their Advantage
Small businesses can incorporate business automation into just about every area of their operations. Of course, what you choose to automate will depend on the kind of business you run. But typically, here are some pointers to using business automation optimally:
- Marketing: You can automate to a great effect in marketing. There are applications that can help you schedule your posts on social media, send emails to a predefined distribution list, redistribute your posts across platforms, and more.
- Sales Processes: You can cut down on the time your sales team spends logging their activities, qualifying leads, and assigning prospects to the right representative by using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools like Salesforce.
- Finance and Accounting: You can spend more time on tasks like strategy, analysis and collaboration by automating your financial planning and other accounting tasks using the right tools. This model is even more effective as data capturing is automated and invoices are matched to documents automatically, hereby reducing data errors and preventing fraud.
These are just three of the most important ways you can use business automation to your advantage. Marketing automation has been a lifesaver for many small businesses around the world, and yours can be part of the story too. Now is the right time to get started.
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