From administrative work to growth planning, running a business can be overwhelming. Fortunately, you can leverage automation to help you save both time and money. Automation also lets you achieve consistent and predictable output while freeing your employees to accomplish more valuable tasks.
In this blog post, we will discuss some of the business processes that small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) should automate.
Payroll
Managing payroll can be time-consuming and stressful, especially if you have a large workforce. When computing salaries for each payout, you need to take into account every employee's time records, absences, overtime, benefits, bonuses, loan deductions, and taxes, among other things. Factoring all this information manually can easily result in miscalculations, leading you to either underpay or overpay staff, which may bring about complicated legal issues.
But with an HR system in place, employees can easily log in and out and file for leaves and overtime. The system stores all of that attendance data and uses it, along with other factors that impact payroll, to automatically compute each employee's salary for every payout.
Some HR systems can even be linked to online payroll accounts, enabling you to ensure accurate and timely payouts via bank transfers.
Email marketing
Email automation can make email marketing campaigns more successful. By automating tasks like email list management, segmentation, and scheduling, you can spend more time developing content that will resonate with your audience and less time on administrative tasks.
In addition, automated emails can be personalized to each recipient, which can help increase click-through rates. And by using data from previous campaigns, you can optimize your email strategy to improve results.
Read also: The role of IT in business
Social media management
Whether it's coming up with engaging content or interacting with followers, managing social media accounts can take up a lot of your time. Fortunately, there are tools that can help you automate some of these tasks. For example, you can use an app like Hootsuite to schedule and publish content, track who's talking about your brand, and measure your results. If you run a contest on Twitter, you can use a tool like Tweetbot to automatically retweet every entry.
Sales pipeline management
Sales automation software can help you manage your sales pipeline by tracking every step of the process and providing data-driven insights to help you close more deals. It can identify which leads are most likely to convert and when the best time is to reach out to them. It can also track your progress on each deal and remind you when it's time to take the next step.
By using a sales automation software, you can focus on developing relationships with your customers and closing deals rather than worrying about administrative work.
Invoicing
Generating invoices can be complicated, and if itβs not done correctly, you may mistakenly overcharge your clients, putting a strain on your relationships with them. If you take too long creating invoices, it can delay payments and cause cash flow problems. Thankfully, automated invoicing lets you quickly generate invoices, so you can bill your customers on time and receive payments promptly.
Customer support
Customer support is one of the most important, yet most tedious, tasks in any business. You need to attend to every customer inquiry and complaint, whether through phone, email, or social media. And if you have a lot of customers, you can quickly find yourself bogged down by all the requests.
The good news is that not every customer concern needs to be addressed by a person. For example, a bank's automated attendant can provide commonly requested services to customers, such as account balance inquiries. Some social media pages also utilize chatbots, which can be programmed to ask questions that help narrow down a customer's concern and provide the answer that customer is looking for.
With the right IT tools, you can automate even more business processes, allowing you to save more time so you can focus on more valuable tasks. The IT experts of Safebit can help you identify, deploy, and manage such business technologies. Schedule a FREE consultation with us today.
