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Business automation has been a fast-growing trend for a while now. As we entered a new decade, we can only expect more businesses to adopt this trend and use it to maximize efficiency, minimize costs, and save time.
If you’re thinking about implementing business automation in 2020, you might be wondering which parts of your business operation process you should start with.
Here are some business operation ideas that can help you achieve better results in the months to follow.
Email marketing automation
In 2019, email was still the preferred channel of communication for businesses, and there’s no sign of this changing in 2020.
Automation can come quite handy for all your one-off email marketing campaigns and regular newsletters. However, email sequences triggered by customer’s behavior is where email automation really shines.
By sending targeted emails based on actions your customers take, you can create highly personalized offers that are hyper-relevant to your audience. Whether they’ve been just browsing around your website or they’ve abandoned their shopping cart, email automation will allow you to easily retarget them with personalized emails.
Personalizing your emails will not only bring you higher open and click-through rates but also help you boost conversions. According to statistics, personalizing email subject lines can lead to 26% higher open rates, and personalization can bring an average increase of 20% in sales.
Payroll automation
Payroll management is definitely up there with some of the most tedious manual tasks any business has to deal with. It is dull, repetitive, and takes up your HR manager’s valuable time. Also, when you put humans in charge of such a task, they are prone to making errors.
That’s why payroll automation is such an important tool in every business’s arsenal. Using a payroll automation software can help you save time, reduce paper consumption, and eliminate human error. That way, your HR managers will have more time on their hands to deal with interpersonal relationships and employee satisfaction.
On top of that, today’s employees prefer personalized payroll cards instead of checks, and it’s even easier to integrate those cards with payroll software, eliminating manual tasks as well as getting rid of unnecessary paper waste.
Hiring process
Hiring is one of the most important activities for any business. Having the right people on your team is crucial for achieving good results.
However sifting through a sea of applications can take days, and even weeks. It will keep your HR managers chained to their desks. On the other hand, automated recruiting software can go through resumes at amazing speed, looking for unique keywords to quickly find the best applicants out of hundreds of applications.
Statistics show that over 80% of recruiters believe that automation can help improve the recruiting process and increase productivity.
Moreover, 61% of them believe that recruiting automation can reduce unconscious biases within the recruiting process.
Customer service and chatbots
With continuous technological innovations that allow modern consumers to have quick access to everything from their bank account balance to the content of their fridge, they’ve grown accustomed to having everything at their fingertips.
Not only that, but they also expect services to be fast (and by fast, we mean almost instant). This is especially true for customer service. In fact, short response time is the most important factor for even 75% of customers.
In order to cater to their expectation in terms of service is speed, automation is a must. Using chatbots and automating your customer support will allow you to be available 24/7 and offer quick and professional service across multiple channels. While there are some concerns regarding the lack of human touch, the pros outweigh the cons by far.
Inventory management
For product-based businesses, inventory management is an inevitable part of everyday business operations. However, depending on the size and complexity of your business, keeping track of your inventory can be quite a challenging task.
Leaving this challenge up to humans can result in human errors and a waste of time and resources. Instead, it is better to use inventory management software that will allow you to keep track of large order volumes and quickly update all of the changes so you can make more effective business decisions.
Automating your inventory management will allow you to allocate both your finances and personnel and utilize their potential elsewhere, making your business more productive and efficient. Instead of dealing with inventory issues, you can spend more time building relationships with your customers and making their experience as seamless as possible.
While you should be careful not to rely on technology too much, using it to automate complex and tedious tasks can help you achieve better results. These solutions are fast, efficient, and they save time and money. So, if you haven’t tried to automate any of these business processes yet, 2020 is the perfect time to start.
