Increasingly, businesses of any size these days are turning to automated solutions for different workflows. Managing these processes the right way can deliver results with great efficiency and free up employee resources to focus on other areas. But which workflows and tasks should you attend first to receive the most benefits? Here are six areas to look into.
HR
Your human resources team is there to support your workforce, meet job needs, and enable each employee to be more productive and efficient. This could easily be the strategic lever that yields the most immediate impact. By improving your HR service and management with a system running on the intuitive ServiceNow platform, for example, your organization can understand and efficiently provide for the needs of your workforce, boosting employee productivity across the board
Sales
Generating leads and converting them to actual customers is what drives any business to succeed. However, the typical sales process entails a ton of work behind the scenes to qualify leads, define tactics, and create and present a strong pitch. Automating workflows within this area will free up your sales team to focus on what they do best and where they can make a difference – taking the right approach to handling each prospect, increasing conversion rates, and ultimately driving up your revenue.
Customer support
Many businesses use outsourcing solutions to handle customer service while reducing costs. But outsourcing can come with its drawbacks such as scripted responses and a lack of in-depth knowledge. Automation can be a more viable and cost-effective option here. You can be strategic and automate selective workflows where human interaction isn’t necessary – self-service options and chatbots, for instance, can address and filter out basic questions while still letting your in-house team take over to address more urgent or complicated concerns.
Billing
For small businesses, financial management can be one of the most time-consuming activities due to its scope and complexity. Yet if you manage to break down your accounting functions into small workflows, there are plenty of opportunities to automate and simplify the work. Generating customer invoices, sending out payment reminders, and chasing down delinquent payments are all tasks that can be automated and accomplished effectively with the right accounting system.
Data management
Increasingly, organizations are relying on cloud-based solutions to enable worker collaboration. You can probably use basic tools such as Google Drive or Dropbox at the outset to ensure that shared files are constantly backed up and synced. But as your operations expand and become more complex, custom data management solutions can automate functions to speed up indexing, assign documents to specific employees and remind them of pending tasks.
Administrative functions
Back-end administrative tasks generally fit the bill perfectly for what you’d like to automate. They are tedious, repetitive, time-consuming, and don’t require intuitive human input – yet at the same time, it’s vital you get them done consistently and without errors. Filtering and auto-responding to emails, or managing schedules and appointments, can be automated to take a great deal of work off your hands.
While you may not agree that robots can eventually replace human jobs, there’s no doubt that automation can take over specific tasks and make work easier for your actual human employees. Find the right balance to maximize the strengths of your workforce.
