With everything getting computerised, automating tasks may seem a job hacker to many, but it is a boon for small enterprises. Those who are trying to save time and money, automation can make work easier and cost effective for them.
Before you start automating your jobs, you should know how and what to place on automation. Some of the basic tasks that can be scheduled for automated completion are:
#1 Social media handling
Social media interaction and engagement is highly important for small organisations. Nowadays, social media is the best way small businesses can attract audiences and develop a strong client base. However, everyday content posting, sharing and commenting can grab a lot of valuable time.
With the latest social media tools like HootSuite, Social Oomph, Dlvr.It, Zapier and Aweber you can automate your social media management and email marketing. You can easily schedule your daily social networking updates in advance to ensure regular engagement and business growth. Some other social media tool like Paper.li and Commune.it, can enhance your potential client reach, engagement and follow ups on a daily basis.
#2 Accounts Management
One of the most time consuming and essential task for small business is maintaining their accounts and taxing. Although the cash flow is not very high in startups and small businesses, it is important to maintain the details of every single transaction. Even the big accounting firms are shifting towards automated bookkeeping for their clients.
Mostly the use of automation of taxing, accounting and invoicing is seen in small business. Outsourcing accounting data and introducing cloud technologies help small businesses maintain accessible, accurate and real-time financial documents without any hassle.
Many online service providers can take care of your payment reminders, bank transfers, receipts creation and tax filing. Automated bookkeeping model is highly cost-effective and saves a lot of time.
#3 Password Manager
As an entrepreneur, it is quite common to have multiple online accounts for the various vendor, social media and other financial accounts. Which means remembering a lot of login information including passwords. You may have a common username for all your accounts, but keeping the same password is not a smart choice. You should always use unique and strong passwords for every online account. However, to keep all your passwords safe you can take help of password managers. Password managers are the best way to store all your login information safely and help you log in automatically.
It is quite safe to use password managers for all the websites, as it encrypts the password database into a master key or master password. While logging in to any of your online accounts, you will only have to remember the master password.
Password managers not only save your passwords but help you generate secure passwords. Therefore, you will not have to face a situation when you get locked out of your account or your account being hacked. To be precise, password managers keep your sensitive login information safe and saves a lot of valuable time. Some of the best password managers are Dashlane, LastPass and KeePass.
#4 Email Marketing
Email marketing can be only beneficial if the right email is sent to the right person at the right time. Therefore, sending thousands of emails in a day can be a tedious and time-consuming work. Automated email marketing saves time, enhance customer engagement, increases timely interaction and opens up new sales and up selling opportunities.
Marketing automation is worth the price as it develops 70% higher open rates and more than 152% click-through rates.
Some of the best email marketing platforms to optimise email ROI are Act-on, Adobe Campaign, Callidus Cloud, Hubspot, InfusionSoft, Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot and MailChimp. These email marketing platforms maintain a database for customer birthdays, product launches, follow-ups, welcome messages and much more.
#5 Helpdesk
There is a lot of work your client support needs to do. This includes listening to customer queries, finding a resolution, raising tickets, ticket status and much more. The automated help desk tools can automate most of the tasks mentioned above. From filling tickets to following with customers, the automated help desk tools are quite beneficial.
Automated customer support tools like FreeDesk and Salesforce help desk can handle the ticket filling, enhance conversations, improve query resolution time, assist customers and reduce workload.
#6 Payroll System
A computerised payroll system enables a business owner to automate employee payroll. The manual payment system is a prolonged process as it requires a lot of calculations and preparing everything by hand. Introducing automated payroll system diminishes errors, reduces time consumption and makes the whole process simpler. Payroll software like Z-pay, PenSoft, Sage Peachtree and QuickBooks help in payment calculations including, calculations of gross-to-net salary.
Some of the best-automated payroll systems in the market are Wagepoint and Gusto, which also helps in time keeping transportation, deduction calculations and other record keeping related to monthly employee payments.
#7 Business Analytics
Switching from one business dashboard to another, may not look difficult but is usually eats up a lot of valuable time. If you can maintain a single dashboard for all your business analytics reporting, you can save a lot of time.
Cyfe is a potent tool for all your business needs. Tools like Cyfe are useful to monitor sales, social media engagement, customer support, marketing reports, strategies and other critical analytics. You may even get tools to create and disseminate other business tools. Some of the best tools used for dashboard creation are QlikView and Hyperion.
#8 Lead Data Collection
Whenever a client signs up on your website, they will have to fill up a lead form which will save information like name, company name, contact, address and much more. This will help create new leads and enhance sales, as these automated forms to save all the information attached to the profile.
Automating regular, boring and time-consuming tasks can save you at least 2-3 hours a day. According to a survey, professional automation of services enhances 61% customer satisfaction, increases 52% knowledge sharing and 59% productivity. Introduce automated task handling systems in your business and learn the differences.
Leave a Reply