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Automation Software Technology Process System Business concept.

Running a business is both exciting and daunting. For one, it comes with numerous processes and tasks to operate correctly and grow steadily. However, not all functions and tasks are equal. While some activities require creative thinking to achieve your goals, others are time-consuming and repetitive, which often takes up a chunk of your resources and bottom line.

Fortunately, technology offers a solution to this–automation. Setting up specific processes and tasks to be automatically completed with minimal human intervention can save precious effort and time. But which business tasks and processes are the prime candidates for automation?

This article enumerates some of those business processes you should be automating now.

1. Marketing And Sales

Automating your marketing and sales can offer the most profitable results. Your marketing and sales processes require significant manual input, which you can automate to boost productivity and revenue. 

For instance, content and email marketing are two key areas that can significantly benefit from automation. You can set email schedules to send content at strategic periods with automation. You can also use automation to track your email and content marketing efforts and generate easy-to-read reports for stakeholders. 

In terms of sales, automation can help with lead conversions and enhance loyalty. For instance, you can use automation to suggest new products and services and encourage repeat sales.  

These are just some of the numerous tasks you can automate to make your marketing and sales team more successful and efficient. You can consult a sales and marketing automation expert to help determine more areas in these departments to automate. 

2. Invoices And Payments

Managing cash flow is one of the most important tasks of a business owner. Without streamlined cash flow management, businesses may face funding difficulties that can limit the company’s growth.

Two critical areas of proper cash flow management are prompt invoicing and payment. Manual invoicing and payment processes can be stressful and time-consuming. In addition, manual invoice creation is also prone to mistakes which can delay invoicing and payment. And in some cases, business owners are also prone to forgetting payment follow-ups causing further delays.

Fortunately, you can get paid faster by automating your invoice and payment processing. With automation, you can send invoices instantly, especially if you have repeat clients. Moreover, most invoice automation software allows you to schedule follow-up reminders for unpaid invoices.

Automating these business processes and tasks can free up valuable time so you can focus more on other critical business tasks while ensuring better cash flow.

3. Employee Hiring And Onboarding

Hiring and onboarding are some of your company's most complex and time-consuming processes. However, with automation, you can streamline most tasks.

In terms of recruitment, some of the tasks you can automate include the following:

  • Candidate selection
  • Applicant tracking
  • Scheduling interviews
  • Offer letters and contract generation

With employee onboarding, automation can help you with several activities, such as sending welcome emails and supporting HR managers with training programs.

4. Cybersecurity And Data Backups

In this modern business world, cybersecurity has become a significant concern. From insider threats to viruses and malware, data breach and loss can lead to costly damages and harm your business's reputation. 

Thus, you want to implement cybersecurity processes to protect your data and business. However, most cybersecurity tasks can be pretty time–consuming, from network monitoring to data backups. 

Fortunately, you can easily automate the most proactive security strategies, particularly data backups. Some security tools can automatically scan your business's devices for any potential threat. Also, adequately set up and connected to the cloud, some tools automatically sync data, so you don't have to manually update your hard drives for backups.

5. Customer Service

Today’s consumers are more demanding than ever. They require businesses to respond quickly to their queries or resolve issues fast. This is where automation comes in. Automation can help streamline customer service processes, boosting representatives’ productivity and customer satisfaction.

A prime example is chatbots. These AI-powered tools can automatically engage and interact with consumers when live agents are unavailable. You can also automatically send pre-set emails for customer issues and inquiries.

In addition, an automated help desk can also help customers with easy-to-find answers or direct their messages to the appropriate team member or department for further processing.

Takeaway

As you can see, automation help simplify most of your business processes. What was once reserved for more prominent corporations, automation is now accessible for small businesses and startups, helping every company to improve productivity and enhance their bottom line.

Consider starting with the above areas to streamline your workloads and gain more time for the more critical tasks for your organization’s growth.