Whenever implementing a new technology into your business workflow, if you can save both time of your staff and money, you’re onto a surefire winner.
Here are 6 suggestions of business operations that may be ripe for robotic process automation both saving time and money, freeing up your staff to work on more strategic work.
1. Payroll
Automating payroll and invoice processing is one of the first things that comes to mind, and modern payroll solutions can make for a quick and easy integration. Without payroll automation, you’re going to waste countless hours on payroll runs, manual excel reconciliation and other such complications.
This is especially the case for companies with a global footprint which must deal with different tax ecosystems, currencies, and local compliance issues. With several companies now providing software for global payroll, applying RPA to these manual processes ,there’s no longer an excuse to be doing payroll manually with its inherent risk of human error and inaccuracies.
2. Marketing
While AI still hasn’t reached the stage of writing flawless content (although it can help you customize it and distribute it), there are several aspects of your marketing campaigns that stand to benefit from automation.
Automated email sequences, for instance, help you reach out to qualified leads in a manner that is planned, segmented, and laid out in advance. Better yet, once you’ve set up the funnel correctly, everything is hands free from the moment someone signs up to your newsletter or mailing list, including personalization (an example of this is addressing them by their first name).
Furthermore, it makes sense to prepare your content marketing materials in advance and use automation to publish them at pre-determined intervals to keep your audience engaged.
3. Customer Support
During the recent years, chatbots have become all the rage, and for good reason. Instead of sending a prospective lead straight to the FAQ section (which can hardly be described as interactive), chatbots are driven by sophisticated AI technology that interprets their queries and is able to provide further assistance.
It can not only answer questions of a technical nature, but also help them choose a product or service that bests suits their needs, just like a real customer support or sales agent would. In the event this isn’t possible, it transfers the conversation to someone more qualified. With the chatbot handling the vast majority of queries on its own, this allows for substantial savings on human resources bandwidth
4. Reporting
Why have your employees spend their valuable time on reporting if a piece of software can do all of this instead? Don’t forget that your employees are also prone to human error; the greater the sample size, the higher the chances of mistakes slipping in under the radar. Moreover, if the report covers multiple areas of your business operations, it is fair to assume that generating it would take quite a bit of time. In contrast, reporting software can accomplish the task in a fraction of a second.
5. Inventory Management
In case your business is built around shipping physical products, inventory management is a must. When you’re just starting out, doing everything manually can still be feasible, but once you’re ready to scale your operations, automation becomes a key tool for saving time and reducing mistakes. Besides, automating this aspect of your business means that you’ll be able to ship products much faster and replenish your supplies once they start dwindling.
6. Alerting
Depending on the needs of your business, alerting can be utilized in various ways. For instance, you can send out an SMS message directly to the customer once their order has been shipped. You can also tie it to the front door of your commercial space to alert you that a new customer has entered the premises.
It can also be used for automating essential communication between employees (for example, you can send out a message that a product has been cleared to enter the next phase of production); or you can ask your customers to leave you a feedback once they’ve been served. With alerts the sky’s the limit.
Conclusion
Automation is all about taking routine tasks out of the equation, saving you time and money, not to mention eliminating inaccuracies and mistakes. The goal is to have robots and computers take on the tasks that can be classified as repetitive and requiring a high need for accuracy. As technology keeps advancing, automating business operations is becoming a breeze, and you’d be doing
