Posted by Cameron Francis
on
20 Jul , 2015
in
News Uncategorized
How can your small business compete with other big businesses? How can you join the big leagues without getting overwhelmed? How can you make sure that you’re growing without the risk of burning out or being stretched too thin?
These questions are the reasons why many small business owners struggle with sleep at night. The good news is that business growth doesn’t have to be painful or stressful. With the right strategies, tools and manpower, you will find your business growth seamless and surprisingly easy. How can this be achieved? Through business automation.
What is Business Automation?
All business growth are directly or indirectly tied to your ability to automate your business. Simply put, business automation is the process of using tools to simplify and accelerate your business processes. Think of it as a way to put your business on steroids. As a result, you’ll be able to cut down on time spent on certain processes, cut down on costs and ramp up your efficiency.
The dream of every driven small business owner is to get to a point where they can comfortably scale up their marketing, logistics, and product deliveries, without compromising quality. Now, business automation easily and effectively integrates all these processes so that the company functions as one well-oiled machine.
Business Automation is Gaining Popularity
Any small business with incredible potential and spearheaded by a visionary leader is always looking to grow, expand and enter new markets or areas. With the internet and the proliferation of supporting tools, business automation has never been easier.
Getting More Done in Less Time
The number one advantage of business automation is the ability to increase efficiency and productivity. Many small business owners are stuck doing tedious tasks when they should be focusing on growing their business.
These activities often take a lot more time than they should. But when you use automation tools to take care of repetitive tasks, you will be amazed at just how much time you save whilst consistently meeting and even surpassing deadlines.
Enhanced Workplace Performance
People generally function well when they are put in positions where they feel motivated. The reality is that most routine activities aren’t motivating or exciting. This means that your employees will simply go through the motions without putting in their best.
However, eliminate boredom, assign challenging tasks to your employees and watch them deliver excellent results.
This naturally translates into enhanced employee performance while on the job. This is what business automation does. It frees them from monotonous repetitive tasks so that they can use their time for more creative and more productive activities.
Increased Revenue and Profits
The best part of business automation is that you spend less time on routine tasks and allow your software or outsourced agency to handle that part of your business while you focus on business growth and expansion.
This will translate to increased revenue and profits because you can scale up your processes, increase your output, market or sell to more people, and effortlessly fill large volume with ease. All of these translate into more money for your business.
More Effective Customer Complaint Resolution
With the use of automation tools like customer relationship management software, it is easier to quickly resolve customer complaints.
These tools provide you with the ability to create knowledge bases, automatically direct the right enquiries to the right customer care agent and have them quickly resolve any pesky problem.
As you know, customers hate being made to wait particularly when they’ve paid for the product or service. Having these tools will help them get the help that they need speedily.
Faster Order Fulfilment and Speedy Service Delivery
Automation helps you deliver excellent products and services with robot-like efficiency: quick order fulfilment, faster service delivery, and seamless logistics.
For instance, if you decide to use outsourcing as part of your business automation process, you can have an order fulfilment team in China or Taiwan speedily execute your orders and have it ready for shipping within 24 hours.
The same goes for service delivery. When there’s less things to worry about, you can actually focus on improving your customers’ experience and providing them with cutting edge, high quality services.
Less Human Errors
Humans are fallible and easily affected by their mistakes. Therefore, there’s always the possibility that there will be errors along the line. Unfortunately, these errors can be quite costly in terms of increased risk, more reworks than is necessary, wasted time and company liability.
But with automation, you’ll eliminate so many instances of human error, increase product quality and output whilst minimising risks.
Improved Staff Collaboration
Staff collaboration can often be hampered by delayed or miscommunication. Luckily, with the aid of collaboration tools available online, your employees can get on the platform, making collaboration easier and faster.
For instance, if you want an employee to create the first draft for a contract bid, they can easily do it, upload it to the platform where you’ll take a look at it, make the necessary corrections and save the file.
The point is there’s less likelihood of losing crucial information. Some excellent examples of decent collaboration tools include Basecamp, Google Drive, and Trello.
Consistent Project Monitoring and Feedback
Business automation takes all the guesswork out of project milestones. It helps make tracking project progress, monitoring milestones and project feedback easy. All of these can be accessed from a dashboard at once, thus providing you with a bird’s eye view of the project’s status.
With these tools you can compare current results with set milestones to determine the completion timeline or delivery of the project. With this, feedback to the client is bound to be regular and more accurate.
Business automation tools can help streamline your processes resulting in a more effective and more profitable business. Start automating your business today for rapid growth and enhanced profitability.
