Automation is transforming the way the world works.
Businesses of all sizes are embracing huge advances in technology to help them get things done on autopilot.
Implemented well, automation will help reduce your staff’s workload, increase efficiency, reduce costs, boost the quality of customer service, and help you use new data and insights to optimize performance.
The benefits will be felt by customers as well. As your competitors start to transform their businesses through automation, expectations can quickly change. If you don’t adapt, you risk falling behind and losing customers.
Here are three of the main areas that are ripe for automation in many businesses.
EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING
When someone joins a company, the onboarding process can shape how they view their new employer and how quickly they can hit the ground running.
Do it wrong and you risk facing problems with employee retention and staff morale. You could even end up with a bad reputation that makes you less attractive to potential new hires.
There’s a lot of room for manual error with onboarding, even with the most rigid guidelines in place.
With so many moving parts that involve so many different people, automating the onboarding process can help to make sure that all boxes are consistently ticked. Reducing the risk of human error and saving everyone an awful lot of time.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Customer service automation gives businesses a way to provide support to customers 24/7 without the need to have staff involved in each interaction.
Chatbots are a great example of this, and artificial intelligence can make them pretty smart at understanding what customers are asking. So, they can quickly give the right support before a human needs to get involved.
MARKETING
Marketing automation can be broadly defined as software that lets the day-to-day execution of campaigns happen automatically.
Businesses use it as a way to nurture leads and free up their marketing teams to focus more heavily on strategy.
One of the most significant impacts of marketing automation is the way it allows small businesses to compete with even their most enormous competitors on a level playing field. In many ways, this was thought impossible only a few short years ago.
You can see marketing automation in many of the email campaigns you receive, the ads that fill your social media feeds, and the ways that businesses notice and respond to changes in customer behavior.
