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When done in an intelligent way, business process automation allows companies to achieve up to 400% ROI. In order to unlock all the benefits of BPA, you have to move step by step, automating your routines gradually and keeping track of your performance as well.
That’s why in this article, we suggest reviewing some simple yet effective ways to automate core business processes using intuitive and affordable tools.
Business Areas That You Can Easily Automate
1. Marketing
With the abundance of all-in-one marketing automation software that is on the market, marketing is one of the easiest areas to automate business. You can optimize and streamline numerous tasks in your work plan, including content marketing, mailing, lead generation, customer support, and other laborious processes.
Automated tools save time and effort for marketers, allowing them to plan, track, perform, suggest, validate and repeat marketing campaigns in an instant.
Applications to choose from:
- ActiveCampaign: It is a kind of a simplified CRM that comes with advanced email marketing automation features. This is the top choice for the companies betting on cold email contacts, since the solution allows those who sent the emails to reach out and nurture leads using all the benefits of automation.
- Hubspot: This is one of the best-known tools for marketing automation. Hubspot allows you to solve and automate most of the marketing tasks and can be a good tool for companies that are just getting started with marketing automation. Their “Marketing Hub” solution comes with features such as lead generation, email marketing, and social media ads as a part of a free package. Marketing automation and custom reporting are a part of a Pro subscription.
Trick! Prioritize. Choose the marketing direction that takes you the most time and effort and automate it first.
2. Sales, procurement, and supply chain
These are the core activities of B2C companies and simultaneously, the sources of the most routine and repetitive tasks. Using specialized sales automation software, you can save a lot of time, protecting the business from crucial mistakes, and making winning data-driven decisions.
Applications to choose from:
- Megaventory: This is a top inventory management app that also comes with features to control the orders and manufacturing processes. Plus, it generates custom and visual reports.
- Prospect.io: This is one of the best sales automation platforms that cover all the sales process cycles and automates repetitive tasks. Its predictive algorithm is in-build in order to help you better forecast the deals and suggest more profitable sales strategies.
- Kissflow: This procurement automation software saves up to 75% of purchase order processing time. The best part of using Kissflow is that it’s extremely flexible, customizable, and integrable with the majority of popular tools.
Trick! Rely on AI. The sales, procurement, and supply chain management processes generate a lot of real-time data you have to take into account and analyze. So, place the highest bet on the apps powered by artificial intelligence in order to manage your data in a more effective manner.
3. Customer support
Your customer support is the top business process to automate and reduce operational costs. According to statistics, 86% of customers have to either turn to customer support several times, or repeat their questions to multiple agents to get an answer. Eliminating time and effort waste with the help of AI can be a better strategy.
Applications to choose from:
- ZenDesk: This application comes with customer service and sales automation features. With its help, you can deploy automated customer support across different channels, including, but not limited to your website and social media, as well as SMS and email.
- OMQ AI: This is a chatbot API that will be suitable for companies that are just getting started with customer service automation. It perfectly handles simple queries and keeps your customers engaged by supporting smart talk when processing their inquiries.
Trick! Embed conversational AI technologies. Conversational AI is one of the most impactful tech trends, according to Gartner. Thus, it makes sense to embed it as soon as possible, and encourage your customers to interact with your brand using both voice and text.
4. Invoicing and reporting
Finances are the business processes where the most mistakes are made. So, when automating them, it is necessary to ensure real-time data gathering and integrations to always have a complete, and most importantly, accurate picture.
Applications to choose from:
- Microsoft Power BI: This is one of the most powerful business analysis solutions available on the market. The reports it generates are done with the highest level of customization are the insight treasures you are welcome to unlock. Power BI allows for gathering data from multiple sources and creating highly customized reports on any data-driven business process. All this comes along with the possibility to visualize the insights on an intuitive dashboard.
- Kofax: This is a finance accounting and invoice processing automation software that can be integrated with an Enterprise Resource Planning system, and it comes with an in-built decision-making AI.
Trick! Extract the insights. Reporting alone isn’t enough to grow your business even with the help of automation. While automating finances actually saves a lot of time and allows your staff to avoid costly mistakes, gathering data-driven insights from the reports is even more valuable, so make sure to do it. Microsoft Power BI, for example, is perfectly tailored for any insights extraction.
5. Project management
Managing projects manually can be overwhelming, and most of the tasks still need human control and participation. However, the applications below can help project managers relieve some headaches, by adding transparency and automating their routine work.
Applications to choose from:
- Tracklify: It’s a pretty new and modern project management tracker that helps you measure the time spent on a task, automate some parts of the Kanban flow, and generate insightful reports which boost productivity.
- Jira: Inspired by the Agile and Kanban approaches, Jira allows you to manage multiple processes within the same project, in addition to tracking the performance and getting instant updates on the progress.
- Trello: The pledge of Trello’s popularity is in its simplicity. Recently, the app’s creators have added more advanced features for workflow management automation. For example, the user can create an “automation rule”, according to which a more urgent task will be automatically assigned to the team member who has no “To-Do” or “In-Progress” tasks right now.
Trick! Choose wisely. Not all project management tools are equally effective. While being powered by the same idea, Jira, for instance, is better for large projects, while Trello can even be tailored to personal task management. In contrast, Tracklify is an absolutely free tool which is an essential advantage for growing businesses. So, test some of them to find the one that better suits your project and is more intuitive for your team.
6. Team collaboration
While team collaboration is more about personal interaction, there are still some tasks that can be automated with the help of the tools listed below:
- Miro: This is a real treasure for creative teams. It gives employees an opportunity to suggest, create, validate and prototype their ideas in a single, intuitive, and semi-automated environment, so make sure to give it a try.
- Slack: Does this one of the most popular collaboration and communication apps need an introduction? Just get started with Slack and you will appreciate the communication transparency it promises by creating dedicated threads for each of the issues. Slack also comes with an in-built chatbot that automates some of the communication processes and integrations.
Trick! Integrate a team collaboration app with a project management app. These tools create a perfect combination for ensuring that your team is always updated and can instantly discuss an issue allowing you to stay on the same page.
Conclusion
Not all business processes can be automated. There are still tasks that require a personal touch and human creativity. But as for the routine issues that mostly waste the time of you and your team, automating them is a direct way to increase productivity and avoid critical mistakes. Choose business processes you need to automate foremost right now and proceed with the corresponding solution to do it as effectively as possible!
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