How Automation Can Increase Business Productivity

Automation can benefit your organization in ways you can’t even fathom initially. However, the following are some of the primary and most common benefits of automation for business productivity.

Time Efficiency and Productivity

In all organizations, different teams are responsible for a wide range of repetitive and monotonous tasks that don’t require any critical input. This can include tasks like bill payments, invoice logging, backing up data, sending reminders, etc. These tasks can be automated completely because they don’t require individual input. This can liberate a large part of your workforce to go after remunerative and essential tasks.

In fact, some organizations and companies have taken this automation to whole new levels. A restaurant in Singapore has introduced their “flying waiters” programs wherein they have drones programmed to fly plates over to their respective tables. This allows the staff to focus on other opportunities.

Reducing Human Error

Human error is only natural. No matter how strong your team may be, human errors naturally creep in. However, by automating repetitive and manual tasks, you can drastically reduce or even eliminate human errors, which can also save considerable time spent on rectifying those errors.

For example, the implementation of automated data collection and logging can eliminate human errors in data entry. As such, the captured data is more accurate and doesn’t need verification from secondary sources, which is another avenue where considerable time and resources are liberated to follow other productive tasks.

Another great practical illustration of this benefit is the use of chatbots. Software robots like chatbots have the capacity to process large amounts of data instantly and learn from their own experiences. As such, chatbots can process information as they’re used by customers and then refine their answers to help them. As such, chatbots can handle customer concerns even more efficiently than their human counterparts.

Innovation

The only way to stay ahead of the curve in this increasingly competitive global landscape is for companies to continually innovate new solutions, products, and technologies. However, when your team is spending a considerable amount of its time on unproductive repetitive tasks, they don’t have the time to be creative and innovate. Freeing up their time won’t make your team more innovative. But it will give them more time to follow through on their ideas and engage in creative activities.

Improve Returns on Investment

Once you implement software and robots to handle repetitive tasks, you no longer need certain employees. You can essentially cut down the number of employees you have, which means you’ll have to spend a lot less on salaries, training, benefits, etc.

Yes, you will instead be investing in the automation tool and you may choose to outsource maintenance. However, the cost of maintaining the software or robot will be a fraction of the cost you’ll save on all of the employees who had been engaged in the unproductive tasks.

This can drastically — exponentially — cut down your business costs for the same work and thus improve your ROI!

Areas that Benefit from Automation

Hopefully, you are now sold on the benefits automation can have on your business productivity. You might be wondering where you can start with automation. The following are some tasks and areas that you can start with.

Voicemails

Sales representatives spend countless hours leaving voicemails and messages. However, with voicemail tools, you can record those voicemails and schedule them so they get sent to the necessary individuals routinely, thus freeing you to do other tasks. It’s estimated that a team of 20 people can save up to 500 hours a month by using voice automation.

Emails

Outreach and client relations personnel have to spend hours every week on drafting emails to be sent to the respective parties. However, you can use email automation tools to create templates and set up schedules for various different vendors and clients. By using these tools, you can cut down time on email creation by half.

Invoices

If you bill a specific amount to your clients and customers on a regular basis, you can easily automate the invoice creation process. Certain automation tools can be used to set up and generate invoice templates that are sent to the desired addresses on a specific scheduled time each month or week. If you charge your clients through credit card billing arrangements for subscriptions, you can use online invoicing use tools as well. In addition to simply sending the invoices, you can also set up follow-up schedules so the tools automatically send reminders. Small businesses often handle all of the invoicing and follow-ups on their own, but these tools can drastically improve the process.

Customer Support

There comes a time in one’s business growth that handling customer support individually becomes too much of a hassle. As such, you need to set up entire teams dedicated solely to the task of customer support. This means you have to spend considerable company resources and finances on salaries, wages, benefits for employees who aren’t directly contributing to revenue sources.

This is where automation tools can be a lifesaver. They can integrate effective ticketing solutions to organize and handle all customer support data. Furthermore, if you have the capacity, you can implement chatbots and other similar automation robots so you don’t need a customer support team at all.

Data Backup

Your online data is your most important business data. That’s why it’s crucial to back up your data on a regular basis. However, doing so manually can be time-consuming, inconsistent, and prone to human error. Instead, you can use cloud-based automation services to regularly back up the necessary parts of your data.