Business and Economy
Why Small Business Should Engage In Automation?
Automation reduces errors and saves time and effort. (Unsplash Photo)
Small businesses, even though they are small, have a requirement to automate. Even small businesses have to deal with both complexity and monotonous work. With automation, this burden can be highly reduced and, at the same time, reduces the cost. It gives an added advantage to the small business to stay competitive, producing better results.
Automation in a small business can take off work that requires technological intervention and no manual management for a sufficient amount of time. However, it is essential to have a good internet speed to ensure the seamless functioning of the automated process. Use either Speed Test or PLDT to check whether the internet speed for your business is sufficient enough to allow you the perfect automation for your business or not.
Automation reduces errors and saves time and effort. In short, it increases efficiency by allowing people to focus on more important things. Here is a list of a few benefits of automation in small businesses.
1. Automate repetitive tasks
Many businesses have to take care of repetitive but important tasks. Most of the tasks of businesses can be automated. Automating the repetitive or recurring tasks frees the resources to focus on more key tasks. For instance, invoices can be totally automated. Similarly, if your business is doing social media marketing, there are tools available that allow you to schedule the posts and save the time and effort that goes into manual posting.
2. Remote work optimisation
After Covid-19, remote work has become the new norm. Even now, with the pandemic slowing down, people are unable to say goodbye to remote work totally. In fact, hybrid models are what the businesses are shifting to. Automation optimises remote work. Automation allows the employees to work together and further ensures a seamless continuity in the processes and workflow.
3. Reduces human error
Tasks like invoicing and bookkeeping leave many errors when done manually. The tedious and monotonous nature of these jobs always makes room for mistakes, which is almost inevitable. However, even a tiny mistake in such management can result in a considerable loss. Automation can save you from error. It is highly accurate and eliminates the error margin by a significant margin.
What To Automate?
The key benefits of automation are now known. The real question is what to automate. Even though many tasks can be automated, the financial resources required for the same can be massive. Therefore, we will focus on the key areas where you can bring in automation for your small businesses.
1. Automate the IT process
IT tasks are tedious, and they can be automated. With automation, you can go for automatic data backup, server maintenance and update installation. Furthermore, you can schedule the automatic data backup and installation update during non-working office hours to ensure that time is not wasted when the employees want to do the work.
2. Social media management
In the digital world, social media marketing cannot be ignored. For a B2C business, engaging in social media marketing is critical. You can automate social media management to increase brand discovery, and engagement and acquire new customers. Also, you can pre-plan the content for different social media platforms and automate the scheduling of such posts.
3. Schedule meetings
Communication is the key, and meetings are essential for a minute and big discussions. However, scheduling a meeting is troublesome. Reaching a time slot that works for all can result in an endless chain of emails. Plenty of tools allow people to select a time from the available slots. It reduces the manual effort in narrowing down the perfect time slot for a meeting.
4. Customer feedback
Customer feedback is important to improve the product and services offered by a business. Gone are the days when such feedback was taken in a physical form. Not only collecting feedback physically is time-consuming and requires plenty of effort, but even analysing the data can be burdensome. You can automate customer feedback with the help of online surveys and questionnaires.
5. Customer support
Thanks to the advancement in technology, people now expect quick services. There are bots out there that you can integrate into your website for quick replies to your customers. You can also provide them with help desk tickets for easy help prioritisation.
With the right automation, you can increase the efficiency of your business and save time and effort.
