5 Smart Ways to Automate Your Business Workflow

Thanks to artificial intelligence, there have been so many technological advances in the last few years it can be nearly impossible to keep up. If you haven't taken a step back to reassess what's been recently offered, then more likely than not, you’re missing out.

Automation has always been at the heart of scaling any business. 

And while some may see it as a way to eliminate jobs and cut staffing budgets, the reality is that automation allows your team to stop wasting time on meaningless work and reprioritize their skills toward tasks that will push your company further. 

Creativity and out-of-the-box thinking are what move the needle, not checking off a to-do list of menial tasks.

Benefits of Automating Your Business Processes#

While we all know automation can help save you some time and money in the long run, are there any other upsides to consider?

Automation now means much more than putting workflows on autopilot. Platforms offered today can actually process at speeds and intelligence that surpass humans and do it better.

With machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and natural language processing (NLP), automated programs can compute vast amounts of data and communicate their findings in a way that's meaningful to people. 

Imagine humans manually reading thousands of reviews across Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Quite frankly, there is simply too much data for humans to digest in a reasonable amount of time.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Here are a few different ways that automation can help you scale your business.

1. Increase Your Sales and Conversions#

While automation is typically thought to boost bottom lines by decreasing expenses, many forget that automation typically has a huge effect on increasing revenues. 

Here are some ways automating processes can increase your sales:

• Increase targeted leads to your sales team and make the transition more enjoyable for the consumer. 
• Improve the customer journey with things like chatbots to provide automatic, 24/7 support. 
• Targeted sales forecasts can help you increase conversions and your sales strategy. 

2. Improve Communication#

Communication and perception are all vulnerable to human error. To help thwart lines getting crossed the wrong way, you can: 

• Automating social media and email campaigns help drive your brand’s message consistently to the digital space.
• When trying to manage large teams with hundreds or thousands of employees, maintaining reliable internal communication is critical to ensure everyone is on the same page. 

3. Improve Organization #

A well-run business is a well-oiled machine, and automation is the grease that keeps everything running smoothly. Automating your data in a secure way will help your company stay organized in order to maintain optimal productivity.

4. Engage and Personalize the Customer Experience#

Providing personalized email outreach to help the customer through their purchasing journey increases conversions. Now, customization can happen at the individual level. 

5. Gain a Competitive Edge#

In today's fast-paced business world, those who automate their workflow have a leg up on the competition. By automating tedious and time-consuming tasks, businesses are able to operate more efficiently and effectively, so their time can be spent determining the next way to move the company forward.

What Are The Best Ways to Automate Your Business Workflow?#

By now, I'm hoping you can see that automating is almost always a great investment. Now let's get into the five most actionable ways to leverage technology with your company.

1. Create Stellar Customer Experience#

When it comes to increasing sales and maximizing your returns, then investing in a winning customer service experience is key. With so many options today, something as simple as your customer not getting the answer to your question or just a slow-loading page is enough to stamp a negative experience and lose the customer.

However, some automation (like using a bot on a phone call) notoriously leads to frustrated customers that want to end the transaction altogether. 

So how do you find the balance between automating and improving the customer journey?

First, start by adding in a conversational chatbot to your website. People love to shop from their beds at all hours of the day across many time zones and you may not have the staff on hand to answer their questions. 

Conversational chatbots like JivoChat increase desktop and mobile experiences to close the sell. 

Once you’ve optimized your chats, next, you should keep a pulse on your customer's experience. The last thing you want is for a lot of consumers to write negative comments about your product or service before you have a chance to rectify the problem. 

Investing in a sentiment analysis tool will help you can keep a pulse on how your customer's experience is doing. You can get their feedback in real time in order to direct the conversation of your brand. 

2. Take Advantage of Generative Content#

If you want to expand your brand visibility and funnel an intentional target audience, then you're likely engaging in a ton of content creation, from blog articles that attract organic traffic to a myriad of socials.

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While this is all great, it takes a ton of time and effort to develop unique social posts when all platforms have different requirements and signals to follow. Not to mention, Gen Z is already showing that video is quickly becoming the most compelling topic. You may not have the budget to create a robust video platform. 

Here are a few areas that you can automate to help generate content to scale:

• Utilize an AI writer for long-form stories, articles, emails, or other ad copy.
• Consider a social post generator to quickly create, schedule, and publish social media posts automatically.
• Replace stock photos with unique graphics with an AI art generator that can create an image from text in a matter of seconds.
• Use a video or music generator to get unique content at a fraction of the price. 

Just be sure to run your copy through an AI content detection system to make sure everything human-centric.

3. Boost Your Digital Marketing Success#

Digital marketing is a pillar of success for any business, but there are so many moving parts it could be hard to figure out where to automate without losing forward progression.

Here are a few areas you can find some automation:

• Improve your cold email outreach campaigns with stunning personalization, optimized sending times for each subscriber, and drip campaigns that are actually opened. 
• Improve your content rankings with SEO tools in order to gain more traffic to your landing pages. 
• Optimize social media campaigns with predictive analytics that know when and what to post at the right time. 

As you can tell, these are only a few of the ways you can automate your digital marketing efforts that will likely increase conversion rates at the same time.

4. Make Meetings Productive Again#

While many processes can automate and improve your outputs, is there any way to simply make your internal functions more efficient?

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While utilizing a CRM software or virtual meeting platform is a start, there are now more options than ever to enhance efficiencies within your daily workflow you can test out such as:

• Transcribing Meetings With A Bot: Instead of spending hours writing, taking notes, then emailing summaries, this can all be done for you. AI bots can even sit in on meetings for you these days if you can't make it. They can also create a to-do list that automatically assigns and emails out to the team. No more needing an in-person secretary.
• Create consistent language: When you have large teams in charge of creating content across multiple departments, automation can ensure that the sound of your brand maintains consistency. 

5. Take Advantage of Predictive Analytics#

Analyzing data used to be more manual, but computers were great at digitizing the information. 

Although you’re likely using it to compute, are you using it to predict?

Many platforms not only automate your data research but can learn from  historical data to make accurate future predictions.

Make projections for future quarters. Learn how to estimate sales and conversions based on the time of year. Prepare and optimize your supply chain to decrease shipping costs and turnaround times. The sky’s the limit.

All of this saves time and money while also reducing natural human error. If there’s an area you’re struggling with, there’s likely an automation platform to help ease those pain points.  

Take Home#

Automation doesn’t have to be difficult to integrate. Oftentimes, the biggest barrier is human reluctance to change. 

Start by identifying some of your biggest workflow bottlenecks. Explore options that could help automate and make it something that contributes to your company. Trial a few softwares and take the demos! If anything, you’ll discover quickly the options available to you, and your only regret will be not doing it sooner.