Automation That Can Change How You’re Running Your Business

When it comes to finding how your business can be innovative, it can be difficult to find the changes that are going to make the most difference to your customers and clients when you’re busy with the sheer workload that you have to deal with. Aside from hiring employees to help share that load, one of the most important steps in reducing it is by automating it. Here, we’re going to look at a few tasks that every business should be taking steps to automate, as well as some of the surprising things that can be automated, and how it can help your business.

Managing your schedule

Time management is an important skill for all business owners. You will have meetings to manage, appointments to schedule, and so on. When you’re trying to schedule appointments with other professionals, manually trying to find a time that is free for you both can be a truly painful and long process. To that end, you should look at some of the calendar scheduling apps like Calendar that can allow you to share your schedule with other professionals before it automatically figures out what time works best for each person attending the meeting. It also makes sure that you never miss an upcoming deadline or appointment with customized alerts that can get in touch with you via your digital device.

Coming up with a presentation

Whether you’re presenting to potential investors, to team members, or to clients, your ability to distill a pitch or a thesis into a few highly communicative slides and points is important. However, spending hours in PowerPoint, putting the presentation together slide by slide might be slowly drifting back into the past thanks to tools like MindMeister, which can help you map out topics and automatically separate those topics into different slides, structuring what starts as a loose set of thoughts into an organized and sensible presentation that’s ready to deliver.

Sending and managing invoices

If your business relies on invoices for payment, then your ability to send out and chase up invoices is going to be key to managing a healthy cash flow. However, it should be no surprise that sending out reminders is one of the things that are most easily forgotten by those running a business. To that end, there is invoicing software like Invoicely that can allow you to quickly generate invoices based on pre-sets that you need to create only once, then send them out after inputting the relevant data. The tool will then track the invoice’s progress and can automatically send out reminders and emails based on how the client handles the invoice and whether they pay it back.

Managing your social media accounts

If you’re taking on the responsibility of working your own business’s social media accounts (rather than passing it on to a social media manager) then you need to make sure that you’re not spending time every day manually typing out and posting things when you should be doing other work. Social media management tools like Hootsuite allow you to schedule your posts ahead of time, so you can make sure that you have all of your content ready to go out into the world on its own schedule. It also makes it much easier to keep track of mentions, hashtags, topics, and other posters’ feeds, so you can respond much more organically to conversations happening throughout the day.

Providing customer support

If you run an online business, then you’re likely already going to be providing customer support through your website. This is extra true if you’re running an e-commerce business. In-site chat tools can allow you to connect more directly and quickly to people that are seeking help, but what if you don’t need to actually have a person present? Business chatbots are becoming much more sophisticated, better using not just the other chatter’s input but their browsing history to recommend pages and resources they can use to solve a range of problems. Of course, you might need human intervention at the ready to take care of the more complex problems, but you can rely on bots to deal with the simplest solutions.

Working out probabilities

There are plenty of fields of work in which figuring out probabilities is a vital part of your work. This is true for financial strategists, portfolio analysts, and those in economic roles, as well as in scientific roles, such as biologists and medical experts. There are tools that can take input from a wide range of factors to give specific estimates and probabilities and, already, these are being used in fields such as investment by consumers, not just portfolio managers. Risk management and insurance are fields that also use probability as a core of their business, and tools like Artificial are allowing them to more quickly write their risks. As a result, businesses can focus more on providing customer service rather than spending all of their time crunching the numbers.

Automating data transfer between applications

Many of us are using all manner of software to do our work. In many cases, we may need to take the output from one software tool and convert it into a format that allows us to input it into another piece of software. This process can be tiring and monotonous when you’re doing it manually, but you may not have to. More and more software tools are being developed with integration in mind, so they work to share data automatically with a range of compatible software. Then, there are integration tools like Zapier that will create integrations and connections between pieces of software that don’t already have them built into them. This can cut out a remarkable amount of repetition from your work.

Automation is and will continue to be the key to raising productivity in business. Even if you don’t see your particular kind of work in the list above, you should look more closely for it. There’s a good chance someone is working to automate it right now if they haven’t already done so.