“Companies should view automation as a way to enhance human productivity, rather than a way to replace manual labour.” — McKinsey
Research from Bain & Company suggests that companies who use automation see an average cost reduction of 20%. You are not replacing employees with technology, you are simply aiding them by having automation take care of repetitive tasks, instead of wasting precious brainpower and working hours.
Everyone knows that your employees are the most important resources, aside from your customers and products. Using automation for daily operations can help to free up your employees time and have them working on more important tasks.
What is automation?
The type of automation we are discussing is a piece of software or code that answers to a trigger from a program. From there, automation completes an action in a separate program. What does this really mean?
Let’s go into an example…
- Automation can happen when a customer fills out a web chat with their details and a message.
- Instantly, this customer receives an SMS saying “Thank you for getting in touch! We’ll get back to you shortly. In the meantime, would you like to book an initial phone consultation in our calendar?”.
- This is all set up behind the scenes so that you don’t have to think about this action, it’s automated. That’s the power of automation.
Think about the hours of following up this could save you – the customer simply books in a time in your live calendar and they await a callback to get started!
Where can I get started with automation?
Here are three questions to get you started:
1- Where are you spending the most time in your workflow?
Is it getting back to your customers in general? What about sending appointment or quote reminders? Requesting reviews from happy customers?
Consider the smaller tasks that are necessary but time-consuming at your business. Your staff will most likely be able to give you a list of tasks that are repetitive and can be automated.
2 – What platforms or apps are you going between?
We can name a few platforms you may be currently using… MailChimp, Sendinblue, Activecampaign, Hubspot, and Clicksend.
Automation can help you link between these platforms to save you time and effort. Why go between platforms manually when you can let them communicate with each other?
3 – How do your employees and departments communicate?
Can you observe which departments communicate the most with each other? What automation can do is make it simpler to transfer and convey information.
How automation can help in different business areas
Customer support –
- We are seeing the emergence of customer support automation, where customers are receiving quality support faster than ever before.
- This type of automation enables support tickets as well as the building of a knowledge base.
Accounts –
- Invoicing is time-consuming and repetitive.
- Automated sequences can be created to request deposits or full payments from customers with the integration of payment platforms such as Stripe or Paypal.
Marketing –
- With the SMS open rate for Australia at 94%, more and more businesses are taking advantage of this marketing channel.
- SMS messages can be used to educate, convert, or simply to notify leads or customers with up to date information.
- Automation can organise your client database so you can target your marketing SMS and emails effectively.
LANA example – One handy feature on LANA known as ‘tagging’ is designed for you to internally label your clients by product or service, or even how they found your business. These tags can be as specific or as broad as your business requires:
| Dental related tags | Tradie related tag |
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This allows you to effectively group and targets specific groups of customers so you can schedule relevant emails and SMS messages.
Reporting –
- Automation goes hand in hand with data reporting and analytics.
- Monitor your leads and conversions with the help of automated reporting. In other words, automation can give you a clear view of what’s working and what’s not in your business.
Harness The Power Of Automation For Your Business
In the long run, automation can streamline your business processes which can free up staff time and lead to them completing their jobs more efficiently.
LANA is your complete lead management solution. We are dedicated to helping small businesses improve their processes so they can focus on their customers.
Interested in finding out more about automation? Check out our website or book a live demo to see how LANA can transform your business.
Check out our other helpful blog posts here:
- Messages in Google My Business – What’s That?
- 5 Benefits of SMS Messaging for Customer Communication
- What Is Review Gating?
