How much time do you think your company spends organizing files, entering data, or even just answering basic customer questions? If you’re like most business owners, the answer is “too much.” With automation, you could save your employees between 10 and 50% of the time they usually spend on manual tasks without sacrificing quality or customer service.
That type of time savings is guaranteed to help your business increase productivity, which benefits your customers and your revenue. Who doesn’t want better customer relationships and increased revenue?
But, not all IT automation will fit with the unique needs of your business, so which services should you focus on? Here are five key areas you should consider automating:
Customer Service
Automated customer service is anything that lets your customers solve problems without needing to interact with another person. You might be worried that taking people out of problem-solving will hurt your business, but software has come a long way.
Automating doesn’t mean that your customers will be desperately waiting for a customer service rep after hours on hold. Instead, you could implement services like:
- 24/7 support every day of the year
- chatbots for quick answers to easily-solved issues
- a bot for directing customer queries and requests
- preset email responses that assure customers your team is resolving the issue
IT automation for customer service is more cost-effective than human customer support representatives. They free up your customer support team by handling simple, repetitive tasks and directing tickets to the appropriate departments. This way, your representatives can devote more focused attention to customers who really need human support.
Sales and Lead Acquisition
Automating sales and lead acquisition can help you speed up the process of finding and qualifying leads. Automated systems can quickly gather data about potential customers and help you identify the best prospects.
Data Acquisition
Data capture is the process of gathering personal data from prospective customers so you can put them into your sales funnel. You can then use this information to help you understand your customers’ pain points.
There are so many ways to get data from even just a landing page, such as asking for a visitor’s name and email, offering them a free consultation in exchange for information about their company or position, or using a chatbot to ask what problem they’re trying to solve by coming to your website.
Automating all of this information to be on your homepage will allow you to easily gather data so you can best serve your customers and increase your sales.
Personalized website experience
People want information and they want it fast. If you automate data acquisition and know if someone has visited your website before, what they looked for, and how they want to be served, you can customize their website experience.
For example, you can have a different homepage for people who have visited your site before, versus a first-time visitor. This will help your customers get where they need to go without having to navigate your website and they’ll be grateful that you saved them time and effort.
Chatbots
A chatbot can get your website visitors exactly where they need to go or provide them with the information they need. Your customers or potential customers will be impressed with how quickly you’re able to help them一in fact, you can reduce some acquisition costs by over 90% with effective chatbots.
Bill Payments
This concept isn’t too hard to understand, since most of us are already doing this for our utilities, phone bills, insurance, and more. Automated systems can keep track of your bills and make payments on your behalf, ensuring that you never miss a payment.
Not only can this save you money (avoiding late fees), but it’ll take a load off of your financial employees, who can then focus on more important tasks.
Books could be written (and probably already have been) on how much time you could save with email automation. Not only can it save time by automatically handling common tasks like responding to basic messages, filtering spam, and managing attachments, but it can pack a punch for your sales as well.
With automation, you can create custom email campaigns that will automatically send based on visitor behavior. For example, if someone visits your website and enters their email, they can immediately receive a welcome email with a free offer. If they open that email but don’t act, automated IT services will send a follow-up email. If they respond, you will be notified to interact personally.
That’s really just scratching the surface of all you could do with email automation, so be sure to consult with an IT expert to maximize this tool.
The Cloud
Automating your business in the cloud can help you improve collaboration and increase flexibility. By storing data and applications in the cloud, you can access them from anywhere, at any time. But, someone needs to set up those resources, test them, identify when they are no longer needed, and take them down, and this can create a huge manual effort.
Automating your cloud might be a lot of work upfront, but then you’ll be able to save hours of work with the click of a button. There are many more benefits than just saving time with cloud automation.
Improved security
With an algorithm taking care of different IT services, it lowers the number of people you need to access your information. Fewer people equals less human error, which means less security risk.
Better backup processes
With automated backups, you can be sure that you’re ready for a disaster or unforeseen problem.
In-depth governance
When systems are set up manually, administrators may have little insight into what’s really going on and no way to manage the infrastructure. Cloud automation lets you set up resources in a standardized, controlled manner, which also means you have much more control over infrastructure running across your organization.
Where to Go from Here
Businesses are seeing productivity skyrocket after implementing automation so that employees can focus on core business goals. Consider automating key areas of your business to see the benefits for yourself.
If you need help deciding which automation tools will work best for your business, reach out to AIS today. We’ll help you decide which areas of your company need automation and how to get the most out of this technology.