Finding ways to save money when running a business can be difficult. You have overhead costs to worry about, plus upgrading your systems so you don’t fall behind your competitors. But one way you can save costs going into 2024 is by automating your processes.
Business automation has many benefits, like improving productivity, streamlining repetitive tasks, and improving accuracy. But the question is, which parts of your business processes should you automate? In this post, you’ll find seven must-try automations that will save you a ton of money.
1. Finding the Best Candidates and Employee Onboarding
One of the most tedious tasks in human resources is finding suitable candidates to fulfill a job in your company. You have to look through hundreds of applications to narrow down your choices, which can take hours of valuable time and resources.
What’s more, when you do find the right candidate, the onboarding process can be even more time-consuming. You may have to set up bank accounts, conduct training sessions, and stay in contact with the candidate’s mentors.
With the right automation systems in place, you can post job descriptions on multiple platforms and search hundreds of applications for the right talent. Additionally, automation can screen and pre-evaluate candidates by analyzing the data in resumes, so you don’t have to.
Automation can streamline the onboarding process by automatically creating and distributing the necessary paperwork for people to fill out.
2. Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms like Facebook allow businesses to schedule posts. Whether you’re promoting a new product or running a discount, you can schedule social media posts to be released on a specific date and time and on multiple platforms.
This means you can keep up appearances across all your social media channels without the need for extra labor. You can also use automation tools to monitor your social media pages for mentions of specific products or services. Your team can then respond to the relevant posts fast, which is important if you’re dealing with complaints or a sale.
3. Project and Task Management
There are specific tools you can use to automatically assign tasks to team members based on predetermined workflow rules and criteria. You don’t have to manually allocate projects and tasks to the right employees, saving you time and money.
Set up schedules and automatic notifications so that your team knows when tasks are due. Automation can also generate reports and analytics on the progress of projects and task completion rates. You can then see where your staff is lacking so you can improve on productivity.
4. Communications
There will be instances where clients or customers will want to find out information about your business outside of working hours. Many companies create chatbots to assist people with questions or information about products when there isn’t a human team member present.
Chatbots can send automated replies to customers so they can get immediate responses to queries. Make sure you set up an FAQ section on your site and relevant information that the chatbot can refer your visitors to based on their questions.
5. Payment Methods
Automation can process payments, which eliminates the need for manual entry and reduces the risk of errors when clients pay for goods and services. Furthermore, you’ll need a system that can automatically generate slips based on the information that was entered into the device.
A POS (Point of Sales) system can help you with a variety of tasks. The right system can also generate invoices and send them to customers automatically to save your business time and effort. Compare the top POS systems so you can find the right one for your company’s requirements.
6. Keeping Customers Informed
Keep your customers informed about discounts, promotions, and changes in the business by automatically sending them newsletters every week. Use automation tools to send SMS notifications to customers regarding order updates, important announcements, or delivery statuses.
Create automatic pop-ups for your website when people visit to gain more emails for your listings or to provide important information to customers.
7. Automate Forms and Surveys
Automatically create forms and surveys quickly, so you don’t have to manually create them. By using an automated system to create your forms and surveys, you can reduce the risk of human errors, which can save you a lot of money and resources.
There are also certain tasks you can automate for your customers. Create forms your visitors can automatically fill out based on previous information they’ve provided.
Final Thoughts
Are you ready to take your business to the next level in 2024? Consider implementing these automation tasks so you can start saving and making more money in the new year!
