4 Processes You Can Automate in Your Business in 2021
📖 Learning
“Automation is cost-cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting them” – Haresh Sippy.
For most businesses, automation seems like a want – tucked away in their long-term plan. For becoming a strategic enabler of market control, moving automation up the ladder by a few years and reprioritizing it as a need could be the difference between success and failure.
There’s a strong reason why 40% of large companies automate at least one of their processes. When we speak of automation, we refer to a system capable of performing repetitive tasks with no errors. As companies worldwide strive hard to adjust to the pandemic-related changes, automation usage is growing at an accelerating rate.
From customer service, project planning to usability testing, and marketing, you can automate your business processes. Apart from mitigating human errors, automation helps satisfy client needs, minimize operational costs, and optimize business workflow. As you seek out processes to automate, you will understand that everything cannot be automated, and you shouldn’t automate everything – things like personal touch are irreplaceable even by automation. With $9.6 billion being the likely spending on automation in 2020 alone, NOW is the right time to embrace process automation for a flourishing business.
4 Processes You Can Automate in Your Business in 2021
1. Compliance process
2. User testing process
3. Project planning process
4. Customer service process
4 Processes You Can Automate in Your Business in 2021
Companies with highly automated processes are six times more likely to witness 15% and above revenue growth. Make hay while the sun shines and focus on ensuring you automate these four processes in your business in 2021.
1. Compliance process
With data compliance laws like CCPA being stringent and stakes incredibly high, it becomes a daunting task for companies to eliminate everything which comes in their way of conformity.
Though companies use a complete CCPA guide to maintain compliance and avoid lawsuits, their efforts are often jeopardized by inaccurate reporting and failure to comply with the updated regulation – resulting in financial losses and tarnishing of brand image.
That’s where you need compliance automation.
Through compliance automation, you eliminate as much human intervention as possible from a workflow. Such an enhancement delivers accurate results, increases performance efficiency, reduces cost, and eliminates severe data breaching penalties.
Advantages of automating the compliance process:
- Enhances risk management decisions as you get real-time data.
- Consolidates all data in a single control center.
- Automates the auditing and reporting process.
- Efficient management of your company’s potential risk.
- Verifies compliance requirements and manages all third-party risks.
Statistics: 90% of companies plan to increase their compliance automation funding in the coming years.
Souvik Dey
2. User testing process
Irrespective of the industry, you require the desired level of user experience for ensuring commercial success. It’s the user experience that ensures your design or product performs in the market as expected.
Without user testing, your user experience (UX) design is incomplete. With technological advancement, UX testing has become more critical than ever, and it exists at every level of design and software development. But, there’s no point performing the same UX testing procedure repeatedly as it’s a mundane and time-consuming process.
That’s where user testing automation comes into the picture.
User testing software, along with meaningful user testing questions, empowers you to automate research processes, especially when working with remote participants. It helps you connect with participants, automatically collect data, understand design areas where customers struggle and areas where they hit their goals. This helps in building a better product and enhances the overall customer experience.
Advantages of automating the user testing process:
- Manual testing requires more software testers and time; automation reduces both the resources. Unlike manual tests, you can leave automated tests unattended.
- Though the initial investment is on a higher side, it drastically cuts down long-term business operating costs.
- Reduces the number of errors that need fixing after product release.
- Ensures a higher rate of investment in design.
- Stimulates hundreds of virtual participants, thereby ensuring performance and stress testing.
Statistics: 70% of enterprise CEO’s see UX as a competitive differentiator. User testing automation will only elevate these figures.
3. Project planning process
In the project planning phase, nothing can be more irritating than spending hours on time-consuming manual tasks.
Let’s understand it using a project plan example. You have assigned tasks to your employees at the starting of the week. But, mid-week, you come up with an unavoidable work, which you should assign to the work overloaded staff. One way is to check each employee’s progress manually; the other is through project planning automation. Such automation software helps you monitor resource load and send out a signal every time an employee is overloaded with work.
Automating a project planning process reduces manual intervention when managing resources, reporting, tracking, and quality control.
Advantages of automating project planning process:
- Reduces the repetitive routine tasks.
- Helps in providing technical scalability.
- Lets the project manager focus on priority tasks.
- Fosters a culture of effective communication as it centralizes the work status report of each team member.
- Identifies and creates an opportunity for efficiency gains.
- Alerts project managers when a workflow is going off-budget or off the timeline
- Enhances risk assessment and reduces the scope for errors.
ATHUL C K
4. Customer service process
In the technological world, your customers hate waiting to speak to a customer service representative. When wait time is too long, customers usually disconnect the call and probably switch to other brands or leave a negative review wherever possible.
Automating the customer service process helps mitigate the chances of losing a customer due to higher wait times.
You can take customer service to the next level by using a chatbot that allows a customer to self-manage and submit tickets without speaking to a human representative. You can even use a live chat with artificial intelligence (AI) to answer customer’s questions.
Both chatbots and live chats pass on the complex calls to human workers, thereby keeping the wait time as little as possible.
Advantages of automating customer service process:
- Reduces human errors
- Minimizes the wait time for customers
- Ensures a consistent workflow
- Increases customer retention
- Reduces cost as employees save 600 hours each week when using an automated system.
Statistics: More than 60% of US customers prefer automated self-service for simple customer service tasks.
Automation tool: Zendesk.
Souvik Dey
Conclusion
Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, you cannot automate your business processes in a single day. When running a business, it’s easy to get carried away by the daily tasks making automation seem like an uphill challenge.
Never wait for the processes to cost more than the revenue they generate to automate. The sooner you embrace automation for some or all your process, the faster you will reap substantial benefits.
Having an explicit knowledge of what you want to achieve through business process automation lets you remain on-goal. It’s a powerful technology that enables efficiency, increases productivity, reduces cost, and above all, results in efficiency gains – a must-have for maintaining competitive advantage.
Automation empowers you to extract the maximum from your operational processes.
Start automating your business’s processes today!
Souvik Dey
FAQ's
1. How do you implement business process automation?
Ans- Business process automation can be implemented in these five steps:
- Identify Tasks to Be Automated.
- Outline Business Goals.
- Select the Right Tool.
- Change Management.
- Monitor and Measure.
2. How do I automate a process?
Ans- Let's take a quick look at the 5 major steps which every business will consider before they move completely to automation.
- Identify Repetitive Tasks.
- Define Business Goals.
- Select the Right Workflow Automation Solution.
- Train the Users.
- Measure Key Performance Indicators and Improve Your Workflow.
Arbaz Sayed
3. What are the key business processes?
Ans- Business processes are the collection of tasks that an organization performs for operations and management, including order processing, customer acquisition, budgeting, expense management, customer support, and marketing campaigns.
4. Why we need to automate the process?
Ans- Automation leads to faster processing of voluminous tasks and reduced turnaround timelines. A reduction in enterprise costs and the time involved in executing operational activities leads to improved workflow efficiencies.
5. Is Automation good for the economy?
Ans- Automation leads to significant economies of scale – important in industries which require high capital investment. Automation enables firms to reduce number of workers, and this limits the power of trades unions and potentially disruptive strikes. Automation also enables a greater economy of scope.
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