Top 5 Workflows Every Growing Business Should Consider Automating

1. Lead Catchment and Following Up

There's no doubt, following up with leads is absolutely essential. But catching every lead and providing sufficient follow-up gets harder as a business grows, especially if the lead capture and management process happens manually.

Without a systematic lead management approach businesses run the risk of missing out on potential sales due to ineffective lead tracking and poor follow-up.

Here are some of the things an automated lead management workflow can do:

• Capture leads from website forms
• Record leads in a CRM system
• Assign leads to the appropriate agent
• Notify agents once new leads arrive
• Automatic follow-up and lead status tracking

Imagine, for example, that you have a lead capturing form on your website. When someone fills out the form, an ai workflow & system integration can do everything from transferring that information to your CRM, alerting your office and even sending out an automatic lead confirmation message.

Why automate lead management?

Having a systematic lead management and follow-up process means faster, better lead processing.

Faster processing translates to a quicker response and more timely follow-up, which is essential for converting leads and not losing sales.

2. Customer Communication and Ticketing

Customers expect businesses to be able to respond quickly, but answering routine questions, sending reminders and other communication-heavy processes can quickly eat up your support team's time.

But what if your business could communicate with customers while also making your support staff's life easier? That is the power of automating your communication, ticketing and support processes.

Common customer communication workflows to automate

Businesses can automate:

• Welcome messages
• Appointment confirmations
• Order updates
• Payment reminders
• Frequently asked questions
• Feedback requests
• Follow-up messages
• Customer support ticket notifications
• Renewal reminders

Chatbot automation systems can be used to great effect across ticketing and customer support in order to both manage customer expectations while helping your employees prioritize their efforts.

AI chatbots can also handle simple questions about your services, products and operation hours 24/7, so employees aren't burdened by hundreds of simple repeat questions.

Why automate communication processes?

Automating customer communication and ticketing means faster response while giving your support staff enough room to breathe.

3.Invoicing and Payment Reminder

When it comes to administration, few processes are as time-consuming and error prone as invoices and payment reminders.

Generating them, keeping track of them, and making sure that all pending payments are currently taking a huge toll on employee productivity. An automated billing and reminder system streamlines the whole process and gets rid of the need for employees to manually update payment status.

That's a huge time saver and productivity booster.

An automated invoicing system can:

• Generate invoice upon transaction or service
• Automatic invoice delivery and receipt confirmation
• Invoice reminder system
• Up-to-date internal tracking and reporting
• Payment and invoice completion tracking and status reporting with internal reminders

This results in much better and organized accounts receivable management, along with a more efficient cash-flow process.

Why automate invoicing and payment reminders?

It will get rid of those tedious invoice-related data entry manual processes while also reducing the chance of mistakes.

4. Employee Onboarding, Approvals & Requests

As a company grows, the burden on the HR and administration departments increases exponentially. This is especially true for employee onboarding and process approvals, where additional steps must be taken every time a new employee is added or an approval needs to be provided by a manager.

In order to automate employee onboarding and streamline process approvals, companies utilize a variety of software tools that perform those actions automatically when one employee generates a request.

This can be something as simple as a new employee request, or a more involved multi-step and multi-department approval system.

For example:

New employee added → HR notification → Document collection → IT account creation → Equipment assignment → Training schedule → Manager notification

Automation can also simplify internal approval processes such as:

• Leave requests
• Purchase requests
• Expense approvals
• Vendor approvals
• Budget approvals
• Document approvals

Why automate it?

Automated approval and onboarding workflows create consistency and make it easier for teams to know what needs to happen next.

5. Reports and Related Business Analysis

Sales and marketing executives and managers across departments deal with mountains of information every day. Reports generated from data relating to sales, marketing, finance, customer service, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, customer service desk logs, and other business-critical sources are vital for any growing organization to understand itself and the market that it operates in.

But manually compiling this information takes time away from your business analysts, who are a crucial asset and should be utilized to their maximum potential.

By automating report generation with appropriate software you can create a system that pulls information from various sources according to specific rules.

Businesses generate reports for a wide variety of reasons, but some of the most commonly automated are:

• Sales reports, e.g. daily and weekly
• Marketing reports
• Customer activity reports
• Expense reports
• Inventory reports and alerts
• Management reports etc

For example, you could set ai powered automation rules so that your business gets a summarized weekly sales report every Monday morning.

Businesses that utilize report automation see an increase in employee productivity due to less time spent on data entry and other rule-based processes related to reporting.

The Power Of Automation For Growing Business

Workflow automation, done correctly, can transform the way an organization operates and scales.

There are certain benefits of a properly executed business automation strategy that any growing company should be aware of before taking any further steps.

Time-saving

Automated processes free employees from the tedium of repetitive activities and let them focus on more productive areas of their work

Reduced human error

Automation replaces rule-based and repetitive processes with algorithms, which removes most of the possibility for human error

Improved response times

Messages sent through automated notification systems, automated emails and other automated communication methods are delivered instantly, improving client and inter-department communication and helping processes move faster

Increased productivity

Automating rule-based and repetitive processes can improve employee productivity by reducing the time spent handling them (particularly when these processes involve data entry). Employees spend less time performing manual and rule-based operations and more time doing the work that only they can do.

Higher visibility

Automated rules and actions allow for more accurate, real-time reporting and insights.

Business growth

An automated workflow has the ability to scale with your growing business and can handle higher and higher volumes of work without you needing to devote more resources to the process.

What Business Processes To Automate

Not all business processes need to be automated, and it's important to consider what tasks take up a significant chunk of time without contributing much to your bottom line.

Generally, these are repetitive, time consuming processes based on a set of rules.

Repetitiveness, time consumption and the ability to put the entire process behind a clearly defined set of algorithmic rules are the main factors that determine if a certain business process automation can be justified.

For example, if your sales team spends several hours each day doing manual CRM entries and sending follow-up emails, using ai driven business solutions for lead management or customer management becomes a clear and easy win.

However, if your finance team is spending the majority of their time sending payment reminders, it may be easier to jump straight to invoicing and payment reminder automation instead.

Each organization has different starting points and areas of concern. Pick one business process automation to begin with, and then move on to additional business automations as needed.

AI and The Future Of Business Automation

Traditional workflow automation works with a set of predetermined rules and actions in order to execute a series of operations. But AI offers new possibilities that can help organizations take their business automation to a new level. Through its ability to analyze data and recognize patterns, AI can enable automation of business processes that previously wouldn't have been possible.

Examples of things that AI can automate include:

• Understanding and categorizing different customer messages
• Generating and sending responses
• Categorizing documents
• Summarizing documents
• Customer support and assistance
• Sales enablement and assistant
• Connecting applications
• Making recommendations based on historical data

Combined with traditional business automation, AI can help turn routine, time consuming manual processes into fully automated rule-based operations across departments and business units.

A practical example of that is an AI Technology that analyzes an incoming message from a customer, categorizes that message and updates the CRM, generates a response and sends it out automatically to the client, and even notifies a sales representative if the inquiry shows signs of being a qualified lead with a high potential.