Businesses move at the speed of the technology they have supporting them. While there are limitations for capacity based on people, there are almost no limits when you employ the right technology and automations for your business. This doesn’t mean you don’t hire people anymore; it simply means you take repetitive tasks and leverage technology to do them instead of people. This gives individuals the opportunity to learn and grow, think strategically, and create new things and explore new ideas. You take once tedious and manual tasks, assign them to technology and free people to do other things. Here are some of the ways you can use automations to improve business processes.

QA Testing

QA testing is critical when you use technology. You want to ensure your apps, servers, and sites are all functioning at the best capacity. Your QA team spends a lot of time doing manual processes. It involves clicking through websites and pages and pages of data. This time-consuming and tedious group of tasks could be simplified with the right technology. A testing automation tool can take 90% of the manual work out of these important tasks. Your QA team could instead run scripts to test the functionality of a page, look for bugs in the system, and find ways to improve it all. Instead, right now they spend their time on heavy manual tasks.

Lead Generation

How much time do you spend generating leads for your business? This could involve going to networking meetings, calling people on the phone, asking for referrals and so much more. With the right technology, most of your good leads can now be generated online. Through the magic of social media ads, SEO, and even Google (News - Alert), you can gain leads that convert. With the right sales process in place, not only can you generate leads automatically, but you can also send them through the sales process and get them connected to your team seamlessly. No more transferring data from one system to the next or assigning sales agents using spreadsheets. Automation simplifies the entire process so your team can focus on customer relations and connecting to people.

Client On-Boarding

This leads into client on-boarding. With a manual process, you have so much work to do to put new clients in your system and get them setup with a rep. By automating the onboarding process, you put the power in your clients’ hands to input critical data, and your reps act as a concierge and a guide instead of manually doing everything. This means that all logins are automatically generated and sent in. It means that clients can get everything they need without waiting on a bottleneck for someone to give them access or get them started. But they still have people they can talk to and connect with when they need it most.

Social Media Scheduling

Creating social media posts is an art and a science. There are keywords, hashtags, and visual elements to consider. But the process of putting these posts online does not need to be tedious or difficult. There is no longer a need to log in to 10 different social media accounts. With scheduling software, you can set it and forget it. This means that each post can be assigned to a social media account all in the same dashboard. Some software even allows you to create bulk uploads and will auto populate the days based on your settings. This saves a ton of time and money in the long-run for your business and empowers your social media team to work on the quality of the content instead of spending all their time scheduling things.

App Automations

Do all your applications talk to each other? If not, what are you waiting for? There is no need for your emails not to trigger automated tasks. There is no reason an inquiry can’t get sent to the exact person who needs to see it. App integrations are one of the best ways to automate your business. Whether you need an email to trigger a client inquiry or an order to start processing right away, there are countless ways to make this happen using technology in your business. Tools like Zapier and IFTTT help create these connections so you don’t need to do the manual work.

Conclusion

Creating automations in your business is one of the best ways to save you time and money. Not only will your staff be freed up to work on more interesting and exciting projects, you’ll have everything you need to succeed. You can think and act strategically instead of constantly putting out small fires at work. Automations are changing the way people work and the way that businesses can grow and thrive.