Small Business Process Automation: Harness it for a future that works

Small businesses have the potential to grow faster.

Great, but how?

Let me introduce you to automation, a concept that will open up new possibilities to grow revenue in the next financial quarter.

Did you know that 37% of the business responds less than in an hour when they receive a lead? (Harvard Business Review)

This brings me to a point of asking you as a stakeholder if you have already automated your leads. No company likes to send a sorry message on missing out on a potential lead and replying after a number of days.

Set a facility of automated responses for the lead, thank them for their interest; have a fast follow-up and lead closure in place. This should be followed by sending a query form attached or a potential guide to understand your business services.

Saving bucks, hiring the best talent and training your resources are not just the only long-term strategy parameters you should have on your plate. Make sure your employees are not investing in manual workflows and using their time wisely. It is important for you to, therefore, automate processes and embrace the technology.

Here is how automation will further help you:

• Gain valuable customer insights
• Faster processing
• Improved quality of service
• Faster delivery & scalability
• Reduce cost and improve productivity

Infact, a report by McKinsey claims that small businesses are likely to succeed more upon implementing automation processes rather than larger organizations.

Understand the Journey and Right Time to Automate

Small businesses normally feel anxious about implementing automation processes at their organization.

The answer probably to the process automation timeline is to plan basis the following pointers:

• Understand gaps and convert them into your opportunities. Layout required technological capabilities.
• Automate small activities with the highest potential and move to big ones for a comprehensive transformation.
• Redefine and review the automated activities and employees, accordingly.
• Decide the future-forward strategy and improve continuously.

And yes, very importantly, check feasibility, market dynamics, the cost involved, laws, and estimated impact on your business. Business process outsourcing companies might be the right way to supercharge your operational capabilities.

Choose the Right Platform for your Business Needs

Now that you understand what automation means, the right time to automate your business processes; let us look at small tasks which you can instantly automate.

Small businesses always try to build customer relationships, products/services that last and touch points that show customers how much they care.

We have curated a list that will help you excel in the automated world:

You can level up your hiring game by adding automation to cut costs and hire employees that meet your standards. It is important that a potential candidate receives a personalized message and follow-up email sequences. Recruiters can even automate assessments to reduce time while screening candidates.

Take data entry off your list and manage reimbursements, expenses, leaves, and salaries through automation! Not just this, you can even inform interested candidates of the closing of a specific position or even a hiring freeze.

Employee Training

Your current employee programs may not be good enough for upcoming large-scale of employees. Identify your training needs by running an internal analysis, define goals, plan training sessions, and obtain feedback. Take care of the measurement parameters to use to gauge the impact of this move. Automate reporting, communication, and certifications to focus more on your critical tasks. Set triggered notifications for your learning management system and carve better career paths for your employees.

Inventory Management

Calling employees to ask for inventories at hand and manual entries is not scalable. As volume increases, it is important to understand the time, resource, and employee utilization to make smarter future decisions. Automated processes can reduce human error, show higher visibility and track inventory to improve customer satisfaction. No business would want to stock extra or less, especially when the sales are usually seasonal. This will also allow you to decide on discounted deals and promotions basis inventory management. Invoice and supply chain – when automated will keep volume growth needs in check.

Marketing Management

Around 74% of marketers feel automation can save time. Responding to emails and social media of your user base as fast as possible will improve brand visibility and customer retention. Potential leads will feel happy by understanding your products and services in one go. Lead management, chatbot revert, and transaction-related queries over social media – all of this can comparatively grow your revenue. Repetitive tasks, scheduling social media posts, automated responses and measuring your marketing process can help you gain valuable insights.

How would automation impact CX at an organization?

Small businesses may not have the bandwidth to cater to these automation needs for their organization. In such a case, we highly recommend outsourcing business process services.

Upon automation through business process outsourcing, it is easier to cut costs and enhance customer experience.

An automated, structured process can replace human touchpoints to enable a better CX.

Here is how Maxicus does it when BPO business process outsourcing under its portfolio is requested:

• Standardize manual workflows for a consistent and standardized experience
• Reduce before, during, and after call work for agents to increase operational efficiency
• Train employees to use free automated tools and measure impact before final implementation
• Detect calls (sentiment analysis) to reduce customer satisfaction
• Flag red signals of agents during their performance to help them with instant feedback

Conclusion

Small business process automation can be a perfect recipe for speeding up operations, reducing cost, improving operational efficiency, and facilitating seamless workflows.

A hybrid workforce will be able to use this automated process to its full potential to –

• improve customer experience
• reduce cost
• improve profits
• excel at innovation
• enable remote work
• increase employee productivity
• improve employee well-being