Automation is becoming an increasingly prevalent part of our personal and professional lives, business automation provides a range of benefits, but many companies and departments are stuck in their ways and don’t want always see the benefits associated with embracing new technology. This blog explores how six different departments can implement process automation and the benefits that will follow.
Marketing
Digital marketing has developed rapidly and provides businesses with new innovative ways to connect with their audience. Although many companies have adopted digital marketing, fewer have implemented marketing automation.
Luckily for your business, there are lots of different options available to automate your marketing including platforms that will automate particular processes like social media, email campaigns and content distribution. There’s also systems that allow you to automate all of your marketing tasks in one platform, therefore making it easier to manage.
Human Resources
Human Resources (HR) departments in any business or sector have always handled a vast amount of physical information through labour-intensive and tedious processes.
Automation can alleviate employees of these time-wasting tasks and allow them to focus on more important jobs. HR automation can extend into a range of processes including recruitment, sickness and absence management, holiday requests, timesheets, and document management.
Sales
Most sales teams will use some form of customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage leads, prospects and clients but if your sales department is using an old or clunky system with no automation capability, they will still be wasting valuable time on tasks that should be automated.
Sales automation through CRM or sales management solutions enables your team to focus on selling while the system automatically tracks and makes changes and will update relevant users of these changes. Visibility and insight for sales management is an essential aspect of such automation.
Administration
Historically many admin tasks are paper or spreadsheet based, which offers limited access to information and the risk of human error throughout each process.
Automation of administration processes provides traceability, version control and data management along with the ability to generate and track company expenses at the click of a button.
Finance
Like in administration, finance processes used to be paper and spreadsheet based, but with the rise in online technology came digital account systems and the ability to generate and send receive invoices online.
The automation of invoices, expenses and timesheets can save your finance department a substantial amount of time, remove human error and provide reports or insight quickly and efficiently.
Customer Service
Customer service is a crucial element in every business, if your department operates an inefficient system or process your business growth will suffer. If your competitors are using automation to improve their customer service, they will have a competitive edge over you.
Automation allows your customer service team to focus on providing the best service to your clients while the system automatically escalates complaints and sends notifications to production or management.
The Importance Of System Integration
Business automation will help improve your organisational efficiency and aid growth, but if you are using different systems in every department without full system integration, you will find duplicate and disjointed data throughout your business, if you want to learn about the importance of business system integration, read our blog.
