Businesses today are looking for highly efficient ways to streamline the process and make things more efficient and cost-effective for the company. Business Process Automation (BPA) is one way that uses technology to automate routine or repetitive work.
The best business process minimizes human cost, energy and time. You can say that over 90% of the operating cost is cut down when one uses automation. Business Process Automation need not be confused with eliminating human force; it just enhances the quality of work humans can deliver.
Automation needs to start at the ground level by automating smaller repetitive tasks and then heading to automate towards more complex, integrated tasks. There are a few best business processes to automate today which will give a robust kick to your business. A detailed discussion of them is presented below,
- Sales and CRM process
Paperwork never appeals to a sales or marketing person. What they enjoy or, I must say, are good at is their communication power and their ability to close a deal. To be a step ahead of their competitors, companies must incorporate a few best-known automated CRM tools.
This automation is necessary to save time for both the marketing team and the client. You can encapsulate automated email marketing that will help you collect customer analysis and provide the necessary insight into improving marketing strategies.
- Employee onboarding and offboarding
One tedious work the HR department goes through is the onboarding and offboarding process. With bigger giants, onboarding and offboarding is a routine work. Automating this process saves a lot of workforce and effort.
When a new employee signs the contract, you can send an automated welcome email. This small gesture has been found to increase 45% of employees’ trust within the organization. You can even automate the process of adding and deleting employee details.
- Certificate renewal
An SSL certificate, be it a multi-domain, RapidSSL certificate or positive SSL certificate or any other, is important to ensure that the customer data and the communication link between the server and the browser is secure from third-party invasions. Often we forget to renew our SSL certificate and end up working on an insecure platform, or we need to entitle an employee to look into the same.
The automation tool here makes the job easier and renews your SSL certificate automatically. The tool notifies you 30 days before expiration for certificate renewal. There are many processes through which you can automatically renew your SSL certificate.
- Invoice processing
An often underrated task is invoice processing. This huge process is repeated several times, uses a great amount of work, and is only looked upon when it goes wrong. Invoice processing requires one to match the work details, check for the legitimacy of the payment, sees that the company does not underpay or overpay the employee and prepare for an audit.
These tedious tasks can be automated in a day and save an ample amount of workload and task force involved in doing it.
- Task assignment
To enhance employee performance or to know an employee’s true potential, automated task assignment tools are a blessing. They assign tasks to employees daily and help the managers keep an eye on the project’s progress.
Here both the employees and managers are well aware that the entire work is done on a transparent medium and can be checked by the stakeholders at any given point. The managers can even set reminder alarms for the allotted tasks.
- Leave management
Managing leave requests of employees can be a cumbersome process. The HR department needs to be on its toes while approving or denying a leave, along with making sure that company work doesn’t suffer.
Here is where the leave automation process eases off the task. The HR department can set a certain fixed amount of leave that an employee can get within a time frame and deny leaves beyond that. Even during the holiday season, when many employees opt for leaves simultaneously, the automation process can allot different leave dates to different employees.
- Customer support
Satisfying a customer is a troublesome task and needs fast implementation. The better the customer support you offer your team, the better your client will trust you. You can automate and manage all the aspects of customer support and ensure high-end customer satisfaction.
There is a ticketing system that you can opt for to increase customer satisfaction. Every time a customer query is generated, a ticket is sent to the customer support team to look into the issue. They are even given a specified deadline within which they need to resolve the query. This makes the process fast at both the client’s and the service provider’s end.
- Expense tracking
The urge to expand your business and revenue cannot be fulfilled without handling the company expenses. One needs to keep a sharp insight into which department needs how much budget.
To aid this objective automated expense tracking systems are made. Only the relevant stakeholders can have excess to it. They get to know which department needs how much and how the budget needs to be allocated to each department. You can even set a monthly or yearly budget plan and further generate reports to track the expenses.
- Social media management
Social media has taken the internet by storm over the years. Social media is a must to expand your business and reach out to maximum people.
But handling so many platforms is quite difficult at times. To ease down the process, automated tools like HubSpot, Buffer, Sprout Social etc., let you handle and manage all your content. They even let you communicate from a single point.
A platform like Facebook has an Instant Reply service, an automatic message service that replies to the messages you receive. You can also set a time when you will be available to entertain the query.
Final verdict
Automation is a game-changer that brings in ground-breaking solutions and increases the company’s profitability. Those mentioned above are a few best business processes you can think of automating today. They will save human resources and seamlessly manage small or big repetitive functions of the company.
