6 Business Processes You Should Automate to Save Time

Running a business seems to require having more hours in the day than the average person. Serving clients, retaining employees, and making a profit are enough to keep anyone's hands full. Smaller details, like your social media presence or onboarding process, often become neglected in spite of their value. Thanks to technology, companies no longer need to hire outside teams and consultants to help them improve their workflow.

There are several available tools that help automate processes such as posting on social media, sending out email newsletters, booking meetings, and receiving reminders. Here are 6 processes to automate in order to better streamline business processes.

What business processes need improvement?

Before investing money and labor into learning new software, make sure you’re targeting the right problem. A common mistake business owners make when upgrading their internal tools is not properly assessing where change is needed.

Depending on your organization’s goals, the processes you need to overhaul may vary. If you’re unsure, start with the areas of business that always have room to improve.

• Repetitive tasks/efficiency
• Customer satisfaction
• Saving money
• Client acquisition

1. Social media posts

Gone are the days of regularly logging in to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn just to make posts. Today there are helpful tools that handle this process for you. Planning your posts in advance helps you stay consistent, and forces you to develop a strategy for future posts. This can also help increase your visibility and ensure you’re still active even on off days.

Once you’ve developed a better social strategy and automated the posting, you can focus more on engagement with followers.

Also, if you regularly publish blog posts for your subscribers, don’t forget to reshare the content after a few weeks. This is also easily planned within automated tools, such as Hootsuite or Buffer. Many subscribers might have missed the original post and it ensures it gets better coverage with additional reposting. 

Solutions: Hootsuite | Buffer

2. Email campaigns

Email campaigns are a large part of marketing and are normally guided by an email marketing specialist. However, as your business grows, you’ll need a better email strategy.

Email management systems are helpful in that they provide an easy way for people to subscribe to emails. You can also manage your subscriber list within the software. As your business grows, you can create a series of emails that will automatically generate to your customers. This is perfect if you are onboarding new customers or need to automate other email campaigns.

Though email has its setbacks, it’s still one of the top ways to build engagement and communicate with your customers. If you’re still manually emailing every customer, consider creating templates and having them generated for you.

Solutions: MailChimp | Campaign Monitor | GetResponse

3. Appointments & reminders

How many times have clients (or staff) experienced confusion that results in a missed appointment? Take more control of your appointments by letting an online scheduling software perform the booking related tasks for you. Most online appointment booking softwares provide an easy way for people to view your meeting availability while automating all reminder communication. Additionally, a good software should automatically adjust for meetings across different time zones. This also helps ensure there’s no confusion over the time.

Automatic emails notify your clients of upcoming appointments, required forms to complete, and even directions to the appointment location. Be sure the software provides text message notifications to keep communication fast and reliable. Automating the booking process opens your schedule to more clients with features like automatic waitlists and custom booking sites.

Solutions: TimeTap | Calendly

4. Onboarding

Trying to make sure every new client receives a welcome email and subsequent documents can take a long time, especially when doing it manually. Why take an hour to send out forty emails when you can use that hour to provide a walkthrough of your services? There are several ways to onboard clients or staff, but the most effective involves automation. Allow your email marketing service to handle welcome emails for you after you've crafted them to your liking.

Alternatively, use a robust scheduling solution like TimeTap that’s capable of sending emails and securely storing client information.

Solutions: Clients - TimeTap | Employees - Trainual

5. Self service FAQ page

One easy way to automate client concerns is to create an FAQ page and route clients there from your official website. Studies show that many customers still prefer a self service page when they have questions. Creating responses to common questions provides an easy way for customers to get answers when they need them. It also saves your business time by not having to address common questions for each customer.

To create these FAQs, you're going to have to anticipate clients' questions when it comes to your services or classes. Clients might ask, "Are there certain forms I need to bring to my appointment?" or "What types of group activities can I expect in this class?" Anticipate these questions ahead of time to help you build well-explained but concise responses.

Another creative FAQ idea is to adopt chatbot software into your website. This frees up time with having to explain processes multiple times by linking or referring clients to a resource for help.

Solution: Tawk

6. Payment processing

Accepting payments and successfully completing transactions is close to the core of your business. With fraud and cybercrime on the rise, it’s becoming increasingly complex to safely process payments without any hiccups. On the other hand, clients are more wary of offering their credit or debit card information to online businesses.

Put your clients' mind at ease by providing a secure payment platform. This provides convenience and reduces cash handling issues that some businesses face. Providing a safe and convenient payments option is key to your business and should be easily accessible to your customers.

Solutions: Stripe | Square

Employing these helpful tools is a helpful way to save your business time while improving overall efficiency.