6 Things Every Medium-Sized Business Should Automate

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Not all startups are lucky enough to enter the threshold of medium-sized businesses. If your company is one of them, congratulations, but you should be aware that growth also brings challenges that will test your ability to cope with difficulties.

6 Things Every Medium-Sized Business Should Automate

Ensuring the sustainability and profitability of your business is a complex task that requires not only the right personnel but also adequate tools to help you automate certain processes.

For this reason, we’ve decided to compile a list of things every medium-sized company should automate, along with automation tools that will help you save time and money, while at the same time boosting your team’s productivity and efficiency.

1. Team Collaboration

Tools for medium-sized businesses must eliminate any communication problems and strengthen collaboration between departments.

By using a good-quality collaboration tool, your staff members can move synchronously to solve issues quickly and efficiently, which translates into increased customer satisfaction and loyalty rates.

If you want to take team collaboration a step further, consider using SharePoint. SharePoint is a cloud-based collaboration and document management platform that uses workflow applications, list databases, and other features to enable efficient team collaboration. You can use it as a secure place to store, organize, access, and share information from any device.

Migration to SharePoint can help boost the overall efficiency and lower costs. But if not conducted properly, this change of platforms can significantly harm your business.

For that reason, it’s wise to consider utilizing professional Microsoft SharePoint migration services to plan every step of the process and ensure that there are no disruptions before your staff gets used to your new configuration.

2. Customer Relations

Finding new solutions that help you meet the needs of your audience should be a top priority for any business and automation might be your secret weapon for ensuring better customer relationships.

When routine tasks are taken care of by automation, your employees will have more time to connect with customers and build long-term relationships.

CRM is mandatory software for medium-sized businesses. Without it, you won’t be able to understand the pain points of your potential and existing customers or close deals effectively. While not always thought of as an automation tool, a CRM actually provides a form of automation by enabling more effective sharing of customer data.

Everything from phone calls to email interactions is stored in a single centralized database. By updating and sharing this information automatically, every staff member is kept on the same page.

In addition, CRM tools provide automated reporting and analytics. They also evaluate customer behavior to anticipate future wants and needs.

3. Customer Service

Customer service automation can boost productivity and improve customer satisfaction by leaving your agents more time to troubleshoot and optimize the customer experience. And one of the best tools to achieve this is chatbots.

More than 70% of consumers consider short response times to be one of the most important factors for evaluating customer service efficiency. Customers want prompt answers and, as a result, they prefer their issues to be resolved via chat instead of over the phone or email.

Research has shown that chatbot usage has increased dramatically and this year, nearly 50% of organizations are expected to implement chatbots for customer support services.

However, you should keep in mind that not every conversation can be handled by chatbots. Although AI can take care of FAQs, more complex issues will still have to be resolved by human agents.

When human customer service agents and AI work together, the response will be faster and, as a result, customer retention and satisfaction rates will be much higher.

4. Social Media Marketing

From creating and publishing content to analytics and reporting, thinking of all the social media tasks you have to complete every day can be quite overwhelming.

Luckily, there are a bunch of great social media management tools available to help. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to schedule all your social media posts, improve engagement, and keep track of all your social media profiles in one place.

These tools can help, generate invoices, streamline your workflows, save you time, and make sure your content reaches the right people at the right time.

5. Email Marketing

Although social media might be stealing the spotlight these days, there are a few other automation-friendly formats you can use to deliver your content, including email marketing.

Email marketing remains one of the most efficient ways to promote your brand with nearly 60% of consumers claiming that their buying decisions are influenced by emails.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that email generates $38 for every $1 spent, which is far more than the ROI generated by other ad categories such as banner ads and SEO.

You can use email automation tools like MailChimp to test user engagement and make the necessary adjustments in order to improve conversions. These tools also offer reporting options and can provide you with detailed analytics on your email campaigns.

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6. Accounting and Invoicing

As a medium-sized business, it is very important to stay on top of your invoicing and accounting. You need to have a record of how your company is doing financially but this can often look really messy if not handled by a professional accountant.

The question is – can your business afford to hire an accountant?

If this is not the case yet, don’t fret. With the help of automation tools such as Freshbooks, YoozPay, and Wave, you can streamline recurring invoices, automatically track what has been paid, and centralize timesheets.

These tools also allow for collaboration between team members and provide detailed analytics.

Final Thoughts

Automation is the tool of growing businesses. The above-listed tools, in combination with skilled employees, can streamline everything from customer relations to accounting.

By using automation tools, you are enabling your staff members to work more efficiently, while at the same time providing your customers with an outstanding experience.

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