In the pandemic era of staffing shortages and disrupted business operations, SMBs face many challenges. Fortunately, workflow automation technology can bridge the resource shortage gap. Even better, these solutions are quickly becoming more available to SMBs, thanks to the rise of easy-to-use cloud-based apps. Businesses that adopt these tools can achieve higher-quality operations, improve employee motivation, and dedicate more time to customers. They find these applications can save money by minimizing wasted time.
However, with limited resources, it may seem daunting to adopt a new technology that requires users to adapt their workflows. The investment quickly becomes worth it, though — workflow automation systems can become your business’ most powerful tools.
What is Workflow Automation?
Workflow automation identifies, creates, and deploys workplace tasks through clearly defined rules that trigger an automated action. That’s a long way of saying the technology uses smart computing to manage (often tedious) tasks.
For example, in Gmail, an email with a meeting invite often triggers a task that automatically adds a meeting to your calendar. There are hundreds—maybe thousands—of repetitive tasks like these that already transpire in offices every day through commonly-used applications.
This doesn’t cover the more unique tedious tasks, though. More than 40% of workers surveyed reported spending a quarter of their workweek on repetitive office tasks. Custom workflow automation tools can free coworkers from having to worry about them.
1. Simplify Accounting Tasks
In 2021 nearly $11 billion was spent on intelligent business automation like data entry; the accounting department is probably one of the biggest beneficiaries.
From generating expense reports to managing payroll and beyond, workflow automation takes the lead on the very repetitive and time-intensive tasks. Accounting process automation includes tasks like generating financial statements, updating financial records, processing recurring invoices and payments, and setting up reminders for alerts like overdue payments.
While some of these tasks may still require a small amount of human oversight, it’s a compelling way to bring efficiency to the one department that’s always focused on the bottom line.
2. Deliver an Efficient Customer Experience
Customer support is one area of operation that can continuously evolve — and these improvements have a high impact on customer retention and brand affinity. For SMBs, responsive customer support typically falls into the “nice to have” category, so it can easily go overlooked. That’s where workflow automation proves essential.
Integrating workflow automation into customer support can quickly get the ball rolling on customer inquiries. For example, website chatbots can engage customers through the power of AI and create tickets or route customers to the appropriate department or contact.
Customer support workflow automation can also govern tasks like customer orders, shopping cart abandonment communications, and receiving and organizing customer service and feedback, like product reviews.
3. Manage Inventory in Real-Time
You can even optimize your SMBs inventory management and distribution process with strategic workflow automation tools. Automatically update and coordinate numbers related to stock, sales, distribution, and even the supply chain from pre-product through delivery to give business leaders a clearer view of potential challenges and the path to business success.
For example, you can keep your online ordering tool aligned with your existing warehouse inventory to ensure you don’t oversell. Or, you can create an automatic alert to trigger a sale for inventory that’s been sitting for too long, based on pre-determined rules and pre-defined revenue formulas. This real-time visibility allows SMBs to run their inventory and sales with the efficiency and accuracy of large businesses without adding the overhead of more people.
4. Increase Task Efficiency and Accountability
How many times has someone in a meeting said, “Let me add that to my to-do list” and then proceeded to open a notebook and write down the task? Sure, we all keep to-do lists in notebooks, on sticky notes, or even on our hands, but it’s hard to add a note on your palm into a project management system.
Task management workflow automation offers the ability to create task lists based on content as dense as emails, delivering accountability. By capturing and creating to-dos floating around the office, assigning them to owners, and then building in auto-alerts like benchmark reminders, workflow automation creates a smoother process and a happier, more productive team.
5. Improve Communications
Internal communications can be a struggle during this age of hybrid or work-from-home scenarios. Having a team spread out across different locations—and even time zones—can create siloed operations, often detrimental to streamlined business goals. Workflow automation can offer a solution that brings teams together by actually simplifying communications.
Imagine a program that can auto-sort through hundreds of new emails to identify urgent work-based tasks from a supervisor. Envision key stakeholders on a project getting an automated alert as soon as their project stage is ready for review. These are the types of communication workflow automation can handle. It eliminates the need for status meetings, or the annoyance of lost emails, missed calls, and disparate work styles.
6. Add Clarity to Overall Operations
Transparency is crucial to business success, and the best way to ensure transparency is to bring clarity to task ownership and progress. Workflow automation can improve overall operations by clarifying what is happening daily.
Implementing workflow automation shines a light on process architecture and redundancies, which can immediately benefit strategic goals.
7. Increase Cost Savings Over Time
As mentioned before, workers report spending a quarter of their workweek on tedious, repetitive office tasks. Freeing up that time increases productivity and gives employees a chance to brainstorm innovative solutions, think about future goals, and foster a more robust work culture that helps with employee retention.
Either directly or indirectly, these automations positively impact a company’s bottom line.
Find Your Workflow Automation Partner
A technology partner can help you better understand how workflow automation can transform your small business by identifying the best areas for workflow automation and implementing them within your SMB.
Soliant Consulting is an experienced partner that delivers solutions designed to transform the course of your business. Reach out to Soliant today to explore your options.
