Regardless of which department or industry you work in, there are many ways in which automation can streamline your repetitive tasks in your day-to-day. In fact, we’ve shared 7 of them already in a previous post. We're back to talk about 7 more processes you should consider including in your business automation plan to continue to make the most of your workday.
Automation solutions can shave a lot of time off repetitive and mundane tasks that make every department less efficient. Think about how much time your team uses up just verifying and inputting data, as examples. On that note, we come to the first item on this list!
1. Data migration and cleaning
Data is integral to any business and will help drive key business decisions. However, it can also be cumbersome, whether you've migrating data between software applications or to another computer. Not only is data migration tedious, but it can also be expensive.
Large-scale data migration projects can run upwards of $875,000, with only about 62% of these projects completed on time and budget.
There's also the challenge of ensuring data remains intact during the migration, leading to more work if it's not. In standard migrations, data can end up losing its formatting, which can potentially make it inaccurate. For example, contact information for one client may be mixed up with another client’s, leading to miscommunication and confusion for both your team and the client.
Data migration automation for business ensures the migration is efficient and error-free, cutting down on time and costs—especially if the task is usually outsourced. Our Data Migration Wrkflows allow data migration to be handled in-house, while also streamlining the process and preventing duplicate information. They also ensure your team is ready to use new systems and applications as quickly as possible with minimal downtime!
2. Sentiment analysis and review management
Your business's reputation dictates your buyers' behaviour. That's because more than 90% of your potential customers will read online reviews before they make a purchase.
If you have many negative online comments towards your products or business practices, then you may lose out to a competitor that has a more favourable image. The trouble is that keeping up with all of the comments, reviews, and concerns can be a full-time job in itself.
Google is still the most popular review site. Zero-click searches—that do not redirect to a third-party site—climbed to 65% in 2020, meaning people are reading reviews directly from search results rather than seeking out additional sources to make a buying decision. At the same time, 53% of customers expect responses to issues within a week, with about 33% of that group expecting a resolution in three or fewer days.
While there's no guaranteed way to prevent negative feedback online, you can build trust by dealing with bad reviews efficiently with the help of automated tools.
This is where a Review Management & Responding Wrkflow can be valuable to your team. This business automation solution monitors reviews and comments on Google My Business and automatically classifies them based on their nature, for example, as a problem or a compliment.
For example, this Wrkflow can create a ticket and input it into a CRM software, such as Zendesk, for any reviews that are categorized as "urgent." It will also ensure a custom response is provided and then publish your response on your Google profile. By responding to reviews appropriately in a timely manner, you can mitigate negative feedback while bolstering your customer relationships in one fell swoop.
3. Ticket resolutions
Aside from responding to reviews in a timely manner, many customers will reach out to your business for an answer directly via email. In this case, a day to respond is too long—in fact, up to 90% of customers expect to hear back from you within an hour. However, the average email response time is a little over 12 hours.
It can be tough to juggle all of the queries coming to your Customer Support team. One way to effectively address them is by categorizing requests based on urgency, which department is most appropriate to resolve them, and more, right down to the type of request.
Automated Ticket Resolution Wrkflows can send a timely response to standard tickets like password resets and frequently asked questions like how to do a return. But what's more is that they can direct more involved issues to the right support person, while ensuring no problems fall through the cracks. These automated tools can also help you pinpoint recurring issues so you can improve them in the future, preventing problems before they occur.
4. Client hand-off
Transferring customers from the Sales Team can also be a bumpy ride. In some cases, information that is forwarded from a Sales team to the Customer Success team can be misinterpreted. This can be frustrating for the client, who then needs to explain their case and situation to yet another department and make them feel unimportant.
This problem can be avoided if your company's internal knowledge transfer is strengthened using automation solutions. This process can begin right from the start, using Wrk's Customer Onboarding solutions to streamline the process of creating customer profiles.
Internally for our own hand-off process, at Wrk, we automate this process by sending an email to our Sales team to provide client details once a contract is officially signed so that everyone is on the same page. This form is then automatically forwarded to Customer Success and routed to the first available agent, with a meeting set up if required for further clarification. This ensures the Customer Success team is well-versed on the customer’s situation from the get-go and creates a stronger relationship with customers from the beginning with a positive onboarding experience.
5. Scheduling meetings
Even deciding when to conduct a meeting with clients or internal teams can be automated. Not only does your staff already spend a good deal of time in the boardroom—in fact, middle management uses up to 35% of its time in meetings—there's also the work of scheduling the meetings.
This is why business automation solutions can also be valuable when it comes to scheduling. It removes the task of comparing schedules and going back-and-forth with a client over email to set up the best time for a discussion.
6. Personalized automated emails
Personalizing communications with clients is a winning strategy. A customized email marketing strategy increases open rates and can drive revenue by more than 700%, thanks to more relevant products and content.
Manually crafting individual emails to perspective customers is not the most time-efficient approach to grow revenue. Research shows that salespeople spend 21% of their time writing emails.
Personalized Email Marketing Wrkflows can tailor a custom message to a customer based on their buying history or preferences. These automation solutions can classify sales leads based on a checklist and then gather information about the client from outside sources such as LinkedIn for a more personal message that's on-brand. While this process may be automated, it provides a very human connection at scale.
7. Customer feedback
Why wait for customers to voice their opinions of you online or send an urgent email to your Customer Support team looking for answers? Just because you haven't heard from a customer for a while, doesn't mean everything is rosy.
In fact, only 1 of every 26 customers will take time to express dissatisfaction. The rest will silently stew, potentially moving on to a competitor.
Automation tools can help your business be more proactive by gathering feedback from clients that can identify any growing problems, as well as identifying successes.
Customer Growth & Retention Wrkflows can send a survey to your clients at regular intervals to collect important information about their experience so far. From there, you can either schedule a call (by using before-mentioned automation tools of course) to either address the concerns or to ask for a positive review.
Turn to business automation for continued growth
Using these business automation solutions will help free up time for your teams to focus on growth instead of wasting resources on mundane tasks. The key is to identify which tasks are eating up time and seek out a solution to automate them.
With Wrk, you get the best of all worlds with industry-leading technology and a simple solution to streamline your work.
Which processes are giving you the most headaches today? Book a demo with us! We’d love to chat about how we can save you time and energy.
