Artificial intelligence and automation are poised to change the world. For businesses especially, these technologies already have the potential to boost the bottom line. This article will be taking a look at some specific ways in which you might employ automated systems to bolster your business efforts, and ultimately increase profitability.
1) MARKETING
Automation software is already a central component for many marketing teams, making it easier to analyze the behavior of potential customers and attract them to the brand — among other things. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature shared by marketing automation tools is their ability to streamline time-consuming business processes such as:
● Making posts to social media
● Sending out routine emails
● Maintaining a lead database
● Task and alert automation
● Analyzing campaign success
With automation software handling these actions, your marketing team has more time to focus on their core duties and long-term planning. This, in turn, makes them more productive and helps your business grow.
It’s not just the little things that automation can handle, though. The right tools can also deliver some advanced features that will help your marketing team bring in new leads, better retain existing customers, and continue boosting your revenues. For example, the social media automation tools often feature a centralized dashboard for all of a brand’s social channels that also allows for sending and receiving messages. This allows marketing teams to respond to existing and potential customers more rapidly, which often improves the outcomes of both lead nurturing and damage control efforts.
Then there are the automated lead segmentation and scoring features, which enable your team to split up prospects based on demographic information and rank them based on conversion potential. You’ll then be able to focus marketing efforts on the most likely targets, which will have a tremendous impact on your marketing ROI.
The list of examples goes on, but the bottom line here is that when it comes to marketing, automation helps your team do more done with less effort wasted.
2) SALES
Much like marketing, sales teams benefit from allowing automation tools to tackle their most repetitive tasks, like juggling sales records and managing orders.
In addition to the tasks that automation can handle almost completely, though, there are also daily sales functions that automation can support so that reps can be more productive. Identifying prospects, for instance, is something that sales reps can hit a wall on as they exhaust search methods, lose track of which prospects they’ve already discovered, and get mired down trying to research if certain prospects will be worth the effort.
Software solutions can handle searches of potential customers much faster than a human, and compile pertinent information from internal records, social media, etc. so that your reps can view everything at a glance.
Automation also makes reaching out to these leads easier, by assisting on tasks like email generation and meeting scheduling. Sales automation tools help reps refine the perfect email templates for generating responses, organize campaigns for sending out their messages, then book times for interested prospects to link up without the endless back-and-forth.
Even your sales managers can benefit from automation tools, as they can use them to rank leads, assign them to reps, and generate reports on the team’s progress with ease.
3) CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
The relationships between your brand and your customers are of the utmost importance. Automation can aid you in managing these customer relationships and improving the customer journey to enhance client satisfaction.
CRM software with built-in automation features, for instance, can make it easier to streamline small tasks that have a big impact on how you interact with customers. Examples include managing contact databases, visualizing orders so that you can better track them for customers, and generating high-level reports that provide an overview of how you’re performing when it comes to fulfilling customer needs and hitting your KPIs.
Perhaps one of the most impactful ways that automation can improve your customer relations, though, is by enabling you to provide more attentive customer service.
For instance, online live chat services (bolstered by automation) enable your company to field customer questions faster than you could using only email. Quicker problem resolution results in improved customer satisfaction, and greater retention of key clients.
Depending on your business, it may even be beneficial to employ customer service tools that automate customer access to your knowledge base and field support requests from customers without the need for human involvement.
4) FINANCE
AI is even making changes to how businesses handle accounting and financial operations. There are plenty of internal finance processes that are clunky, repetitive, and standing to benefit from becoming automated. This includes a range of core tasks like payroll, invoicing, expense management, and bookkeeping.
By automating these functions, you’ll do more than simply save time. You’ll also be cutting down on errors, mitigating instances of fraud, and enabling accurate data collection that you can put to use in other areas of your business.
Through automation tools, your finance team can handle greater challenges, stay consistent to reduce mistakes, and do more to contribute to your business’s bottom line.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Automation can help your business in more ways than one. By and large, though, it will be an invaluable tool for streamlining your business operations and cutting down on the resource drain that comes with menial tasks. By helping your teams reduce their repetitive workload and concentrate on core duties, you’ll see a decrease in time wasted and a bump to your ROIs across the board.
