Your team is well equipped with staff, the market campaign is running in full swing, and the key projects have successfully launched. Yet the business isn’t growing…
One of the major problems that get often overlooked – but creates a great hindrance to growth and innovation- is manual, inconsistent processes that restrain productivity.
Many organizations today are rapidly embracing automation, and for a good solid reason: A recent survey demonstrated that employees want their employers to automate manual, repetitive tasks, and give them time back to focus on higher-value work. As per the survey report, more than 59% of workers have said that automating manual tasks can save them six or more hours per week.
Here’s an infographic- that offers in-depth knowledge of what workers think about automation- and the top 3 efficiency killer tasks they want their employers to automate.
Repetitive, manual tasks steal time and energy that could be better spent on critical business tasks. Here are three of the most common reasons your business isn’t reaching its potential, along with solutions:
Data collection is tedious and boring. But, you need data to run your business-sales figures, profit/loss numbers, expenses, etc. but manual data collection and analysis can take hours (or days). Error-free, consistent, and organized data becomes easy to achieve with automated web forms.
Approval processes drag on. Major business decisions aside,
routine approval requests needed for tasks like expense reports, equipment
purchases, and time off requests can be quickly approved when there are
established guidelines. Instead of facing delays when requests get lost in
email and approvers try to conquer their inbox, automating the process
reduces email churn. Using automated triggers
& alerts keeps the process flowing.
Reporting on updates monopolizes resources. Employees need to keep managers, teammates, and direct reports informed about the status of work, but it often comes at the cost of the real work getting done. By automating processes, project updates and key results can be done instantly, freeing up time to make an impact. Stakeholders gain instant insight into the progress being made. You save time by automating key tasks, without needing to invest significant amounts in new software or skills.
Take the next step…
If you can’t decide where to begin,
check in with your people. Select a single team or pull together a small group
of folks to identify opportunities to automate processes, like setting up
automated alerts for expense reports or gathering details for weekly sales
reports. Once you begin, you can always scale up the solution to automate other
processes.
Your business is likely already using business tools, so you can also start there. Identify the solutions adopted by teams that may be useful for other departments. From there, a business automation platform like Tigersheet could help you corral the myriad solutions your teams adopted individually.
Removing the impediment of
repetitive tasks for your employees frees them up to focus on the work that
matters: strategic thinking, innovation, and problem-solving. These are the
activities that truly power your business and propel it forward. Making a small
investment now in automation tools and taking the time to master them will pay
dividends tomorrow.
We are living in the age of
fast-paced technology that has paved the way for Automation, to a point where
human intervention has become unnecessary. If something can be done without
human interaction, by just giving some sort of “start signal” (e.g. pushing a
button), this can be considered automation.
Automation can save time and money,
delight customers who no longer have to wait in line for a person to assist
them with a transaction, and impede human error.
It might come out as a surprise for some people, but automation is already everywhere around us!
Examples of everyday automation that most people experience on a daily basis; Washing machine, dishwasher, refrigerators, bus doors, Air Condition systems in a car, turning on a complete home theater system with the push of just one button, etc. And these are just a few examples to quote.
Automation is quite broad in terms of its applications, significance, and its opportunities. This scope has long vexed the imagination of some of the world’s greatest thinkers. On that note, here are some of the finest and intriguing automation quotes to ponder upon along with insights on the lessons they offer.
In a 1994 famous science horror film, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, the protagonist creates an intelligent
life using inanimate materials. However, far from the perfect artificially
created specimen imagined, the result is a hideous creature that brings
terrible consequences.
Takeaway: So, this very first entry in the
list of our automation quotes reminds us to be careful of what we automate.
Just because you can automate something doesn’t imply that you should be
automating it. In fact, automating the wrong things can trigger a ripple effect
of damage. Wondering what could be these wrong things? Some examples:
Prolonged
Customer Service Calls:
No one wants to
be stuck in an automated phone call that lasts for all eternity. Slowly making
your way through random questions while keeping patient is painful. With long
automated phone calls, customers end up getting frustrated which means a bad
experience and low customer satisfaction.
Highly
complex processes: Automation
software is capable of complex processes but sometimes during complex processes, one
needs human intervention and decision-making. If it’s a process that demands
significant human attention at many stages, it’s better not to automate it all.
Instead, automate the smaller, simpler segments.
Moreover, attempting to automate everything puts you at the risk of losing the human touch and friendly face of your company. When customers can’t get support from a human, and the automation in place isn’t equipped to help them, they’ll inevitably feel alienated.
Here’s another entry in the list of
automation quotes that meaningfully sums up an important message: You
should not attempt to automate broken processes.
Automation is not a cure-all remedy, so it’s important to understand it will not mend your broken processes. Automation will do only what you tell it to do. If you tell it to complete a broken or faulty process, it will. As a result, you’ll get broken, faulty results. And, they’ll be on a much larger scale, as automation efficiently replicates your inefficient operations.
So, remember the thumb rule: Automation is best for common, constant, and systematic tasks that follow a standard pattern. Always start small as it will let you identify errors and correct them as you move forward. Initially, stick to a goal followed by trimming minutes from predictable, repetitive processes, with small benefits adding up over time.
Using automation to replace humans is one of the biggest
automation pitfalls. It fuels automation anxiety in your office, meaning that
the remaining human team members worry about being replaced by technology. This
hurts office morale and can see valued employees jumping ship.
Not to forget, automation can’t do everything a human can do anyway. Automation isn’t capable of out-of-the-box thinking, problem-solving, or analysis – you need the human members of your team for that.
It’s imperative that you find the right balance between automation and human intelligence within your business. Automation is shy; it’s great for boring, repetitive tasks behind the scenes, but not so much when it comes to the frontlines. So, leave representing your business — be that to customers, partners, or other employees — to human team members.
Business Process Automation is not Artificial Intelligence.
Remember, Automation is not ‘smart’ as it will only do what you tell it to do.
This means that it doesn’t learn or adapt by itself. You must instruct it. If
you tell it to do something incorrectly, it will complete the task incorrectly.
So, there is no flexibility in automation. It will neither
offer a magic solution to all your problems nor recognize faulty or broken
processes.
Takeaway: While Automation might not be able to learn for its
mistakes, Humans always Can.
And these mistakes can always be corrected. To Sum up at its best: Data
is a useful tool, but human initiative and understanding remain at the heart of
any successful business.
Moving next in the list of best
automation quotes is a best practice curtain call. If you visualize automation
as a means to cut corners or avoid certain processes, mind it but your outlook
is all wrong.
Daily workflows across various business departments are loaded with small repetitive tasks. It’s no surprise that your team performs them as a part of everyday challenges. When these tasks expand and burden your team, don’t ask who should be handling them, insteadFocus on how to handle them. In other words, a good automation approach will start by assessing your company’s work and how best it should be done.
Personal Takeaway: A different way
to put this together: improving your business processes shouldn’t be a ‘who’
question, but a ‘how’ question.
Asking ‘how’ splits your business
workflows up into the individual processes and tasks they comprise. This offers
an opportunity to review the workflow from end to end and find areas both to
automate and to optimize.
While this may be the age of automation, nothing can beat human touch and personalization. In fact, in many services industries, human labor is considered a mark of luxury. So, at the same time robots are said to destroy manufacturing jobs, the demand for labor-intensive services is soaring.
The good part, we can see it all
around us.
The rise of Etsy, an online marketplace whose main selling point is that the products are not mass-produced.
Then there’s the craze for restaurants with organic, locally sourced ingredients that often come from smaller, less mechanized farms.
In recent years, there has been an exponential rise of coffee breweries where Hand/manual coffee picking requires laborers to pick the coffees, quite literally, by hand.
These are all cases where greater
automation is technologically feasible, but companies are using their lack of
automation as a selling point. They’re doing this because customers like the
feeling of a personal connection to the farmers, brewers, and artisans who make
the products they’re buying. So, while automation undoubtedly makes products
cheaper and readily available people will increasingly shift their spending to
goods and services where a connection to a human provider is seen as a key
benefit.
…. Choose the automation path that works for you
Each of these quotes draws on a very real element of the
automation reality. Why not use them to get you thinking about how to implement
automation successfully in your own business?
Tigersheet is a uber-fast modern-day no-code platform that can help automate and streamline business processes in quick and easy steps. The intuitive drag and drop interface allows users with zero coding knowledge to create workflows and share them with your employees.
Using automation quotes as a catalyst. Want to give it a try? Try a 30-day free trial of Tigersheet to witness the change in your organization today!
We are living in a fast-paced technologically-driven world that is constantly changing. Speed, Agility, and Adaptability have become game-changers in the 21st century. Living in an age of instant gratification, customers today get easily accustomed to new services and expect you to deliver excellent quality in whatever you are offering.
Amidst this, a pivotal question to ask is how quickly does your business move and adapt to changes?
Well, frankly speaking, every business organization be it a small startup or multinational giants like Amazon or Google are looking at ways to improve productivity and for many of them, the answer lies right under their nose.
The Answer: Business Process Automation. It is a technology that streamlines business processes thus eliminating the need to perform repetitive manual tasks. By leveraging rule-based logic to automate manual tasks, workflow automation can help your business save time and money, reduce errors, avoid inefficiencies, and boost productivity.
The Big Question: What types of tasks or processes can be automated?
The good news is that Automation can start small and doesn’t necessarily require sophisticated tools, to begin with. You can always begin by mapping the workflow of a given process and look for inefficiencies and errors.
An important aspect to keep in mind is to not begin automating mission-critical tasks. Starting small has an advantage that it lets you identify errors and correct them as you move forward. Initially, stick to a goal followed by trimming minutes from predictable, repetitive processes, with small benefits adding up over time.
As you move forward identifying your workflow, search for processes that are:
Simple if/then scenarios
Actions that are recurrent and predictable
Actions that often get delayed in the absence of any human action
Now that you have a fair insight into what automation means, let’s dive deeper into specifics. While the list could go on and on, we bring here 5 common tasks that are ripe for automation
Copy and Paste Between Systems
Let us begin with a common yet significant task. One cannot deny how many times, organizations are seen struggling to manually move their data across systems.
For example, their ERP systems aren’t connected with their reporting software, so they are forced to manually pull data out of their ERP, edit in Excel, and then upload it to other systems. No wonder, this wastes so much time and also puts data at grave risk for errors. While this is just an example, I am sure it shows the bigger picture. Any time one is manually moving the data from one piece of software to another, that process should be simply automated.
With Tigersheet in place, we don’t let our users suffer from the hassle of moving their precious data from system to system. Tiger sheet’s importing capability ‘Import from Excel’ allows you to bring your Excel record to the platform while saving in a lot of time and effort that can otherwise go into creating a sheet from scratch. You can even convert your excel sheets into a centralized web application without any coding knowledge involved!
Reporting
Reporting Options in Tigershee
Reporting is one of the most vital arenas that has highest potential for automation, yet very few organizations take this step. For many companies, reporting is still a manual process wherein some cases employees waste hours manipulating data in Excel. In other cases, users still submit reporting requests to the IT department and wait for their approval.
In today’s data-driven world, automated reporting is a must-have. Here’s why you should consider automated reporting for your organization:
Data Error & Inaccuracies: Studies suggest that more than 90% of data stored in spreadsheets contain errors. So, if you are still relying on manual reporting through excel, you must be prepared to deal with data inaccuracies in your reports.
Slow and Tedious: We live in a fast-paced technology-driven world, but manual reporting is tedious and very slow. These days, businesses need a way to be able to create and access reports on the go which can be automatically delivered to them on a daily basis.
Tigersheet has powerful report generation capabilities, including grouping items, generating pivot tables and charts. All your reports can be saved and shared with other users, along with drill-down filter capability. Such insightful reports will not only give your business a better insight but will also help you identify bottlenecks, view how your teams are performing, and allocate budget and other resources effectively.
WebForms
Build Web Forms in Tigersheet
It’s 2020, and it’s quite surprising to see that some businesses still do not have automated forms. Wondering what are automated forms? Let us break this down to you.
Let us consider a scenario where a prospect completes a contact form on your website asking for more information on a specific service or product.
Now with a manual process, someone in your company will receive an email with the prospect information. He will first enter his data into a system (preferably a CRM) and then a concerned salesperson shall be notified to follow up with the lead. But with automated forms, all of this happens instantly!
Tigersheet lets you design and launches web forms in just minutes, right from your browser. On top of that, there is no coding involved, so anyone in your team can build forms. The data gets sent to your CRM system and any other necessary system. Notification emails are sent to the appropriate employee. The form can even trigger an email campaign that educates the prospect of the benefits or the product/service they inquired about.
See the difference? The automated forms not only eliminate manual data entry, but they can also improve the entire process.
CRM Tasks
Having a CRM software for your business has become indispensable at this point. While you must be familiar with the common benefits like data organization, improved sales performance, higher customer retention, and so on, there is still a lot more that an automated CRM can offer.
The automation features in a CRM can provide a plethora of benefits like:
KPI Tracking: Present-day automated CRM gives you a visual summary of your key metrics in an easy to read manner. This completely eliminates away the need to go through complex steps to measure your KPI metrics. All you have to do is configure your dashboards and display the information that you want to keep track of.
Better lead nurturing: Many CRM systems provide the option to set up follow-up emails, meetings, or calls. They can trigger email campaigns based on specific actions taken by the prospect.
Improved efficiency: Integrating your CRM system with other tools can dramatically improve your sales team’s efficiency. It can automatically schedule meetings, update calendars, create follow-up reminders, and much more.
Most of the pre-canned CRM software available today incur huge costs and that too with a lot of features you don’t need. Instead, why not subscribe to a no-code platform that allows you to create your own CRM at a fraction of costs? By using a no-code platform like Tigersheet to build a custom CRM system, you have an opportunity to automate another process of your business. Right from sales, customer service to HR your daily business operations can run more smoothly with Tigersheet when implemented across multiple departments.
Email or Text Message Auto Responses
Automatic responses are one of the simplest yet most effective areas to automate that can save so much time. Some of the ways in which email or text automation can help are:
Nurture and Follow Up Leads: Many businesses nurture and follow up their leads via autoresponders that are activated whenever a lead completes a form on their website. These responses share content that the prospect might find useful and help them understand how the business can solve their problems.
Improve Customer Support: Let us consider a situation that a customer submits a form on your website. Hence, an automated message can be sent to deliver a thank you message to the customer and an alert message to the concerned employee in your business.
Report Sharing: Many companies set up their reports to run on weekly/daily intervals. With the help of automated responses, they can automatically distribute these reports to various department heads without any human involvement.
Set Reminders and Alerts: If you are constantly reminding your team to complete specific tasks Or, are there predefined steps in a project that require reminders, its high time you should consider automation to increase productivity.
Closing Words
Automated workflows are key to remaining competitive in the coming years, as they help businesses achieve higher goals in a relatively shorter time. Start streamlining your processes today, and don’t get left behind. Get in touch with us.
Tigersheet is a uber-fast modern-day no-code platform that can help streamline business processes in quick and easy steps. The intuitive drag and drop interface allows users with zero coding knowledge to create workflows and share them with your employees.
