What is one process automation tool you’d recommend to help address business challenges with digital transformation?
To help small businesses find process automation tools to address business challenges, we asked tech professionals and business leaders this question for their best tips. From automating project workflows to understanding your data better, there are several recommendations that may help you find the appropriate process automation tools to grow your business.
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Here are ten process automation tools that can help your company:
- Embrace Business Process Management
- Integrate in Predictive Text Software
- Automate Project Workflows
- Integrate Multiple Apps
- Start With Invoicing
- Understand Your Data Better
- Focus on the Craftsmanship
- Simplify Your Record Keeping
- Increase Availability to Customers
- Leverage Data to Increase Sales
Embrace Business Process Management
Making the switch to digital can be a little challenging, but I think an easy shift a business can make to help ease that process is first finding a Workflow Management or Business Process Management (BPM) software that fits your needs. A BPM will help you with your processes and the cycle of your work, from start to finish. Taking this approach with workflows or business processes can help you start small before moving into something larger. While we work to offer these alone, there are also combinations that we have to also assist you in your digital transformation journey. When starting small, a bit of a human touch might still be required before completely handing it over to the advanced automation technologies like RPA, AI/ML and Low-Code.
Giota Gavala, Comidor
Integrate in Predictive Text Software
One of the easy steps businesses can make to ease into digital transformations is a switch over into a predictive text software, like ours. Being able to communicate clearly is largely important. Projects are being handled at home, across the country, and everything in between. Checking in has become imperative and with that we need to keep in mind that communicating clearly is also communicating efficiently. Our predictive text software catches and corrects in real time for spelling errors, learns your typing patterns to help you draft emails and documents faster, and matches your tone so that you’re always positive that the information is coming across accurately. Having such a software can immensely aid your business as you work towards your digital transformation goals.
Guy Katabi, Lightkey
Automate Project Workflows
Our marketing agency recently upgraded to a Business pricing plan to help manage our Agile workflows and 95,665 monthly tasks our team tackles. Without Asana’s automation features like Rules and custom templates, we’d be losing a ton of time and value. Instead, our teams have built custom workflows to save us time and tackle projects efficiently.
Brett Farmiloe, Markitors
Integrate Multiple Apps
When it comes to processing automation tools, I can wholeheartedly recommend Zapier. By creating our own zaps, we can automate a lot of things. We can easily automate and integrate information between multiple applications. We can connect over 2000 different applications so that each process can be easier. Thanks to this application, we will save a lot of time and be more productive in our daily work.
Natalia Brzezinska, PhotoAid
Start With Invoicing
One great place to start your automating journey is your invoicing process. You can create an automation to send invoices and follow-ups with the correct dollar amounts every time. This will reduce human error in the invoicing process while also saving your team time. If you want to take it a step further, you can also get software that will automatically record when bills are paid. Gone are the days where customers complain about being billed the wrong amount and now you can focus on more complex customer issues.
Brooke Wilson, Fabric
Understand Your Data Better
An excellent extension for marketers is our Google Analytics application. Teams can use it to add insights and observations into their reports, making it easier to map activities. It helps them automate events and track activities and actions that may affect their campaigns and website traffic.
Fernando Ideses, GAannotations
Focus on the Craftsmanship
We value our craftsmanship in our original and handmade products, however, we have taken advantage of some automation. Our ceramics take more time than just forming them out of clay; we use automation to source our recycled materials, create clay, and prepare the clay that will be handmade into beautiful dining ware. We are proud to use a healthy balance so that our craftsman can focus on their skills and we can prepare them efficiently.
Joe Parenteau, Fablehome
Simplify Your Record Keeping
We were early adopters of automated record keeping tools. We must take extensive records of every step of our work, and due to the complexity of the electronics we design, a wealth of information that we must track comes from our customers as well as our engineers. Record keeping was extremely time consuming for us until we automated some of these processes. It has been a huge help as we continue to evolve digitally.
Keesjan Engelen, Titoma
Increase Availability to Customers
Customer service has to be one of my top recommendations for automation. Whether it be your welcome series, post purchase nurturing email sequence, or implementing a chat bot for quick questions on your website, these are things that can save you time while still getting the job done efficiently and on time. In this day and age, many customers prefer to communicate via chat. That’s great news for businesses who are thinking of adding chat bots to their website, especially if they’re understaffed or just want to take some of the workload from their employees being online all the time. Additionally, this can also add to the fact that bots can work 24/7. Rest assured your customers will be able to get some of their questions answered even if your business is closed for the day.
Abby Herman, Snap Agency
Leverage Data to Increase Sales
Not only has marketing automation created such an in-depth understanding of lead based marketing, but it has also become such a key tool for organizing this data. Now we are able to collect our data from all of the platforms we are using and hold it in one place. We are cutting down on the analytics side and focusing on increasing sales and customer service.
Chris Vaughn, Saucey
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