What is one automation you use at your small business to improve your team’s productivity?
To help small businesses improve their productivity via automations, we asked small business owners and business professionals this question for their best insights. From automating transaction emails to utilizing project management software, there are several strategies that may help you improve your productivity through automation for your business.
Here are eight small business automations that improve productivity:
- Automate Transaction Emails
- Auto-Select Article Content
- Get Assistance in Copywriting
- Enable Push Notifications
- Schedule Emails in Advance
- Utilize a Project Management Software
- Integrate Chatbots for Sales
- Post Social Media Updates
Automate Transaction Emails
One automation we use at our business to improve our team’s productivity is transaction email automation. Whenever a customer purchases a product from our website, they get an automated email reviewing the purchase and offering a link to our customer support team. If they have any questions regarding the order, they can contact our support team for help. This helps our team stay more efficient and know where our support requests are coming from.
Lauren Picasso, Cure Hydration
Auto-Select Article Content
At Terkel, we believe process optimization is the key to improving the team’s productivity. For that, we rely on data science-backed algorithms that help in automating the process flows and reducing the manual efforts required. Terkel is a knowledge platform that creates community-driven content featuring expert insights. We are using content intelligence automation to select the best insights to be featured in articles for our partners. This automation has a preliminary step of assessing an expert’s profile and assigning a rank while simultaneously giving a quality score to the answer. This automation helps Terkel to improve our team’s productivity as well as maintain the value of expert insights.
Sri Sagar Kalisetty, Terkel
Get Assistance in Copywriting
One automation tool I use is an AI writing tool called Jarvis. Jarvis helps me write more content quickly, so I can work on other aspects of my blog, like promotion. AI copywriting software writes great content in a lot less time.
Steve Morrow, Paddle About
Enable Push Notifications
We use push notifications to notify people about our latest developments. Whether it is a sale, a product launch, or new content creation, we send push notifications. That way, people who want our notifications but don’t want more email inbox clutter can stay apprised of our business developments. The tool tells us when people are most apt to click on our link. We choose to publish the notification, and the SMS tool sends it out when it’s scheduled. By using automation, we take out the human factor, so people don’t have to be at the computer all the time.
Janice Wald, Mostly Blogging Academy
Build Process Shortcuts
If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a great tool that creates shortcuts and automated processes across your different apps. You can use it to send emails automatically, share posts on social media, or sort through your inbox. You can even use it to open up documents needed for certain meetings. By automating these little tasks, you will have much more time to focus on more complex issues in your business.
Jacob Dayan, Community Tax
Utilize a Project Management Software
I’m currently evaluating several transcription workflow solutions for automating project management, quality control, invoicing, and freelancer payments. In the past, I used secure file storage software and kept track of projects using a spreadsheet. This involved a lot of manual processing of audio files and resulted in some errors such as incorrectly named documents, which in turn led to some confusion when it came to recordkeeping. With the implementation of workflow software, I look forward to saving hours of admin time, reducing errors, and offering a more streamlined experience for my clients and freelancers.
Chloe Brittain, Opal Transcription Services
Integrate Chatbots for Sales
One automation we use is a chatbot on our website! We find that many customers have questions that don’t actually need to be answered by an agent. If someone would like to speak with a real person, there should be an agent available since the bot has taken care of most of the requests! This is also a great way to get customers’ information such as email or phone numbers.
Tom Mumford, Undergrads
Post Social Media Updates
Managing social media accounts used to be time-consuming for us 一 logging into them all individually and reposting similar content across them. Something we’ve done to make it easier is creating a free Zapier account to connect them all. We post something on Instagram, which connects to Facebook automatically, and it will “zap” that post into LinkedIn and Twitter automatically as well. This lets us make one post instead of four separate ones and saves us time managing multiple accounts.
Phil Bryson, Easy AZ Home Buyer
Terkel creates community-driven content featuring expert insights. Sign up at terkel.io to answer questions and get published.
