With recent technological advances and the explosion of AI-powered solutions, many businesses are embracing automation to save money, increase efficiency, and encourage growth.
Business process automation brings countless benefits across a business, its teams, and tasks. Automating time consuming tasks can significantly reduce wasted hours in the day, enabling increased focus on higher priority tasks. Automation helps your processes, your people, and your profits.
For example, AI-powered chatbots improve complaint resolution in 90% of businesses that deploy them. In many cases, chatbots can help remove the load that a business has to handle, letting agents focus on more complex and critical demands.
Automated customer service
Implementing automation across a variety of customer service interactions eliminates the need for repetitive tasks to be completed manually. Instead of devoting their attention and time to time-consuming manual processes, agents can devote their time and energy to creating meaningful interactions with customers.
The goal of customer service automation is not to completely replace human agents; rather, it should provide agents with the opportunity to enhance customers’ journeys, whether through personalised product support or in-depth conversations about their feedback, both of which are made possible once mundane and repetitive tasks are completed.
Workflow automation
Workflow automation is the process of launching a series of tasks that run on their own without any human contact. Once the rules and logic are established, automated workflows can send emails, set up reminders, schedule tasks, trigger drip campaigns, and more — all without anyone on your team touching a single button.
Almost every department can benefit from workflow automation. Whether it’s marketing, HR or finance, the technology can help you work smarter, not harder.
Workflow automation can be used to automate some of the most repetitive marketing processes, such as sending emails, text messages and social media posts. You can plan out your entire social media schedule using marketing automation, and you can create workflows that nurture particular types of prospects with email offers.
Sales workflow automation automates time-consuming lead and prospect management tasks, allowing agents to focus on selling rather than data entry. Aside from moving leads through the pipeline automatically based on their actions, an automated sales workflow can enrol prospects in drip campaigns and update deal stages as the deal progresses.
Automated tasks in sales include:
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Moving the lead to a different stage of the pipeline when they take a certain action
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Automatically moving a lead out of the pipeline if they’ve stopped responding.
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Sending a series of communications to the prospect during the deal stage
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Updating the deal stage once the lead has progressed
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Creating tasks for sales reps once a lead has scheduled a meeting
24/7 Customer support
According to research, up to 90% of customers, a quick response to their problem is critical to their satisfaction (HubSpot). If you can accept purchases at any time of day, it stands to reason that you should be able to address their problems and provide assistance around the clock. That, however, is unrealistic for many businesses.
That’s where customer service automation comes in: because you’re utilising AI and self-service, your customers will be able to receive efficient, personalised resolutions to their problems at any time of day or night.
Automated customer support examples include:
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Automated IVR: The automated IVR listens and identifies keywords from the voice, then either provides the solution or routes the call to the most skilled agents in the contact centre.
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Automated Call Distributors: It receives inbound calls and then routes calls to the right call agents, team, or even back to the IVR menu.
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Canned Responses: Canned messages are predefined messages to common inquiries. These messages link to a specific keyword to pledge the customers that your support team is working on it.
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Chatbot: Answering basic questions, redirecting the customer to any knowledge base or route to a human agent if needed.
Furthermore, providing 24/7 customer service gives your company a distinct competitive advantage. If customers can expect help at lunchtime as well as after midnight, it’s enough of an incentive for them to choose your product or service over your competitors.
Real-time analytics and reporting
Automation tools do more than just manage routine tasks. They also include analytics tools that allow businesses to collect and analyse customer data to provide a systematic overview of their behaviour and purchasing patterns.
This enables businesses to perceive customer purchasing habits and demographic information so that they can target these customers later in their marketing campaigns, providing more efficient use of resources.
Customer analytics and reporting is the foundation that gives businesses control over their products. It assists businesses in developing more meaningful marketing content and presenting their products in novel ways. It establishes a system for further automating newsletters, emails, as well as marketing campaigns.
Reduce costs
Finally, streamlining work processes and eliminating repetitive tasks will undoubtedly shorten delivery timelines. This means the team can complete more work in less time. Reducing time and operational costs in this way has a direct impact on the overall profitability of your company.
Automation aids in the simplification of complex tasks including analytics of customer behaviour and satisfaction, as well as scheduled reporting that saves employees’ time and speed up processes, lowering resource demands, reducing company costs and improving your bottom line.
