If you’re considering task automation for your business but need a little inspiration, read this.
You win in business when you manage to keep a positive balance between what you invest and the return on that investment. In other words, the ultimate challenge here is to constantly widen the gap between costs and profits. And the best way to do that is by using the latest technology to automate business operations.
Rubyroid Labs has been helping companies discover growth opportunities with technology since 2013. We’ve automated various processes for our clients, watching more users sign up, more strangers become customers and more informed decisions made. So, if you’re unsure how to automate tasks in your business, don’t hesitate: contact us for advice.
Contents
In this article, we’ve drawn upon our experience to outline eleven business areas that you can automate with technology.
Front Office Operations
Handling customer requests soaks up a lot of time. People will call you to check for available time slots, reserve an appointment, ask questions about your product or services and more.
The good news is that customer support task automation has been around for a long time already. Take chatbots, for example. In 2018, we helped a German startup Chatchamp build one. The chatbot increased lead generation by 180% and reduced the cost per lead by 50% for companies using it.
Another task that can be easily automated is booking, and regardless of what sector you operate in. In yoga, for example, there could be programs with schedules tailored for different types of students. That might sound complicated, but even complicated systems like that can be automated, as our own experience with Yoga La Source proves.
Market Analysis
Successful sales and acquisitions of assets demand that you understand your market well. The better you do, the less time you spend chasing after irrelevant targets and the more promising deals you secure.
However, to figure the market out you need to analyze multiple parameters. Time and money spent on that may outweigh the value of the insights you uncover — unless you automate the process.
Market analysis is all about accumulating, structuring and processing vast tracts of data. You can automate this set of tasks to a great extent.
For instance, you can pull in information about a neighborhood from different sources like Google Maps, news sites and social media. Based on that information, the software will rate the neighborhood by specific parameters, helping developers, retailers and real estate agents make informed decisions about buying or renting property.
The described example is a real case study: we helped startup Layer Cake develop an application just like that.
Sales and Marketing
Automating your market analysis will help you make informed decisions. But it doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve appointed targets, software can reach out to them for you.
Sales and marketing task automation may work like this. You have a system where you add new offers (e.g. property) and leads. Each property listing has parameters like price, type, age, location, number of previous owners and others. At the same time, each lead is accompanied by parameters like age, desired location, personal preferences and so on.
Every time you list a new property, the automatic system checks it against available leads. If there’s a match, the software emails the listing to the lead.
Customer Self-Service
Self-checkout lanes and self-service gasoline stations are becoming increasingly common around the world. As consumers get used to it, you may want to consider borrowing this approach to business optimization.
At Rubyroid Labs, we’ve helped a few companies apply it. One prominent example is a Volvo-owned car wash automation system we helped build. It allows customers to book washing and valeting, set a location for onsite service and track progress online — all by themselves.
Resource Management
The right amount of resources in the right place at the right time can help you keep your balance positive.
Imagine you manage a cruise company that has several piers. How do you figure out how many boats to send to each of them and when? Of course, you can go over bookings and do some sophisticated calculations every time you sit down to plan. If that doesn’t sound exhausting, just go ahead.
But there’s a better option. A UK-based company Sail Croatia reduced manual operations by 70% with an application we built that automates boat allocation alongside other tasks. So, evaluate your resources, and if automation is possible to cut manual work, we could help — just drop us a line.
Collaboration
Another area of business you can improve with software is organizing staff collaboration. Task automation tools can distribute workloads evenly across teams or departments, notify operators of their tasks, send reminders and ensure fair shift scheduling.
As a result, people won’t have to argue about whose to-do list is the most packed or whose shift should be next. Everyone will have enough time to rest and feel like they’ve been treated fairly.
A Canadian company used our help to build an AI-powered administrative task automation app for clinics and hospitals to do exactly that. Medical facilities have reported spending less money on paperwork and raising employee satisfaction as a result of using the app.
Recruiting and Management
Hiring people is a complicated process. You need to outline your expectations, create questionnaires and test assignments, interview people, assess their performance and more. Automation won’t do all of those tasks for you, but it can cut the time you spend on recruitment.
We helped a German startup build recruiting software automating one of those tasks: creating questionnaires. Taking that task alone off recruiters’ shoulders sped the process up significantly. Your hiring process may be more complicated, but automation can still boost it. Tell us about it, and we’ll suggest a strategy.
Compliance
If you work in a regulated sector like healthcare or education, you know the pain of organizing your processes in a compliant way. It’s a mundane job that takes a lot of precious time and makes no one happy. But the mundanity is what makes this job perfectly fit for automation.
Rubyroid Labs helped an Australian software company build a platform for workflow optimization in industries like those. Filling medical and consent forms, reporting incidents and managing field trips are among the tasks the software automates. Schools, youth groups and similar organizations using it have been able to reduce the need for manpower by up to 75%.
Accounting
Accounting is a job no one likes doing, especially if you’re a founder of a business still in its early days. And software developers have been offering solutions in this field for a long time. Applications like QuickBooks, Wave, Xero, NetSuite and many others allow you to benefit from the latest financial task automation technology.
In fact, finance professionals believe that software will fully automate about 90% of finance operations by 2025. So, if you are still not in, it’s time to embrace financial technology.
Client Relationships
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems encompass most of the areas mentioned above. They work as all-in-one task automation tools for managing front office operations, sales, marketing, resource management, collaboration and more.
Suppose you’ve decided to adopt software like that for your business. First of all, you need to ask yourself whether you should build a CRM from scratch or use an off-the-shelf solution (e.g. Salesforce). And if you opt for the former, Rubyroid Labs can help. We have a proven track record of building CRMs for travel, real estate, automotive and other industries.
Take Big Purple Dot, a real-estate CRM. With our help developing the software, its founders have been able to increase daily usage by 15% in just a few months.
Ready to Tap the Benefits of Automating Tasks?
Cost reduction is the ultimate goal of allocating jobs to software. However, the benefits of automating tasks don’t stop there. They include increased employee satisfaction, happy customers, data-driven decisions and, eventually, overall business growth. And although proper use of software isn’t the only prerequisite to success, it can play a crucial role.
You can research task automation tools yourself and try a bunch out to find what fits you best. Or you can consult Rubyroid Labs, and we will save you time and trouble by building a fully customized application that checks all your boxes. Whichever you choose, it will be a step in the right direction.
2 Comments
worth reading articles thanks for shared
Thank you!