It’s Friday afternoon, and you want to leave work early to spend some time with your family. But you still need to copy customer call details into three separate systems, digitize some forms, and run other admin tasks. If this sounds familiar, you need automation.
Before you close this window, thinking this is too technical and probably not for you, give the following pages a read.
We speak with hundreds of business owners every week who are absolutely brilliant at what they do. But most of the time, they are buried in repetitive admin work. The puzzling part is that most of these mind-numbing tasks could actually run themselves. And you don’t need to understand code or hire an automation expert with a fat paycheck to make that happen.
A 2024 report shows that 61% of small businesses in the US use AI to automate daily tasks. Yet there exists a significant percentage of small businesses that are yet to automate. The top two factors that hold SMBs back from automating are a lack of the right tools and internal skills. Yes, a recent survey revealed that 30% of SMEs struggle to identify the right tool for their processes and budgets, and 24% lack the personnel to deploy and maintain automation.
This blog is especially for the 39% of SMBs who are yet to automate. If you have been delaying automation until now, thinking it is too technical, too expensive, or too complex, this blog will prove otherwise. So, without further delay, let’s start with the most fundamental question: why should you automate?
Why Your Business Needs Automation
Before we go further and reveal the step-by-step process that you can follow to automate your business processes, we want to first make you understand the need for automation. Many business owners feel that their processes are already perfect and, therefore, they do not need automation.
However, here is a fact many overlook:-
As a small- and medium-sized business owner, you prefer to run lean operations. In most cases, this translates to you handling everything for your business, including admin work. But answer this: When you dedicate hours to admin work, doesn’t your focus on revenue work get reduced? Automation can help solve the puzzle for you by:
- Recovering time for revenue work: By automating most of the mind-numbing admin work, you get more time to focus on revenue work, including sales, customer service, and production.
- Annihilate Errors: Machines do not make errors like humans. They do not make typos in file names, fail to notify a team member, or make mistakes while copy-pasting data. This means reduced duplication of effort, billing mistakes, or missed shipments.
- Consistency: With manual processes, you have to constantly worry whether every customer got the same follow-up. Because a manual process that works with five customers will likely break down at 50. But this is not the case with automation, which scales effortlessly. This means every customer gets the same follow-up, and every order is tracked.
- Reduced Stress: Manual processes leave you constantly under stress. You always worry whether everything was done as per plan. But automation gives you peace of mind. Once you set up automation, everything works like clockwork. This means you have fewer stressful moments.
Automating simple admin tasks like confirmations, status updates, and reminders can help you easily save 10 to 20 hours per week. That is about a day extra that you can directly invest into growing your business instead of babysitting spreadsheets. And on top of that, you get boosted employee morale, improved customer satisfaction, and steady business growth.
How to Prevent Mishaps While Automating
Reading the benefits of automation has definitely got you excited, and you are raring to make your first move. But before we tell you the exact process that you can follow to automate your business, here are things that you should follow to avoid pitfalls.
1. Document Everything
Automation will not automatically solve your messy business processes. If your business process is in a mess, then automating it will only exacerbate the issues and make them happen faster. So, before automating, first untangle the mess and create a clear step-by-step guide on how the process needs to be executed.
2. Don’t Lose Personal Touch
You shouldn’t automate blindly and lose personal touch with your clients. This portrays your business as insensitive, and you end up losing goodwill and business. For example, while automating appointment confirmations, don’t forget to exclude clients who have mentioned bereavement or health issues.
3. Start Small
If you are doing it by yourself, you need to start small. It is essential to start small, figure out what’s working, and then repeat it for the next process. The success you taste by automating one process builds confidence and shows you what’s possible.
4. Seek Professional Help
Trying to automate your processes yourself works well when they are straightforward, with clear if/then rules. Also, if you are doing it yourself, target only one department, use common tools, and choose a task whose failure doesn’t result in a catastrophe.
However, if you are targeting a process that involves the coordination of multiple departments, it is best to partner with a reputable company offering IT automation services. An automation expert with multiple years of experience will be best suited to handle the automation of processes that involve sensitive financial or personal data.
The automation expert will design bespoke automation solutions where automation tools aren’t readily available. They will also offer ongoing support and ensure your automation does not encounter a glitch.
Step-By-Step Automation Process
In the above pages, we have discussed at length the benefits of automation and the risks you should take care of. Now we will describe the exact steps that you can follow to automate your business processes as a non-technical person without hiring an automation expert or partnering with a company offering IT automation services.
Step 1: Start With Clear Documentation
Before you jump into choosing an automation tool, first have a clear understanding of your processes.
So, for the next 48 hours, document every repetitive process that you do. You need not use technical terms while documenting. Just make sure that your documentation is clear and is in the form of an easy step-by-step manual.
For each process, you can create a simple log using the following set of questions:
- What happened:
- What you did:
- How long did it take?
- Was it simple and repetitive:
Step 2: Identifying Automation Candidates
In a day, you would be doing multiple activities. So, if you are willing to automate business processes yourself, we recommend that you start with one such activity. Not two, not three, not a few related activities. You need to start with one activity because you want to learn the platform, prove the concept, and build confidence before you can scale.
If you try to automate everything at once, you can feel overwhelmed and abandon the task. Thus, if you are doing it yourself without hiring an automation expert or partnering with a company offering IT automation services, it is better to start with one.
Now, how do you select the first process to automate? The answer to this question lies in the process document you just prepared in Step 1. Refer to the process document for the different processes you prepared in Step 1 and find answers to these questions for each of the processes.
The more yes answers to the above questions you have for a process, the better suited it is for automation. So, start your automation journey with a process that is repetitive, has clear rules, is predictable, is time-consuming, and has a low level of risk. However, as said earlier, if you are targeting a process that involves the coordination of multiple departments, it is best to partner with a reputable company offering IT automation services.
Step 3: The Decision Framework
If you have got multiple processes with five yeses in the above step and are confused about which one you should start your automation journey with, this step is for you.
Rank each of the processes on a scale of 1 to 10 for these three questions:
- How much money/time will you save (Impact):
- How often does the process happen (Frequency):
- How straightforward is the process (Simplicity):
Multiply the scores that you assign to the processes for each of the above questions. The process with the highest score should be your starting candidate.
Step 4: Set Success Metrics
Now that you have finally arrived at a process that can be automated, you must be raring to give it a go. But wait. There is one final piece of the puzzle that you need to solve before you start automating.
There are multiple tools that you will likely test to automate your selected process. So, to figure out the best tool, you need objective evaluation criteria. Therefore, set up specific success metrics that you will use to evaluate different tools. Make sure that metrics are measurable and specific. For example, you can have metrics like:
- Reduce time from 9 hours/ week to 2 hours/week
- Maintain 94% customer satisfaction
- Zero-process errors
- Implement within 3 weeks.
Step 5: Test the Tool
This is a vital step many miss while automating their processes: test before purchasing.
Most modern business automation platforms offer free trials, free pilot programs, demo environments, and money-back guarantees.
Leverage these to test the different business automation platforms before choosing one. Test at least three different business automation platforms before choosing one to automate your process.
Step 6: Soft Launch
Once you have selected the process, tested the tool, and reviewed the results, you are ready for lunch. But don’t make an announcement yet. Instead, have a human admin as a backup for every process that you are trying to automate using AI.
During the initial days, AI might make mistakes, and you will need the human admin to intervene frequently. The AI business automation platform will learn from each such intervention, and slowly, the human admin will have to intervene less.
Finally, a few weeks down the line, the AI will be able to handle the process by itself, and you will need the human admin to review the summary of work done once a week. This will help you save massive human hours.
Final Words
In the above pages, we have talked at length about the need for business process automation, the important checkpoints that you must keep in mind before automating, and the step-by-step process you can follow to automate a process by yourself.
So, are you ready to begin? All the best in your endeavors.
We have only one small piece of advice before you begin. Start with a simple process that you can easily document, and that does not involve interactions between multiple departments or connecting with an ERP system. It is always better to start small before you scale.
For more complex automation tasks, you can always drop us a line, and we will offer you the best automation expert within two business days at an affordable rate.
At Automation Expert, we have helped multiple businesses automate their processes by offering them IT automation services. And we believe you could be next. So, why wait? Fill the contact form now and let our automation expert address your concerns over a free, no-obligation call.