6 focus areas to automate your business

In 2021 most of your office admin, IT and data management work can be close to hands-free. At most a few clicks at important decision points maybe. Here are six of the highest value areas you should focus on to get there.

Your website should not be disconnected from your business

Your website likely takes orders or bookings or other types of requests from a customer, directly initiating a business process. It’s so common that the implementation of that business process involves someone in the company exporting or downloading data from the site, putting it into a spreadsheet or some other tool, maybe emailing it around, and somehow getting the task done in an ad-hoc fashion.

This disconnected data flow is expensive, error prone and frankly unnecessary.

The reason it is so common is that the website design activity is carried out as an end in itself. Taking a more holistic view of your site as the customer facing end of an entirely automated business process from the get go, and working with your website provider to keep the door open to automation, pays off in the short term and the long term.

The short term pay off is being able to focus on growing your business in the early days, and the long term pay off is the scaling that automation enables as you get bigger.

This applies to all customer facing presences you have that might initiate a business process: Facebook, Instagram etc.

Email should not be an island

A ton of business gets initiated, reported on and finalised using email exchanges. To many this is doing business.

But a lot of the work that goes on behind the scenes involved manual shovelling of data from email to other tools and back again.

And another chunk of the work is crafting email responses that are generic and can be automated.

With the right tooling and planning, email flows, into and out of your business, can be entirely automated and hands free.

Aim for a single customer view

With islands of information in a company’s website, emails, spreadsheets and shared files being the norm, few businesses have a comprehensive view of their customers.

Apart from this not cutting the mustard when it comes to GDPR, it’s massively inefficient and misses a ton of opportunity.

Islands of information in your business will be unavoidable due to the patchwork of tools you’ll have to adopt. But these islands are not a problem if you plan and implement a central glue that ties all the information together.

In other words, you should aim to have a small central store of all of your customers, that coordinates customer data in all your other tools - automatically adding customers when they start doing business with you, deleting them when they want to be forgotten, and reporting to them what information you have on them should they make such a request.

Apart from GDPR, having this joined up view of your customer, enables better service to them based on the more comprehensive insights you have as soon as they contact you.

Automate ALL document production you do more than twice

If your process around producing quotes, proposals, contracts and other documentation is to copy the previous one and edit it, you will save yourself time, mistakes and pointless frustration by automating that process.

Document automation involves a document template and a data entry form to define what needs to go into the template. You enter the data info the form, click generate, and you have a document that should then flow into the next step of your business process - emailing someone, or filing it etc.

Apart from saving time and reducing errors, automated documents are easier to report on and easier to link to customers, because the data contained in them is explicit.

Keep everything digital

There is seldom need these days to print documents for signing, or to keep receipts in a box for your accountant. Digital signing solutions and receipt keeping apps solve these specific problems, but don’t miss the point if you are carrying out “analogue” work for different reasons.

Searching out the right tools, and integrating them seamlessly into your process, allows you to stay maximally efficient, and avoid valueless trips to the printer and scanner. And accountant! I have nothing against accountants I need to say.

Expect more

This is the final principle. I find that a lot of business owners and operators, especially in the SME space, are quite comfortable with their business process of copying and pasting files, jumping around half a dozen tools and keeping a lot of context in their heads. And they manage to keep their businesses running just fine.

My signing off piece of advice is: expect more. Computers are meant to automate repetitive, valueless work, so you can focus on what’s important, and why you got into business in the first place. Digital technology has made huge strides in the last decade, and while technology can sometimes be the most frustrating part of anyone’s day, done well it can be like an invisible assistant.

So you should expect more, and look for more, and with the right partners, advice and implementation, hands free or close to it should be your goal.