Running businesses these days is challenging because the competition in all domains is growing at a rapid pace. At the same time, modern enterprises also have the benefit of technology they can leverage to automate their processes. How quickly you empower your business with automation can actually decide how soon you are able to get ahead in the competitive landscape. Also, you must identify the processes you can automate to secure the winning advantage. Anything that is mundane and repetitive should come on top of the automation agenda. Additionally, you must do it for every operation you can because it serves a range of advantages, from cutting down dependence on humans to saving your teams hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars. Here are the processes you should start with right now.

Business Processes on Steroids

Sales/CRM process

Every business defines a clear process for the sales team to acquire leads and maximize them. They need to communicate with leads, nurture them, understand their preferences, identify their pain points and give them a solution that eventually converts them into customers. The entire process involves multiple people and layers of customer engagement, all of which have to run in tandem to bring more conversions and sales for the company. A smart sales/CRM workflow solution can drive automation for the system and ensure that the process is executed flawlessly from start to end to bring in maximum revenue.

Customer support

Sales are just half the work done; good customer support is the key to retention and long term relationships with the customers. After you empower the sales process with automation, customer support obviously should come next. The best way to do is to have software-driven chatbots, help centers, and other artificial intelligence systems in place. They can reduce the dependence on human support executives while speeding up the resolution of queries and issues. These platforms can even provide helpful insights into the overall support process so that you can get new opportunities to increase operational excellence.

Human Resource management

Another area of business that has good scope for automation is human resource management. Considering everything it involves, from hiring to onboarding, scheduling, task management, time management, employee training and development and more, there is a lot of work that this team has to handle. A feature-rich human resources solution gets you on the right track as it is capable of covering the entire processes that come under the category of HR operations. With the automation of the system, the HR team saves up all the time that they can use for strategic tasks.

Expense approvals

The expense approvals workflow is another process that you can automate. This is particularly useful for large organizations that have multiple and recurring expenses to handle. A software solution for expense approvals can be used to specify conditions for approval, manage departmental budgets and streamline multiple approvals beyond a threshold. When you do all this in spreadsheets, the system is often inefficient and there are chances of errors as well. However, with an automation solution, it becomes easier to handle and there is accuracy as well.

Invoice processing

Business owners often end up ignoring invoice processing and it gets attention only when something goes wrong. However, it is vital to ensure that you keep the system on track to stay compliant and ensure that you don’t end up overpaying or missing deadlines. Handling everything manually can get laborious and cumbersome, particularly if you deal in thousands of invoices every month. It is best to automate the invoice processing task to reduce the workload on your accounting team and minimize the chances of human errors as well.

Document reviews

Every business needs to handle large volumes of documents during its day to day operations. Automating the document review process is a smart move as it enables you to dynamically generate, edit and approve documents and contracts. Besides managing multiple documents, the software can also be used for reviewing content in diverse languages, formatting and even one that is geo-specific. Further, it enables the team members to make real-time changes and track updates in the documents. Overall, the automation solution ensures that deadlines are adhered to and there is no risk of sharing or publishing unpolished documents.

Automation of the vital business processes can open great opportunities for any business. Even though you will have to make an initial investment on the solution, you can eventually save a lot of time and money. At the same time, optimized processes translate into greater productivity and higher levels of employee satisfaction for an organization.