How Automation Helps Businesses Achieve Higher Profits

Companies worldwide seem to be competing in some sort of efficiency Olympics. There’s a good reason for this – all processes within a company should contribute to the singular goal of solving organizational problems while maximizing output or results. So naturally, automation has become a staple in corporate DNA.

With 40 percent of enterprises expected to deploy automation centers by 2025, automation is already creating opportunities no one foresaw two or three decades ago. This article shows how automation can help your business produce higher profits.

What Does “Automation” Mean?

Automation is not for big enterprises alone; small and medium businesses can enjoy its many benefits. The problem arises when people connect the word “automation” with massive factories and robots building products. To be honest, this may have been true decades ago, but the times have changed.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have matured enough to make it normal to disrupt industries. So even as a small business, you have enough power through automation to take on Goliaths (as Malcolm Gladwell calls them)  and make a financial windfall in the process.

Automation goes beyond company size and deploying robots. Automation applies to multiple facets of business and fits well with the most unconventional business model. So, even if you’re in the agricultural, construction, or marketing industries, automation can improve your business as much as it helps the big bank or consulting firm you admire.

Your business needs automation software to manage repeatable tasks and processes with minimal human input. Procuring such will help your business to become more efficient and profitable.

Typical automation tools that any business may need include accounting process automation, chatbots, employee onboarding tools, invoicing software, inventory management systems, and marketing and e-commerce automation solutions.

It’s advisable to make it a priority to automate your business operations now. It is because nearly 69 percent of a manager’s workload will be replaced when routine tasks the managers are currently doing are fully automated around 2024. So it could be the edge you need to stay ahead of the competition.

How Automation Helps Businesses Achieve Higher Profits

Applying automation to perform repetitive tasks saves businesses plenty of time. In addition, once they put aspects of the business in “auto” mode, they can take care of other critical and more rewarding areas of operations.

The result is that you [and your employees]  go from “working at the business” to “working on the business.”

There’s evidence that businesses using automation see more than 200 percent revenue growth, skyrocketing profits, and deal sizes that are close to nine times those like yours that are not using automation.

So even if you’re not Amazon or Netflix, buying back valuable time like this in order to be productive where it counts is an important way to achieve greater profitability in your business.

You can save money on labour hours by automating tasks such as drip campaigns, follow-up sequences, and bill payments.

It’s advisable to seek and focus on the right automation for your business. However, it’s common to find business owners that seem to copy what another company is doing. The problem with that is every business is unique and has a lot of nuance to each process.

The key is ensuring your processes and workflows are where you want them to be. This way, you can pinpoint opportunities for automation where team members can zoom in on significant tasks that need hands-on attention.

Raising productivity levels gives your business a higher chance of nailing profit targets in tight markets.

Therefore, it’s high time we looked at the specific ways automation can boost business profits.

#1 – Automating business processes leads to healthy cost savings

One of the implicit outcomes of “delegating” repeatable and time-intensive tasks to automation software is that your company will need fewer people than it presently employs. All key objectives and metrics will be achieved and even better because you can trust automated processes not to skip work or take unwarranted breaks.

With automation handling significant processes, staff can tackle more meaningful work requiring human input and direction. As a result, you’ll have greater employee satisfaction and higher quality output on those tasks.

Besides, startups and small businesses can rapidly improve productivity by automating and streamlining onboarding protocols. Again, it’s reasonable to expect the software to be always reliable and never make mistakes.

All these help enterprises to save a reasonable proportion of overhead and grow profits.

#2 – Automation promotes collaboration and keeps it lean

Digital transformation ensures that workers get things done together, and many projects at companies require the simultaneous input of several individuals. One challenge in executing such projects is that they quickly become hard to track and manage. But automation can save the day!

Automation tools for big and small businesses guarantee the prompt flow of information to the relevant team member. Once everyone is armed with all the necessary information they require, team leaders and managers can go on to monitor the responsibilities and progress through one interface.

This approach allows all stakeholders to have adequate information on the real-time progress of a project. It also ensures that staff only spend time working on uncompleted tasks since everyone knows what’s been done and what’s left to be done.

#3 – Automation can help to optimize remote work

The aftermath of the pandemic has left us with a hybrid workplace culture. Businesses are increasingly accepting remote work as a fact of post-lockdown life. Besides tech, businesses in many industries are coming to terms with the idea that maintaining distributed teams works.

There are challenges with remote working, however. But, automation continues to provide an abundance of answers in terms of solutions. Therefore, working remotely can be more efficient and effective with the right automation of processes and workflows.

In remote working environments, automation drafts and deploys contracts and enables rapid approvals for routine purchases from a hierarchy of colleagues. It also makes for an excellent personal assistant.

#4 – Automation guarantees better customer experiences

A business is only in business for as long as the customers stick around. That’s why customer service is essential to brand value and brand relevance.

Automation can be deployed to resource-intensive functions, including sales, shipping, and after-sale follow-ups. The goal is to continuously deliver an enhanced and consistent customer service experience.

Optimized customer service channels can help your business to lock in a decent advantage over the non-caring competition.

Happy customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, improving sales and profits at the end of the day.

Chatbots, data collection tools, and other information technology utilities ensure that customers receive the appropriate answers to questions on time without human interaction. Such an approach means orders come in without fuss – quickly and seamlessly – with continuous improvement of end-user experiences.

#5 – Automation helps to improve your marketing

You can now take advantage of data-driven automation tools to improve the outcomes of marketing and sales efforts. For example, marketing automation tech will study a target audience, note their interactions, nurture personalized communications and build relationships that help in making sales.

Marketing automation tools have also found good use in audience targeting, ad purchases, and e-mail marketing. All of these happen with only a whisper of human intervention.

#6 – Transparent performance insights

Performance insights ensure your business grows in line with current and future goals and objectives.

Therefore, business automation software can help your company collect, track, and analyze organizational data for valuable performance insights.

Business process automation software dashboards can be customized and personalized for relevant insights.

#7 – Automation puts compliance and governance first

Regulatory compliance is something lots of businesses struggle with. A typical example is an adherence to the GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation. In addition, it typically takes a lot of time, which is crucial to productivity.

Like many other aspects of business compliance, GDPR requires agents and professionals for oversight. But, once again, automation tools in the superhero cape stand tall and ready to help.

All you need to do is to integrate automation tools into the regulatory framework to ensure that workflows and processes are compliant at every juncture.

How to Automate Your Business Today

You can summarize that automation requires an initial investment. Yet, this is nothing compared to the significant cost savings and eventual profitability that the process brings.

You might be wondering if business automation is necessary for your business now. The only way to answer this is to objectively evaluate your business processes and needs. This appraisal will reveal what operations are taking the most time and resources.

Once the evaluation is complete, you need to thoroughly analyze each process and determine if it’s realistic to demand an improvement. Why is this step necessary? First, when you do it for your business, you avoid spending on expensive automation technologies that likely won’t solve all your business problems.

Developing a comprehensive automation strategy is necessary before you commit capital and other resources to it. Once you identify the processes that are repetitive and can be executed digitally by employees, those are the ones you need to automate. We have a checklist to easily determine if a process is a good candidate for automation.

Off-the-shelf business automation solutions don’t work the same way for every organization. In that case, you’ll do well to seek out a custom automation software solution. The initial financial investment may be high, but the returns will soon be evident in your profits.

Conclusion

Much of the inspiration for building a business is the dream of having rock-solid profit at the end of the fiscal year. But, not many are aware of the limitations in productivity that make business growth and profitability futile.

Business [process] automation helps large and small enterprises become better and more productive overall, leading to improved profitability in the long term.