5 Functions to Automate in Your Online Business

With many of us locked away in self-isolation and working from home, now is an ideal opportunity to begin planning and automating business and technical processes for your online business.

Some businesses are finding it very difficult right now. Not just because of the slowing economic conditions but because their preparedness for remote work was not as advanced as they would have liked.

Many others may well have transitioned to cloud services already but may be experiencing difficult times because they've had to reduce the number of staff and are now finding a number of processes slipping simply because the knowhow has "left the building".

No matter what situation you find yourself in, now is an opportunity to investigate new apps and tools that could be making work easier and faster in the future.

1. Automate the Movement of Data Between Systems

The most useful form of automation for a business, when the entire team is working remotely, is making sure that data flows between multiple systems automatically.

Behind the scenes, there are many processes that need people to manually get data from one system and enter it into another.

Perhaps you're all too familiar with this:

• Export data from your ERP system
• Open it in Excel
• Modify and add columns
• Save as a CSV
• Upload the CSV into a different system
• Run a report
• Repeat

Reporting in this way can take teams of people days to produce and its no wonder CEOs and General Managers just can't keep their finger on the pulse.

Integration tools such as ActionDesk and Zapier give you easy ways to automate the flow of data between different systems.

2. Automate Your Report Creation

As businesses have gone from being physical only enterprises, to hybrids of physical and online (or completely online) entities, the software and systems used for running operations can (and often do) end up as silos of data.

Where the only way to generate business-wide reports is to export the needed data from each of these seperate systems and then manipulate all this information into a single useable report, all too often this takes hours, if not days, to create a single report.

BI (Business Intelligence) tools have come a long way over the last 2 years.

JReport and Microsoft’s Power BI tool have taken creation of dashboards and visual reporting out of the hands of developers and put the control squarely into the hands of business people.

Gartner has an excellent summary of analytics and business intelligence platforms - allowing you to filter your way through to find the right platform for your business.

3. Automate Your Website Contact Forms

There are still a surprising number of businesses who still manually handle contact requests; with contact details sent to them via email for manual follow up.

And, the increase in spam propagating through these contact forms is annoying and downright frustrating.

Website contact forms should be a vital part of any business transaction with prospects and customers. It's often the start of a sales process and having this communications channel integrated and automated into your business operations saves a lot of time and resources.

There are lots of different tools available for connecting your website forms into your other business systems and perhaps the most difficult part is to know what to look for and where to look.

• What technology has been used to build your website?
• Which business system do you want the entered form information to go into?
• To what extent will your website forms need to change so that they are collecting all the right information to create a valid entry in your business system?

Platforms like MailChimp and AWeber provide extremely easy ways of integrating forms into virtually any website and best of all, they'll take care of spam and help you segment your contact list.

You can contact Conversion Leadership if you need help with getting your website forms automated to update your business systems.

4. Automate Your Customer Communications

From simple solutions like MailChimp to more sophisticated ones like Infusionsoft and Salesforce.  Being able to both automate common CRM activities and follow up communications, puts your business on a whole new higher level when it comes to efficiency and customer service.

The days of having emails hanging around
unattended in someone’s Inbox while they’re off sick is truly a thing of the
past.

Conversion Leadership specialises in the set-up of process and communications automation for Infusionsoft, Wishpond and Drip.

5. Automate Your Invoicing and Payments

Despite there being many software and online book-keeping systems available, there are still many businesses manually handling invoicing and payment of bills.

Whether due to limitations in the systems used for running business operations, or as a choice for a perceived greater control over cashflow. Manually generating invoices, in particular, means unnecessary delays in receiving payments from your customers.

Cashflow is one of the most vulnerable tasks for many businesses, and right now, due to the COVID-19 lockdown, introducing any form of automation can help your business manage during this “hibernation” period. It will also provide a lasting improvement in your productivity once you get back to business as usual.

No matter what situation you find yourself in, take the opportunity now to begin planning for automation in your business. that could be making work easier and faster in the future.

Investigate solutions, ask questions and, if you're really not sure where to start, talk to us. Automation is a core to our expertise and we have a team of experienced developers and business process engineers ready to help.