SMBs: Save Time, Money & Wow Your Customers With Automation

In the present challenging business landscape, the only constant is disruption. This makes agility a critical differentiator for SMBs, so they can respond quickly to changes in market trends and customer demands.

In achieving the right mix of agility and operational efficiency, Business Process Automation (BPA) can be your key business ally. BPA enables organisations to automate and streamline repetitive tasks, resulting in error-free processes and a productive staff that has more time for high-value, strategic, and creative work.

SMBs can leverage automation solutions to level the playing field, strengthening their capabilities to offer quality products and services and achieve cost-efficiency like their larger counterparts.

Today, automation constitutes a significant portion of the rising IT budgets of SMBs in India. According to a report published in Fortune India, more than 75% of the 97,000 SMBs registered with the India SME Forum have adopted digitisation. Furthermore, these SMBs are expected to spend almost 2% of their revenue on new technology, up from 1% in 2020. Automation will constitute a bulk of this investment.

Automating for operational efficiency, cost savings, and seamless customer experiences

Widespread use of patchwork tech solutions and constrained resources mean that Indian SMBs frequently depend on their employees to manually manage a variety of tasks (such as manually creating reports or matching invoices with payments) to keep the company going. While employees may feel overworked and unable to concentrate on their primary responsibilities, this also increases the possibility of errors.

Here’s where automation can positively impact the functioning of SMBs. From increasing productivity and profitability to helping unlock greater efficiency and economies of scale, automation is helping small and medium-sized businesses achieve more with less.

Brings down the cost of day-to-day operations

The right automation tool lets you manage repetitive administrative and operational tasks swiftly and efficiently across functions – sales, marketing, customer support, IT, finance, and logistics. Automation frees up experienced talent to invest their time in more valuable tasks. This, in turn, significantly brings down your operational costs and lets you achieve your targets even with smaller teams.

Reduces manual dependencies

In the new data economy, SMBs must move from a people-focused approach to a process-oriented one to unlock efficiency and scale. An automation tool designed for SMBs – such as the Salesforce automation everywhere solution – helps make processes people-agnostic, letting SMBs drive change faster. Creating detailed customer profiles, sending out email reminders, integrating data from different sources, generating leads, tracking employee performance- the list of tasks that can be automated is endless.

Reduces errors

Automation enables consistency. Critical but routine tasks can be performed in a standardised manner, making processes and operations more accurate and ensuring consistent, high-quality output. From data entry to report creation and invoice management – automation helps you eliminate costly mistakes, even when your key team members are unavailable or are being replaced by new hires.

Encourages cross-functional collaboration and engagement

By investing in automation, you can consolidate fragmented, siloed workflows and achieve end-to-end visibility. An automation platform like Salesforce Customer 360 to consolidate data from across functions and teams, easily monitor project progress, remember important dates and milestones, and share information, documents, or project status with all employees, enabling complete visibility and swift progress on priority tasks.

Improves employee satisfaction

Automating critical but routine business tasks enables employees to focus more on high-value tasks, improving their productivity and satisfaction… Additionally, automating administrative processes (leave management, travel reimbursement, hiring, and onboarding, etc) helps SMBs provide a positive experience to both existing and new employees.

Enables delivery of seamless customer experiences: Automation could be an extremely useful tool when organisations are looking to offer personalised interactions at every customer touchpoint: Here’s how:

• Automate your marketing communications to send personalised messages to customers on their preferred channels, at a frequency that works best for them.
• Enable seamless digital experiences using chatbots and AI-powered help-desk software, and complement it with self-service account portals.
• Improve data discipline and database management processes for effective data collection at all touchpoints and enhanced cross-functional collaboration.
• Identify common pain points and develop a strategy for timely intervention and process improvement

Salesforce helps SMBs leverage automation to reduce costs, boost efficiency and increase revenue

Automation tools for SMBs serve as ‘low-investment, high-on-returns’ solutions. Business process automation helps enhance business productivity, brand reliability, service performance, and the overall customer experience.

Salesforce Customer 360 enables SMBs to accelerate end-to-end workflow automation and rapidly adapt to change with no-code capabilities that can automate any work- from repetitive tasks to manual processes, and embed data and AI-driven workflows anywhere.

With highly personalised service across channels, it empowers teams to boost productivity, and better collaborate across the business functions.By leveraging business process automation that connects data, systems and AI across the business, SMBs can save time and money, and deliver better customer experiences, all while staying within budget.