A Guide to Small Business Automation - How Tos, Ideas, Examples, and More

Automating mundane tasks that do not require strategy or planning can take a lot off your plate. You need not hire as many employees but still keep up with the workflows seamlessly. This means you can focus on activities that truly drive results such as managing customer relationships, closing deals, and expanding your business.

Automation can make you and your employees more efficient and provide great customer experience. You get to save resources which you can then divert to more meaningful tasks.

Here are 13 ways you can automate your small business:

1. Automate routine service desk tasks

Managing an internal service desk is one of the most daunting tasks for any business. It tests all aspects of a small company: right from the efficiency of the staff to the flexibility of the software you use to manage the service desk, everything impacts how quickly (or slowly) you close your support tickets. 

Additionally, it’s almost impossible to meet all deadlines and escape disgruntled users even after avoiding all the potential delays and mistakes. Most software often fail at meeting such tough requirements — only the best ITSM software survives.

Now, what if you could automate the most common tasks of your internal service desk — and make the process more efficient and reliable? What if you could automatically categorize and assign tickets, handle recurring scenarios with a single click, and standardize ticket priorities based on preset criteria? This would allow you to provide your employees prompt and consistent support with fewer hassles.

In addition, automating your service desk can help you reduce the risk of errors and oversights. A great IT helpdesk software can help you automate up to 80% of your work.

2. Resolve customer support queries with ticket deflection

Ticket deflection is the process of automatically redirecting customers to relevant answers on self-service portals using chatbots, forums, knowledge bases, or FAQ pages to resolve support tickets at the earliest. 

It acts as a self-service portal and ensures that your customer support team has fewer tickets to handle, reduces support costs, and delivers a better customer experience. Ticket deflection, thus, is crucial in the modern-day scenario of ever-increasing volume of support requests.

To set up effective ticket deflection, you can use chatbots, knowledge base for FAQs, and community forums to help your customers find answers to their problems without reaching out to support agents.

Ticket deflection not only benefits your customers but also helps improve their satisfaction levels by providing quick solutions to their problems.

3. Automatically reply to common customer service queries

What are the most common queries of your customers? Imagine if you automate responses to all of them: your business will save a lot of time and need less support bandwidth to deal with customer queries. The automated replies to recurrent queries, achieved through small business process automation for customer support, are known as canned responses.

These pre-saved answers can speed up your response time while keeping your replies personalized.

Your support team can easily send a canned response in a conversation by typing a shortcode that is unique for each response. This shortcode should be relevant and easy to remember. 

So the next time a customer asks a popular question, your support team can respond within seconds. No need to frame a response, worry about the grammar, or discuss with the team on what reply to give or how to respond!

4. Send personalized bulk emails without human intervention

Email marketing remains one of the most powerful channels for targeting potential customers. But a lot has changed over the years—now it’s super easy to automate personalized bulk emails. 

This means you need not write a mail draft and copy-paste it for each new email. You can use an Email Marketing Automation tool to write the copy once and send it to hundreds of thousands of contacts—without having to manually edit their names, contact details, or any other custom fields.

With such tools, you can automate, for instance, the newsletter subscription process for your business. The tool collects subscribers' email addresses and sends out regular newsletters. You can also split the contact list into segments and send only relevant content to each of them. 

For example, you can split your audience based on geography, and have separate newsletters for, say, Texas and New Mexico, or any other city for that matter—without worrying about a mix-up of your communication.

Automated emails can also help you resolve the problem of people abandoning their online shopping carts mid-purchase. When a customer selects items to buy but doesn't purchase them by finishing the check-out process, you can use an automated marketing tool to send a follow-up email to remind them that there are items pending for purchase in their carts. 

To make these reminders even more effective, businesses can also personalize the email with the customer's name and a discount or promotion that can be applied if they finish the purchase process—no manual intervention required, thanks to the automated marketing tool.

Automation can not just streamline your email campaigns, there are many use-cases for other channels of marketing.

5. Auto-assign new leads to sales representatives

Are your sales leaders busy allocating leads to your sales team? If they are stuck with such mundane tasks, they would find no time to guide the team, strategize, chase targets, build the sales pipeline, or foster relationships with customers — which is the essence of sales!

Now, what if the platform for your small business sales automation could auto-assign leads to your sales team based on specific criteria? For example, the owner of a real-estate business would want to assign leads for a geographical area to those salespersons who are experts in that particular area and not to an ‘outsider’ to the locality. 

In that case, if their sales software auto-assigns leads with “location” as the criteria, the salesperson would be able to assist better, leading to better utility of their time and better customer experience. Also, your sales manager's bandwidth is better utilized in higher-level tasks.

6. Streamline marketing campaigns across all channels

Businesses today have so many more avenues of generating leads beyond the referral and word-of-mouth channels. There’s SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing, Paid Advertising — the list is endless. 

If you use one or more of these channels, you know how difficult it is to keep track of everything. It is not easy to track attribution, channel performance, or even your marketing team’s efficiency. But thanks to small business automated marketing, all that changes for the better.

For example, a customer’s first visit to a product in your ecommerce storefront may have come through the organic search channel. But the customer does not buy it immediately; they just add it to their cart and abandon it. It might take two email reminders, and a discount offer to boot, to get them to finish the purchase. 

Now, would you attribute the sale to organic search or the email channel? It’s a call you can take but to ensure adherence and tracking, you need marketing automation software. This tool will tell you how you acquire customers, how many touch-points they need for a typical purchase, what their buying journey looks like, and which channel works best.

Hard data from this tool can help you optimize your marketing campaigns and fine-tune your customer journeys.

7. Optimize usage of your support agents' bandwidth

Every business today, small or big, needs a support team. You may already have established a 24x7 support system for your clients but if you have not devised the system to auto-allocate customer calls to agents with the required expertise, you will always stay a few steps behind your competition.

Automating customer support through routing call flows automatically can help small businesses improve efficiency, resolve tickets faster, and boost the CSAT scores. Plus, an interactive voice response (IVR) system can save your support team’s bandwidth by tackling the most common questions.

For example, the two most common reasons for customer calls to an ecommerce store are to check order status and cancel orders. By automating the call flow to redirect callers to an IVR, businesses can provide a more seamless experience to customers. 

Based on the caller's input, the IVR can give dynamic responses retrieved from your call center software, which can help in faster resolution times and increased customer satisfaction. And the software can forward the call to the support agents only if the customer’s request is beyond its scope.

8. Gently guide visitors to your knowledge base

Your knowledge base is not only a goldmine of information for visitors, it is also one of the most useful resources for your support and service teams. 

If you can find a way to automatically direct customers with a well-known pain-point to a support article that covers the solution, you can save hours of your team’s time while providing stellar self-service features for your customers.

This means the next time a customer enquires about the status of their order through your live chat software, the tool will direct them to the support content that is tailored to their pain point.

This type of automated redirection frees up your support team's time to focus on more complex issues that require human intervention. In addition, guiding customers to relevant knowledge base articles can also reduce the number of support tickets you receive. This means you get more efficient and do the same work with fewer employees.

9. Set up alerts for tickets with imminent deadlines

Managing customer support tickets can be a challenging task for any business, especially when there are multiple activities to handle simultaneously. But as an owner, you can simplify and streamline your ticketing processes through automation. A modern ticketing software can help you set up alerts for tickets with imminent deadlines, thus ensuring that your team stays on top of their workload.

You can choose which team members should receive notifications and how frequently they should be sent. These alerts will notify your team members when they are running late for closing a ticket, thus obviating the need for them to constantly monitor their tasks.

Further, your ticketing software can collect data on the frequency of missed deadlines, categories of tickets more prone to delays, and the team members who may need additional training. You can optimize your team’s performance by drawing insights from this information.