You may have been thinking of ways to offload certain tasks that can free up your time so you could focus on more important ones. You can absolutely do this by streamlining and automating repetitive but essential tasks that your team does every day. This will not only make your workdays more pleasant, it will also make room for more time for you to serve clients, build better relationships, and strategize to achieve your business goals.

Here are some ideas that our team is already doing that can help improve your business processes with the use of automation.

1. STREAMLINING FOLDER STRUCTURE CREATION

This really comes in handy when you have a client signing up for your service and you have to manually create a folder structure in storage tools like Google Drive or Dropbox. Maybe you also need to add them to your project management or your CRM (client relationship management) tools. This is one of those small repetitive tasks that, when added up, can help free up some of your team’s time and remove human error from the equation.

What we do:

Our proposal software, Ignition, notifies Google Drive via Zapier when a new proposal is signed and we’re then off to the races. We have folders and subfolders that are created automatically, saving hours of busy work per month.

As a bonus, try connecting your proposal software to your CRM to add a client record as well and have the proposal PDF attach itself to the client record. You can even have team members get notified in Slack when a proposal is signed. The options are truly endless.

2. REPORTING AND TRACKING SUPPORT RESPONSE TIMES

We know that time is a very important resource and is a powerful factor in customer service. Research consistently states that higher customer satisfaction has a direct correlation to faster response times. In fact, Forrester Research claims, “77% say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good online customer service.”

Whether your business involves selling products or offering a service, the quality and speed of your service are vital factors to the impression placed upon the customers. It goes without saying that if you are slower to respond than expected, you are creating a negative customer experience. Time tracking is key to reducing these kinds of incidents.

What we do:

Although we can run reports in our support software, we find that exporting the information via Zapier to a Google Sheet and/or our internal dashboards helps us view the information better. We can sort and filter and ensure we’re staying on top of response times.

3. TIME TRACKING FOR PROFIT, COSTS AND CAPACITY

A common issue for businesses is working on clients or tasks that go longer than anticipated - turning profitable engagements into unprofitable ones. Working longer than expected on specific engagements also leads to capacity issues.

Whether you track time or not for revenue purposes or just capacity, businesses should think of keeping track of how much time is being spent on a task or project to get an understanding of their engagements - even if it’s for a temporary period to achieve a baseline metric.

What we do:

Our bookkeeping team will track time on their engagements and using Zapier, we connect to our time app, ClickUp, via their API and the results automatically appear in a Google Sheet. We then can compare revenue per client (also automatically generated by Zapier via information in our CRM) to the time spent and apply a cost to it. Using a formula, we can review profit margin by client on an ongoing basis.

It might seem complex but start with even a small analysis and grow from there.

4. INTEGRATING YOUR HR INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR IMPORTANT REMINDERS
HR management platforms are quite sophisticated nowadays. Most of them include a feature on its dashboard that shows different kinds of feeds. Some platforms can be customized to show who in the team is out on a certain day, whose birthdays are coming up, or even work anniversaries and holidays.

What a lot of people are not aware of is this information can be synced to your workplace communication tool such as Slack. Having these reminders come into Slack helps with culture and lets the team stay on top of important notifications and reminders.

What we do:

Using our HRIS, BambooHR, and either its native integrations or Zapier, we automate specific reminders for the whole team to see, so that everybody knows whether someone is on vacation or if it’s somebody’s birthday. And if it is someone’s birthday, they always receive a special shout out from the team.

5. AUTOMATING ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS FOR SIGNATURES

For accounting companies such as ours, sending thousands of forms to different clients and for various purposes especially during tax season can be the bane of our existence. Since this was a major pain point and is also an area that has no room for human error, our team had integrated our CRM and e-signature platform using Zapier and custom code via AWS.

This way, when our team uploads all the necessary documents to a certain job in our CRM and clicks on a trigger button, the documents get automatically shipped to the correct individual for signature without having to log in to another software and enter the clients’ details. To top it off, when our client signs the document, we receive a notification in our email and Slack, and the signed document gets automatically stored in the correct folder in our cloud storage tool.

This does not only cut 50% of our team’s time but also eliminates the possibility of sending a sensitive document to the incorrect individual. Talk about a game-changer!

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