Automation is considered to be the most important aspect of reducing labor costs within a company. Through RPA solutions and other methods, businesses can increase the efficiency of their operations, logistics, and customer support, all whilst decreasing their costs.
Recruitment
Recruitment is perhaps the most difficult aspect of any company, big or small. It never gets easier to hire the right people, but it begins to consume a lot of resources.
Automating recruitment can be a powerful cost-cutting decision. One way in which recruitment can be automated is through software that automatically scans CVs and filters out criteria that do not fit within your hiring requirements. This is even easier to do if you have created your own CV builder on the site (i.e. dedicated fields of input for the candidate to enter pieces of information).
Secondly, recruiting tests can certainly be automated, but they come with their pros and cons. For example, asking candidates to go through a series of online maths and English tests to ensure they pass a certain requirement can be much more efficient than doing this in-house with HR staff. This isn’t going to cover all of your qualitative recruiting needs, but it’s a great first phase to reduce the number of interviews you need to conduct.
Excel Macros
Managing spreadsheets can be a time-consuming business, but it’s one area that has massive time-saving potential. For example, any test that you perform each day that seems repetitive can likely be automated.
Take the example of going into a sheet and having to extract the same information that is updated each day. If you record yourself doing the task once as a macro, you will simply have to execute the macro each day and it will perform each step sequentially the same as you did it. Even better, schedule your macro to run each day at a certain time and you can set and forget the process altogether.
Customer Service
Customer service can cost a great deal of money when hiring an in-house team to respond to each incoming message. This is why many people outsource customer service, but that can quickly negatively impact customer experience, as you have less control over the quality of the service.
Instead, having a chatbot can help solve some customer queries early on through automation. For example, customers who need help with a typical issue, such as finding some piece of information within your website. A chatbot could detect what they’re asking and direct them to a dedicated help page that solves this common issue.
Only if the customer responds that this did not solve their issue will they be put forward to a human. This 1-minute conversation with a chatbot, when happening all day every day, can save a ton of time in labor whilst not negatively impacting the customer experience (because the chatbot responds instantly).
Social Media Management
Social media posts will likely need to be created manually when it comes to content unless you’re copying the information from somewhere else (i.e. relaying news headlines) – but this isn’t advised.
However, social media management can be automated. For example, posts can be made in bulk and then scheduled for when they will be posted. This is an easy set-and-forget bulk activity, meaning you only have to worry about posts once a week (or month).
Another way to automate this is by having automatic replies, which you can program in almost any language you wish as long as you can connect to its API. Otherwise, a SaaS service will be needed. Auto replies are easy to make because they follow a similar process to a chatbot. Simply detect what is being asked in the comment that’s @ at you, then program it to select from an array of pre-written replies, such as directed to a help page. Direct messages can also have chatbot-like replies, too.
Expense Tracking
Finally, long gone are the days of manually inputting each and every expense you make into a spreadsheet. Many SaaS companies allow you to connect their software to your business bank and it will detect all activity and all transactions.
All future purchases will be categorized and tracked, and automatically filled into your accounting software.
