For small businesses, the last two years have been difficult, to say the least. From dealing with forced closures to adapting processes for an all-remote workforce, it's a wonder that any of them managed to make it to the end of 2021. But the challenges are far from over.
Heading into 2022, there's a new hurdle looming that small businesses will have to get over. It's that there's a massive labor shortage that's pushing up costs and forcing many companies to leave vital positions unfilled. As of October, that translated into over 9.6 million unfilled jobs in the United States alone.
But it's not all bad news. The labor shortage is giving small businesses just the push they've needed to embrace automation technology in their quest to do more work with fewer workers. And there are quite a few tasks that they can and should be automating without delay. Here are the five most obvious among them.
Email Marketing Operations
For obvious reasons, automation has made the greatest technological advances lately within the realm of marketing. And there is no better marketing task to automate than the ongoing operations of an email marketing campaign. The reason is simple.
Email marketing is already a one-to-many proposition, but managing customer responses on a large scale can be time-consuming and difficult. With automation, businesses can build predefined and personalized automated responses that help customers move further into their conversion journey without human intervention. As far as automation uses go, it's a no-brainer. Businesses need only set up their system and then watch the sales roll in.
Social Media Marketing
Small businesses also can and should automate their social media marketing campaigns. They're another typically labor-intensive part of modern marketing efforts because there are so many channels to manage at once. But automation tools can get the job done with ease.
With the right tools in place, small businesses can pre plan and automate their social posts, manage their content promotion initiatives, and collect analytics about their campaigns without much effort. They turn what can be a department-sized job into something that a single employee can handle. Other than managing the overall social strategy, automation will make it so that their biggest concern is winning a few games of spider solitaire in their newfound free time.
Customer Service
Although there's no substitute for the human touch when it comes to customer service, there's no reason small businesses shouldn't be expanding their customer service capabilities through automation. And the best way to do it is by rolling out automated self-service options like chatbots and other AI-powered response systems.
The data on the matter is clear. According to Forrester research, customers are practically begging for more self-service options. It's because people don't have the time to wait in a queue to get a hold of a person who'll help them. So for issues that they can resolve themselves with just a bit of guidance, they'd rather have access to an automated system that provides the help they need with no waiting.
Payroll and Billing
For most businesses, managing the inflow and outflow of money is a labor-intensive process. It's quite a task to stay on top of every outgoing customer invoice and every incoming vendor invoice, all while making sure employees get their regular paychecks without error or interruption. But it's also a task that's a natural fit for automation.
And that's why there is no shortage of accounts payable automation platforms available on the market today. The same goes for accounts receivable and payroll automation. Small businesses need only choose reputable providers and sign up. From there, all they have to do is feed their information into the systems and let them get to work.
IT Tasks
If there's one thing most small businesses don't excel at, it's managing their information technology assets. But the fact is that there's a whole range of IT tasks that small businesses can automate to relieve some of the burdens. And doing so also comes with some significant cybersecurity benefits.
In particular, small businesses should be automating their IT onboarding and deboarding processes. That way, when a new employee joins the team, managers can create all of their necessary accounts with a single click. And they can revoke access in the same way when employees leave.
This has the added benefit of preventing overprovisioning – when employees have more IT system access than they should. And it also makes sure that no zombie accounts get left behind when employees leave. Such disused accounts are a primary attack vector for hackers, so keeping them to a minimum is essential.
The Bottom Line
By embracing automation and deploying it wherever it's available, small businesses will be capable of overcoming this latest challenge with relative ease. And if they do an especially good job of it, they may even find that they're thriving rather than merely surviving. That's an outcome that not many small businesses would have expected after the last two years of struggle – but automation brings it well within the realm of the possible.