4 Ways to Reduce Manual Work in Your Business

4 Ways to Reduce Manual Work in Your Business

Nobody enjoys manual work. Teams would rather be working on high-value tasks instead of busywork. Things like data collection, data entry, and scrolling through emails can take up a lot of time and drain your employee’s motivation.

A good team leader will want to look for ways to reduce time spent on manual work to let their staff focus on bigger challenges. By freeing up your team so they can focus on creative and critical thinking, you can end up saving the business money.

Manual work can chip away at productivity levels so if you want to keep your business growing at a solid pace, eliminating repetitive tasks is a must.

Let’s take a look at how to reduce manual work in your business. Implement these techniques to ensure your employees can focus on the work that’s more rewarding for them.

Optimize Your Business

Take the time to assess your business and identify any areas that could be improved. Futureproof your business with a tech stack that’s cutting edge. Things move quickly in the digital space so you need to choose your technology carefully.

Here are some ways to optimize your business that can help to reduce manual work in your company:

• Hire people with experience in modern technology. When hiring, look for new employees who have modern skillsets that can be a boon for your company.
• Invest in new data analytics tools. Your customer’s data is an incredibly powerful resource. Make sure to invest in data analytics tools to understand the sentiments of your customers.
• Upgrade your systems. If your software and hardware are outdated it could be running slow. Not only is this frustrating for your staff but it’s costing you a lot in man-hours.
• Invest in cloud-based software. Using cloud solutions you can access your software from anywhere. This is a useful way to keep your business competitive and reduce wait times for people who are out of the office.

Once you’ve taken stock of your business and you’re sure things are fully optimized you can start to look at how automation can save time and money.

Templates

Templates are going to be your best friend. They are a big-time saver and templates help to keep your processes uniform. You can create templates for almost anything including emails, reports, and approvals. Team members need easy access to templates so consider creating a shared folder that everyone can access.

Start by looking at the documents you create the most frequently. Instead of creating something from scratch each time, make a blank copy you can fill out whenever you need to. If you send a lot of emails, it’s a good idea to try to create templates where possible to save you time with repetitive correspondence.

Automation

Automation can make a big difference to your business and help to reduce manual work. An added benefit of automation is the elimination of human error. Unfortunately, everyone makes a mistake eventually but if you can automate certain processes there won’t be room for errors.

Free your team up so they can work on bigger-picture goals instead of having them do all the manual work. Automation can be implemented for things like data collection, data entry, and emails. It’s been proven to improve team efficiency as busywork can be mentally exhausting. Look for new ways to use your employee’s time, or consider if you can reduce hours and save money.

Some employees might be skeptical about automation as it can be seen as the death of labor. However, most roles cannot be fully automated so your employees won’t have anything to worry about. The benefit of automation is to do the boring, repetitive stuff instead of them so they can focus on more rewarding endeavors.

Chatbots

Customer service is an important part of any business. You need people on hand to answer people’s questions and address any issues people have. In order to keep your team from being overwhelmed a simple Chatbot on your website can save a lot of time and money. A chatbot won’t be able to replace your customer service team but it will help ease their workload.

Chatbots are a great way for customers to find answers to questions they may have. They use artificial intelligence to identify what your customers are saying and they can offer solutions or redirect them to articles with more information. Chatbots are intuitive enough to locate orders and share tracking details.

They’re perfect for reducing repetitive tasks for your customer service team. Simple queries can be handled by the chatbot which frees your team up to focus on more difficult customer issues. You can also expect a reduction in emails and phone calls.