Business Automation & Client Service - What to Automate Today

Business automation is essential to helping your business scale and thrive. Fortunately, technology makes it easy to put a number of tasks on autopilot, saving you time, resources, and money. 

So what tasks are a good fit for business automation? Here are eight areas where businesses that serve clients can leverage technology to free up valuable time for other tasks.

1. Lead scoring

Business automation can assist your business with attracting leads by helping you capture personal information, including email addresses, needs, and interests. This allows your sales team to narrow in on the most promising leads and tailor communication and outreach to potential customers most likely to sign up for your services, purchase a subscription, or buy done-for-you services. 

2. Workflow

The whole team can benefit from business automation tools that streamline your workflow. This means automating the processes involved in assigning tasks, making communication among team members coherent, and keeping clients up to date on the status of their project, request, or deliverables. With a dedicated client portal, you can also send instant notifications to clients when a service request is complete or work is being delivered. 

3. Email marketing

Email marketing is still an incredibly effective way to reach customers and potential leads, and automating it can help you ramp up your marketing outreach. 

Email marketing also delivers an impressive return on investment, generating $38 for every $1 spent. When you use tools to automate your email marketing, you can maintain email lists with ease, create reports that help you analyze key data, and segment your list based on various criteria that help you tailor your message.  

4. Customer support

Whether you're a freelancer, an entrepreneur, or an agency, having a dedicated team on standby for customer support is an expensive prospect. Fortunately, automation can help.

When you automate customer service, you can rely on technology to quickly prioritize customer requests according to a customer's service tier, amount of urgency, and other important factors. If needed, business automation can also send certain requests directly to a team member who can provide immediate assistance.

5. Onboarding  

Business automation can also help streamline the way you introduce clients to your service and get them set up for a project or deliverable. This will look a bit different from business to business. For example, some businesses might use automation to offer tutorials—something that often works well for productized service businesses that sell coaching. 

When you automate customer onboarding, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you bring on a new customer. Automating your onboarding process can also help ensure each client receives the same instructions and level of service, helping your team avoid mistakes and miscommunication. 

6. Invoicing 

The popularity of electronic payments means that most customers are already familiar with paying invoices online. This makes it easy and straightforward to use automated invoicing for your business so you can get paid, manage your cash flow, and make sure team members are compensated. 

This way, you get paid up front, and you free up your team to do other work. If necessary, automation can take care of reminders and receipts. It can even remind customers when their payment method is set to expire, prompting them to renew before billing becomes an issue. 

7. Downloads and signups

Business automation can also make it easy to keep potential customers engaged with your brand. While you might not capture a client on their first visit to your site, a call to action with a newsletter signup or free download can keep you top-of-mind while they're considering your services. 

With a newsletter or free download, you can showcase your expertise and continuously remind leads why they should hire you or purchase a subscription. With business automation tools, you can deliver downloads and newsletters seamlessly. 

8. Free trial offers

Free trials are a great way to offer your services for a limited time, allowing potential customers to sample what you do. They get to see what you can deliver firsthand without any risk.

With business automation, you can deliver a free trial and include a prompt that invites customers to continue their services once the free trial period ends. If you prefer, you can capture payment information at the start of the trial, making it easy for customers to submit their first payment once the trial concludes. 

ManyRequests makes business automation easy

ManyRequests offers an intuitive client portal that helps productized service businesses track progress, offer automatic notifications, invoice, and much more. Get all the tools you need to run your productized service business. Claim your free trial today and see for yourself how ManyRequests can help your business scale.