4 key reasons to automate your business

During April, Intuitive IT was working hard on creating more efficiencies and automations in the business. In doing so, we thought it would be a good idea to share four key reasons to automate your business.

As a Melbourne IT support company, we have access to skill sets that make the process of developing automation a lot easier than most. You would think that this would mean we’re running a Jetsons-like world of bots and robots doing our every task. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

Like any business, we get stuck in doing things “because that’s the way we’ve always done it”. Yuck, I hate that phrase. Thinking like that keeps all those manual processes in place. It stops people from sharing information and tasks. And it ultimately stops the business from moving forward.

So it takes effort to constantly ask people to consider and reconsider their day to day activities. We do it in a few ways:

#BelieveInBetterIT

We ask staff to questions every action they take.

“Is this the best way to do this?”

“Is this the best use of my time?”

The answer, in most cases, will be “no”, and this thinking allows them to consider smarter ways of working. This is #BelieveInBetterIT. Our current IT Support motto found on our website and on our social media posts focus on IT done better. And this is where automation can help. Creating some efficiencies in a process is a smarter way to work.

Documentation

We are big believers in documentation. To automate anything you need a process first and this needs to be written down. Documentation is great for staff to share knowledge on how to before a task, but today, documentation is the foundation for any automation of a process. So after a pandemic lockdown or two, Melbourne style, we’ve reintroduced our monthly documentation award.

Apart from recognising the great work the team does by encouraging better documentation, we have more opportunities to find those inefficiencies and automate them.

Speak up

The third way we are encouraging improvement is by asking each member of the IT Services team to share what they did that improved a process or task either for the Support team, or the wider IT services teams or our clients.

During our Friday standup meeting, each staff member is asked to explain what task they found that was inefficient or needed improvement and what they did to make it better. This focus on sharing seems to really help people look at their daily tasks for improvements. As management, we listen and find our next candidate for automation or process improvement.

4 reasons to automate

Last month we spoke about how we turned domain name registrations from a loss leader into a profitable part of our business through automation. During April we created an automation that copied our primary contacts from our ticketing/CRM system (Autotask) into MailChimp.

Currently run monthly, the script looks for any new clients and copies the primary contact’s email address to MailChimp – the system that sends our monthly email to you. It also looks to see if any primary contacts have changed and sync that to MailChimp too.

The other task it provides is it looks at the status of the company and tags them appropriately in MailChimp. So clients are tagged with the tag Client. Prospects tagged with the tag Prospect and so on.

This allows me to target different contacts with different emails and we all know that targetted content works better than “spray and pray”.

The four key benefits of this automation and automations in general are:

1- Automations save time and money

No more checking for new addresses, and spending time typing (or copying and pasting) into Mailchimp forms. How does this save time and money you ask?

Simple, no more manually copying email addresses save us a minimum of an hour each month.

Some months it would be more given the number of new addresses. So that’s the other benefit. Not being sidetracked by an unexpected task of copying and pasting more email addresses than expected.

2- Automation is scalable

Running the script once a month means we can now focus on other value-adding tasks and not worry about if we’ve forgotten to manually update our email list. It’s now a set and forget task.

3 – Automations are more accurate

Human error gets in the way. Typos or missed entries are a thing of the past. Like with every system, rubbish in, rubbish out. Or now in this case, quality in, quality out.

4 – Automations are more reliable

You don’t have to worry about what happens to this task because the automation doesn’t go on holiday, has a sick day or forgets to do it. It gets done every time.

Every business has a mundane, repetitive task that is the perfect candidate for automation. Reach out to us to find out the best way to automate it for you.