Automation For Business
I remember the old times. When you only had the option to buy from the shops that were close to you. Because there were no lots of cars or taxis or even buses. You had to walk for a long time or even ask some stranger to give you a lift.
Those times, the options were limited. Regardless it was a product like clothes or you wanted service. All you had to choose were among a few shops and either like it or not that was the only thing you could get.
Yup, this belongs to the time that the internet was unpopular and also there were a few amounts of online shopping. No social networks, no Instagram, no Facebook, and honestly nobody trusted to buy something online.
Now the world has been changed. This is technology century, internet area and get-what-you-want-regardless-where-it-is, age.
Now as a customer all you have to do is open the browser on your phone and write what you need. (I want a good quality pair of shoes, or I want someone to fix my plumping, or I want to print my business card). there are hundreds or thousands of businesses in front of you to pick.
On the other hand, businesses focus on online and digital marketing. They tend to promote their services or products over the internet. Even they have a big shop but still, 80% of their focus is on the internet. Because they are connected to millions of potential customers.
So far everything is good. Businesses have more customers and customers have more and easier options to buy. But something is missing.
When the sales increase the operation gets more difficult.
In old times, you just needed one or two shopkeepers inside the shop to answer customers but now you need more human resources. You need one person to handle your Instagram, one person to answer customers from your website, someone to take an order, many people to prepare, and the worst thing, how you can manage it.
The good news is, there is much good software out there on the internet that can help you to manage your business. Well, it’s a technology area remember? There is software for the sales group, another software for your finance, another one for task management and operation, and so on.
Now, we have another problem. Your social media guy gets a customer, they should send an email (if we say you are a great company) to the finance, then that guy creates an invoice and responds to the sales. Then sales go to the customer to get the money (or even online payment) after that they should notify the finance, and the operation… do I have to get to the end of it? :) You get the idea.
There are big companies who tried to provide solutions by introducing corporational services that we know as ERP. Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Sage, SAP, and many others. Truth be told, they are great but very very very difficult to work with. Customization is very difficult, maintenance too. In my opinion, this is what big companies need to small startups, shops, or companies with fewer than 100 employees. I mean, who can handle SAP for example in a company that struggling to reduce the cost of human resources to survive and on the other hand doesn’t have any idea how to handle customers.
This is where I jumped in and tried to solve the problem. I researched and read lots of articles. I found out there are very nice automation systems out there like Zappier, Zoho Flows, Pipefy and etc. They have reasonable prices.
Yes, That’s the answer. I was able to automate the whole business process from order to delivery via these systems. I understood the design and architecture and defined the best flow for the companies and the cost is really low.
Right now our company uses my flow that could automatically handle everything. And by everything I mean everything. Let me give you an example:
1- Customer goes to the website and sees the products.
2- Customer decided to order service so moves to a form (yay!)
3- Customer choose online payment (another yay!)
4- A task creates in our CRM and Production software.
5- A digital contract sends to the Customer to signs (Automatically)
6- Each department has its own tasks and interacts with them. all the information is available in the task.
7- When the operation is finished, the result is uploaded to the task and the operator hits Done.
8- The work is automatically sent to Customers and notified via SMS or WhatsApp message.
9- Customer Review the result and hit the I’m Okay button.
10- All the stuff will be pushed to the delivery platform to send to the customer.
How many people manage it? None.
It’s all automated. The example above is only one small section of our automation system. There are lots of notifications, reporting, statistics, etc are involved.
How much do I spend a month? Less than five pizzas :D
You would like to automate your business? I’m available to talk about it. Send us a request (through our automated system) I’ll contact you and we discuss it.
