Automation: Why Is it Important for Your Company?

We are in the middle of a new year, a very special one indeed: if we look back, we will realize that our environment has never before been as digitized as it is now. The past two years have brought a radical change in the way we live; our relationship with technology is now indispensable and everything indicates that it is also irreversible.

In this sense, it is impossible to ignore that technology is also completely ingrained in our way of working, as this couple of years of pandemic has forced us to adopt more digital tools to continue our activities remotely: collaborative work platforms, virtual desktops, messaging apps, new labor and financial management systems are now part of our "work arsenal."

But along with the benefits of a more digitized work routine, such as increased productivity and better resource management, some challenges linked to the adoption of new tools have also emerged. Repetitive work, greater margin for human error, the wear and tear of manual labor and the famous information silos (distributed data sets to which one department has access but others do not) are some of the most critical that affect the productivity of companies. Data from HubSpot, a CRM platform that automates marketing, services, content, operations and sales tasks to make it easier for companies to connect with their customers and grow better, shows that people waste up to five hours a week on non-essential activities: 24 percent of them scheduling meetings and 23 percent writing and sending emails manually.

Automation as a Priority Solution

The above issue has not been ignored by companies, which is why many have already begun to deploy an automation strategy so that their digital transition is not interrupted: according to the Technology Trends Index by research firm McKinsey, automation has positioned itself as the top business priority globally. According to HubSpot's Essential List of Marketing Statistics for 2022, which collects data from customers and companies around the world, 68 percent of companies already use some form of automation platform to accelerate their processes, while 70 percent say that the main benefit of automation has been to achieve segmented and effective communication with their customers.

HubSpot's Marketing Essentials List 2022 also forecasts that the expected year-on-year growth of automation platforms will be 31 percent, as it is estimated that nearly 50 percent of labor activities can be automated, which may lead to changes in the future of work, mainly in terms of labor costs. According to financial services optimization platform SoftCo, implementing a Process Automation (PA) strategy can help reduce companies' operating costs by up to 80 percent, as the elimination of manual tasks and repetitive work leads to more accurate and cost-effective teams, while freeing workers from manual workloads to focus on higher-impact tasks.

Make Automation Your Best Ally With the Help of a CRM

While the benefits of automation represent tangible benefits for business efficiency and profitability, there is still some concern that someday "robots will replace the work of humans." Nothing could be further from the truth, as their implementation will optimize workflows. The State of Automation in the Workplace survey by project management platform monday.com shows that repetitive tasks are the main causes of burnout for 57 percent of workers; 40 percent say they work more hours per week because of monotony and 54 percent believe they would save more than five hours if they used the right automation tool.

Sales and marketing teams, for example, are departments where automation can bring great benefits. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, 30 percent of customer service tasks have the technical potential to be automated thanks to the adoption of advanced customer relationship management (CRM) systems, through which executives can:

• Access contact information in seconds.
• Deploy marketing campaigns smoothly.
• Promptly follow up on a customer's sales process and redirect them to the appropriate department.
• Accelerate sales processes intuitively.
• Delegate and distribute workloads among the other teams.

Specifically, as the digitization of our work progresses over the next decade, it will be necessary to better interact with new technological tools. In this sense, implementing a process automation strategy can not only make this transition easier but also help companies improve their productivity and profitability, especially in a year of financial challenges such as 2022.