In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, ensuring efficient operations for both customers and employees is crucial. Embracing automation is a powerful strategy to achieve this goal, as it can alleviate internal challenges and enhance your company’s adaptability in meeting customer demands and navigating market dynamics.
Workflow automation offers a wide range of opportunities for business optimization, spanning internal process streamlining, customer issue resolution, and proactive implementation of valuable insights. By leveraging automated processes, you can effectively serve and retain customers while fostering a harmonious and productive work environment for your employees.
The question is not whether automation can benefit your business, but rather how to effectively implement it. To inspire potential use cases, we will explore several examples highlighting workflow automation’s transformative potential.
What is Workflow Automation?
Workflow automation refers to using technology and software to streamline and automate various tasks, processes, and activities within a business or organization. It involves the design, execution, and management of automated workflows to improve efficiency, reduce manual intervention, and optimize productivity. As per the report, the workflow automation market is expected to increase by US $5247.2 million in revenue.
Top 8 Workflow Automation Examples
Workflow automation can be included in multiple processes to accelerate process efficiency and create a better workplace experience. Some of the workflow automation examples are-
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IT Service Desk
Lack of automation in IT operations can strain the relationship between IT and other employees. Manual processes and repetitive ticket handling can burden IT, teams, leading to delays and frustration among employees who face slow response times and limited access to resolution tools.
However, by implementing workflow automation in IT service desks enterprises can alleviate these challenges. This allows IT staff to redirect their efforts towards more complex issues and processes while improving overall efficiency.
One example of automation in this area involves leveraging a chatbot that acts as a communication bridge between your business communications platform (e.g., Slack) and other applications. By providing easily customizable request templates within the platform, employees can easily create service requests. The chatbot then creates a ticket in an IT service desk system, routing it to the appropriate approver through a message in the business communications platform.
The approver can review and respond to the request with a simple click, and the chatbot promptly notifies the initial requester of the decision. This streamlined process eliminates manual data entry, enhances transparency, and expedites the overall request and approval cycle.
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Customer Onboarding
It is a critical process that is the foundation for a positive customer experience. This whole onboarding process includes multiple steps like onboarding registration, data validation, document verification, account creation, welcome email, progress tracking, and integration with the CRM system.
Handling these processes manually takes a lot of employee time and if resolution is delayed then customer service is hampered. Using a predefined workflow, enterprises can automate the whole customer onboarding process. With workflow automation in customer onboarding enterprises can-
- Automate welcome messages and offer assistance
- Create self-service information
- Guided onboarding
- Offer autonomous data verification
- Give personalized recommendations
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Employee Onboarding
Eighty-eight percent of organizations lack proper onboarding processes, while 58% are impatient with paperwork. Many employees find the process impersonal, inefficient, and lacking in terms of integration within the company. However, leveraging workflow automation can address these issues by facilitating the provision of important documents, automatically scheduling meetings with mentors and colleagues, conducting follow-up surveys to gather feedback on early experiences, and offering numerous other benefits. Let’s understand it by creating a pre-defined workflow with WhatsApp for employee onboarding.
- Once a candidate is designated as hired WhatsApp can trigger a series of actions.
- Firstly, the accounts for the new hire are seamlessly generated in HR, finance, and planning systems, as well as in access management software.
- Secondly, an automated welcome email is promptly sent to the new hire, providing essential instructions concerning technical aspects such as tax and banking details, benefit plans, and employment eligibility verification through WhatsApp.
- Lastly, the progress of the new hire in completing onboarding tasks is effortlessly monitored through a ticketing system, ensuring a smooth and efficient workflow without any hindrances.
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Incident Management
Errors are bound to occur in any business, but an automated incident management system can alleviate the challenges associated with identifying, resolving, and preventing mistakes. Workflow automation offers a more efficient and stress-free approach by simplifying the resolution of minor, recurring issues. It also enables service team members to update and track problem resolution automatically, granting them the necessary space to address more intricate problems. For example-
A chatbot can be employed to initiate a ticket creation in the business communications platform whenever an incident occurs. It can collect essential details such as a brief summary of the issue, the customer’s name, and the urgency level for resolution. If necessary, the chatbot can prompt the user to escalate the ticket by simply clicking a button. This action generates a ticket in the platform utilized by the engineering team to manage incidents.
Once the dedicated resolution channel is established, team members can conveniently access the associated tickets and collaborate seamlessly within the channel, without the need to switch platforms, until the issue is successfully resolved.
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Invoice Processing
Invoice processing is another critical process that requires a lot of manual effort and employee intervention before the payment is initiated. Instead of employees, workflow automation solutions can extract invoices from multiple systems, analyze the data, verify it with the database, initiate the payment, and make a record for audit purposes. By automating the invoice processing workflow, businesses can reduce manual effort, minimize errors, accelerate processing times, and gain better control over their financial processes. This leads to improved efficiency, cost savings, and increased productivity for the organization as a whole.
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Electronic Health Record Management
Workflow automation plays a crucial role in streamlining electronic health record (EHR) management, enhancing efficiency, and improving patient care. With predefined workflow and ready integration, healthcare providers can manage patient registration, appointment scheduling, data management, task assignment, billing, reporting, and analytics autonomously.
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Customer Support
Implementing workflow automation in your customer support department offers numerous advantages. By leveraging automation tools such as chatbots and a digital help desk, you can empower customers to find solutions to their problems independently, even before contacting a support agent. This not only saves time but also reduces the need for additional staff, allowing your employees to concentrate on more intricate tasks and deliver higher-value support.
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Payment Process Management
Traditionally, payment processes such as reimbursements involved multiple manual steps and approvals. For instance, an employee would send an expense report via email to their manager, who would review and endorse it before forwarding it to the finance department. In finance, someone would have to manually enter the report’s details before issuing a check that would be delivered to the employee.
However, workflow automation streamlines these payment processes effortlessly. By implementing the right automations, when an expense form reaches the finance team, the information is automatically integrated into the electronic system. Consequently, the reimbursement amount is added to the employee’s upcoming paycheck.
These examples provide a glimpse into the diverse range of possibilities for leveraging workflow automation to improve organizational efficiency. However, there are numerous other manual tasks that can be automated to streamline operations. For instance, utilizing Automationdge ready solution workflow organizations can easily implement automation in their business process
By conducting a thorough evaluation of your processes, you can identify repetitive tasks that are prime candidates for automation. Implementing automation in these areas frees up valuable time and energy for your team to focus on business growth and strategic initiatives.