Are you looking for ways to streamline your business operations? Automation can be a powerful tool for improving your processes and helping you work smarter. By utilizing automation, businesses can increase performance, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction – all while giving them more time to concentrate on other areas of the company.
In this blog post, we’ll help you understand how automating four key parts of your business could benefit both short-term tasks as well as long-term growth objectives. With our advice, you’ll soon know where and how to use automation most effectively in all aspects of your operation.
#1. Automate repetitive business processes, from billing to scheduling
The right software can automate most business processes so you can do more with the staff and resources you already have. Financial and business management software like Managely or Sedona Office automate many common business tasks, including:
- Setting up automatic invoices and recurring billing online
- Managing, scheduling, and dispatching field service technicians
- Overseeing inventory
- Getting an instant snapshot of your business expenses and financial health
If you’re relying on a patchwork of systems and software to run your business, consolidating them to just one solution can save you time, money, and headaches. Or, if you’re still mailing out paper invoices each month or tracking field service tickets manually, like Owen Security and Custom Alarm once did, you can make major leaps in efficiency simply by moving those processes to a software solution that can manage it all for you, automatically.
#2. Boost central station efficiency with automated workflows
By automating many of your central station’s tasks, you can achieve more with less–all while providing better security coverage.
The central station Kings III, for example, began using Manitou alarm monitoring software to process many different signaling flows from one place. (Tip: Choose software that can integrate many different signals from thousands of security devices–including audio and video hardware to PBX systems, databases, and geolocation programs.)
Not only did this make King III’s alarm response more efficient, it set the stage for greater automation. Kings III was then able to create automated workflows that guided its operators through every possible type of emergency. Their automated pre- and post- alarm action patterns also helped to reduce workloads, ensure a fast and efficient response, and streamline security operations.
#3. Lean on AI video analytics to automatically reduce false alarms
For security professionals, it likely comes as no surprise that only 2%-6% of all alarm calls are actually true emergencies. The rest are false alarms. But up until recently, central stations had to filter all of these out one by one, wasting precious time and energy and potentially slowing down response times for real emergencies.
Fortunately, today’s advanced video capabilities can help reduce or eliminate false alarms by automatically adding context to every situation, only alerting you in case of a true emergency. This can translate to major time and cost savings for central stations that get bogged down by false alerts.
AI-enabled video monitoring can filter out many things that would otherwise trigger an alarm, like passing cars or wandering animals. Integrating this into your security offerings ultimately makes your operations more nimble and better prepared to respond to real emergencies.
#4. Make success automatic for your sales team
If you rely on people to go out and sell your security services, you can make their jobs easier with the right business management software. Security dealers can boost their productivity with business management software that helps their sales team track sales and keep everything in one place, rather than requiring them to call in with updated information, or to shuffle paper forms and customer contracts back and forth to be digitized.
Automation can help you move away from paper-intensive processes, like keeping paper contracts and service requests, and make it easy to execute and track all of them digitally, from one place. This and other options are clear ways how automation can improve your business.