Employing automation tools is a relatively easy way for IT teams to make a positive impact on their companies’ bottom line. Benefits include better organization, less redundancy, and increased accountability and consistency – all things that are important for any company looking to grow and expand its customer base.
If you were to ask a group of IT people what comes to mind when they think of automation, chances are you would get a lot of responses like “efficiency†and “increased productivity.†These are certainly true. By making use of smart workflows to eliminate redundant manual tasks, automation can help organizations do more with less. But automation does even more than that. It also increases visibility into what’s going on in your day-to-day operations, which gives you more time to pay attention to the things that really matter to your business.
Expanding on that a bit, here are four commons ways businesses benefit from IT automation.
1. Better Organization
A hallmark of IT automation tools is that they distribute information seamlessly, improving organization by ensuring that information is automatically sent where it is needed. This prevents your team from wasting valuable time searching for it.
For example, when you have the ability to automatically create a quote for a project and also invoice it using the same system, they do notall information related to the project can now be found in a single location. You don’t have to spend valuable time hunting it down. That way, when your sales person closes that new contract with a client, the details of that agreement flow from sales to the service team and then to billing. This prevents your team from playing the “telephone game,†which almost always results in confusion and someone dropping the ball somewhere along the way.
2. Less Redundancy
Another thing that IT teams love about automation is how much time it saves them by eliminating redundant tasks like ticket creation, which usually takes between five and seven minutes due to the manual processes involved. Those things can really add up, and automation can significantly cut down on the time spent on them. Automatic ticket routing can reduce ticket creation time to as little as 30 seconds. If a tech creates 20 tickets every day, on average, that translates into 90 minutes more productivity every day, or seven and a half hours per every week.
3. Established and Repeatable Processes
To get the most out of IT automation, it’s important that your teams are setting up workflows and processes in advance. Doing so ensures that there is a set of easy-to-follow standards in place for your entire team. Once these rules and processes are in place, your operations will become more consistent and more efficient. That means no matter who is handling the tickets, your customers should have a more consistent and positive experience. For instance, the client onboarding experience can be heavily scripted to where every one of your clients comes on in the exact same way. The same items are checked, monitors implemented, required AV deployed, backup placed on the servers and implemented as though your best tech was always doing it, consistently.
Repeatable processes also can help increase scalability by allowing you to complete more tasks in a shorter amount of time. When your team is not wasting time worrying, about processes, it frees them up to focus on serving customers more effectively.
4. More Accountability
The typical IT environment employs multiple systems, making it a challenge to get a handle on what is going on at all times. For example, what happens if you have a rogue tech that accesses your clients’ passwords? How quickly would you find out about that? And how would you remediate it? With automation, you can monitor for this behaviour in your systems, then redeploy passwords across your entire client base to ensure those passwords don’t last long in the wild if such an event were to occur.
There are a lot of automation tools out there to choose from. When determining which ones are best for your organization, make sure that the solutions you are evaluating address these four key areas. If you focus on tools that assist you in managing workflows, getting rid of redundant tasks, and delivering a consistent customer experience, you will be able to provide a superior level of service while helping grow your business.