If your business is running with a reduced workforce but remains as busy as ever, you’ll need some automation help.
Automation tools can sustain productivity, increase efficiencies, and boost output to help you, your business, and your employees survive and thrive through these difficult times.
Every business can benefit from automation, regardless of how big your company, budget, or employee numbers are. In fact, business automation can be more beneficial for small to medium-sized businesses, helping you to:
- Increase resilience
- Remove manual tasks
- Improve efficiencies
- Highlight unnecessary tasks
- Increase capacity
Even better, business automation tools are highly affordable (if not free), and can save you money in the long run.
These 12 automation tools can help you make your business more efficient with less people.
Top automation tools for businesses with a reduced workforce
The top automation tools for your specific business will depend on your current weaknesses. (Where you’re lacking man/woman power the most).
We’ve split our recommendations into six key areas:
- Management
- Communication
- eCommerce
- Sales and marketing
- Customer service
- Other
1) Management automation tools
Business owners and managers struggling with reduced clerical or administrative support can benefit from the following tools.
Calendly
Calendly is a diary management tool that enables you to schedule meetings without the endless back-and-forth emails that usually result.
Instead, Calendly automatically calculates your availability and presents appropriate slots to your meeting attendees. Automation functionality includes:
- Direct integration with calendars in Google, Outlook, and iCloud
- Team scheduling
- Time zone intelligence
- Syncing with Salesforce and Zapier
Price: from $0
Alternatives: Doodle and Appoint.ly
Trello
Trello is an online project management tool that helps project managers and department leads to visually manage projects and delegate tasks.
The automation features of Trello make project management less of an administrative burden, by automatically:
- Creating due dates, adding tags, and designating tasks
- Conducting pre-defined repetitive tasks for you
- Syncing project changes across boards and employees
Price: from $0
Alternatives: Asana and ProofHub
2) Communication automation tools
Communication with your employees and customers is crucial right now, especially if you’re running a remote or reduced workforce. These tools can give you or your marketing team a little helping hand.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool useful for anyone running the company’s social media accounts.
The automation benefits of Hootsuite are vast, including:
- Automatically scheduling your posts at specific times on different days
- Syncing your posts to multiple channels
- Filtering content relevant to your brand, industry, or competition
Price: from $0
Alternatives: Buffer and SocialPilot
Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that automatically proofreads your writing as you type – even when your personal assistant is out of the office.
Grammarly’s machine learning expertise makes it perfect for:
- Automatically highlighting spelling and grammatical errors
- Suggesting alternative words or phrases, according to your audience, purpose, and style
- Checking text for accidental plagiarism
Price: from $0
Alternatives: ProWritingAid and Hemingway Editor
3) eCommerce automation tools
If your online sales are booming right now, but you don’t have the capacity to keep up, automation is your savior.
SellerActive
SellerActive is a multi-channel eCommerce tool for businesses selling on Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, and any other eCommerce channel.
SellerActive saves businesses significant time and mistakes by automating multiple common (and time-consuming) eCommerce tasks.
- Pushing listings and edits to multiple sales channels
- Syncing your inventory across online marketplaces
- Repricing products to increase sales and win the buy box
- Forwarding relevant orders to your fulfillment provider
Price: from $79/month (free demo available)
Alternatives: GeekSeller, Sellbrite
Google Smart Shopping
Google Smart Shopping campaigns are automated Google Shopping ads that use machine learning to create and place ads across the Google network. Even better, on April 21 they announced on their blog that it is now free to sell on Google.
The biggest benefit of Google Smart Shopping ads for time-strapped online sellers is the automation of:
- Relevant audiences
- Appropriate keywords
- Picking the best products for placement
Price: $0
4) Sales and marketing automation tools
For your business to thrive as well as survive, you need your sales and marketing functions to be operating optimally.
HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and service tool that allows you to manage three key areas of your business efficiently.
HubSpot comes with a variety of automation tools to help, including:
- Marketing automation such as drip feed campaigns and segmentation logic
- Workflows that automatically take action on customer tickets
- Deal triggers that alert your sales team to high-value leads
Price: from $0
Alternatives: Salesforce and Intercom
MailChimp
MailChimp is a popular email communication tool that can streamline and professionalize your internal and external emails.
MailChimp comes with a variety of automation features, including:
- Scheduling email campaigns to send at specific times
- Triggering email campaigns upon certain events, e.g. a new blog or customer birthday
- Segmenting email subscribers to the right audience list
Price: from $0
Alternatives: Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor
5) Customer service automation tools
Maintaining an outstanding level of customer service when operating a reduced workforce can be challenging – but it’s achievable with the following help.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer support ticket system that helps you maintain full customer service operationality, even with limited capacity.
Zendesk’s customer service automation features include:
- Notifying agents about unresolved or unassigned customer queries
- Sending customers a holding message outside of operational hours
- Alerting staff to urgent queries by SMS
Price: from $5/agent (free trial available)
Alternatives: LiveAgent and Salesforce
ChatBot
ChatBot is a chatbot with AI capabilities that takes the pressure off of your customer service agents, by answering straightforward queries for them.
ChatBot’s functionality includes:
- AI-powered natural and helpful conversations with your customers
- Search functionality to answer common queries
- Automated audience segmentation
Price: from $50/month (free trial available)
Alternatives: Bold360 and HubSpot
6) Other automation tools
The helpfulness of automation tools doesn’t end there. There are two more solutions that didn’t quite fit in any of the categories above, but are worth mentioning.
Zapier
Zapier is the automation tool of all automation tools and works by connecting all of your business applications and software together.
This is useful for businesses running multiple apps, and can help with:
- Automatically passing information between apps
- Creating workflows that are triggered by certain actions
- Completing routine tasks for you
Price: from $0
Alternatives: IFTTT and Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow)
Harvest
Harvest is a simple time tracking tool that allows you to utilize your business’ time more effectively so you can cope when someone is absent.
Harvest’s stand-out tools include:
- Automatically tracking time and expenses for you
- Generating project process reports based on your time
- Turning your time into billable invoices
Price: from $0
Alternatives: FreshBooks and Timely
15 Tools to streamline your business finances and people ops
Use smart tools to automate and optimize your processes
Having to scale down your team can be scary and feel overwhelming, but with the myriad of helpful tools to improve your processes, you and your team can do more with less.
A reduced workforce doesn’t have to mean reduced capacity. In fact, with these tools, you can increase business productivity, for your workforce to return to a less pressured and more fulfilling role. The possibilities are really endless.