If your professional service business is in a rut, or if you’re facing a lot of stiff competition, you might be wondering what changes you can make to operate more efficiently and eventually grow.
While you can invest more in product research, marketing, and advertising to boost your appeal and reach, it’s also important to consider integration professional service automation (PSA) software – a critical resource in the modern era that can help your business grow.
Key Areas of Professional Service Automation
PSA software is generally designed to help you manage your organization’s day to day operations, including:
- Project management. Learn to manage projects from a high level and from a task level – and automate some of the most important tasks for keeping your teams and projects running smoothly.
- Customer relationship management. Centralize the management of all your customers’ information – and establish one source of truth that your employees can rely on for consistent data.
- Documentation. Through automation and centralization, your PSA software can help you document everything.
- Time tracking. Instead of tediously tracking every hour of work your employees commit, use PSA software to streamline and automate it.
- Billing. You can manage billing and tracking in your PSA software as well, keeping everything under one roof.
- Financial reporting. You may even have access to financial reporting features, helping you examine how money is changing hands in your business.
- KPI and another metric measurement. Is your business operating efficiently? Where can you stand to see some improvements? With the right KPIs provided to you by your PSA software’s automatic reporting, you can answer these questions and more.
PSA software also typically comes equipped with easily usable APIs, making it simple to integrate other platforms together to exchange data.
The Benefits of Automation
Another key feature of PSA software is that it attempts to automate many of the manual and tedious processes that your business would otherwise need to manage meticulously.
There are many advantages of automation, including:
- Eliminating manual tasks. Most people know automation for its ability to eliminate manual tasks entirely, saving time and, potentially, money. Let’s say you have a team of 10 employees, each of whom spends an hour a day on tasks that could be automated. Introducing that automation reduces 10 man-hours of labor. If those workers each make $20 per hour, that’s $200 saved per day. In this way, even expensive automation solutions tend to eventually pay for themselves.
- Freeing up employee time. Eliminating manual tasks isn’t just about saving money directly, however. It’s also about freeing up your employees to focus on more important things. In the above scenario, each of your employees will have an extra hour they can use to focus on some higher-level tasks, such as coming up with new strategies or improving your company in some keyway. With a free, more strategically minded workforce, your business can focus on growth – instead of just getting through the day.
- Improving employee morale. It also helps that automation frequently improves employee morale. When employees can spend their time focused on solving high-level problems and engaging with others, they like their jobs a lot more – which means retention rates will improve and you may even see higher productivity.
- Increasing reliability. Even the best, most experienced employees sometimes make mistakes. They forget a critical step of a common procedure. They enter the wrong number in a system by accident. They skip over some important detail and end up ruining an entire project. But algorithms aren’t capable of these kinds of errors; they always do exactly what they’re programmed to do. That means you’ll have much higher reliability and consistency with the right automation-based software in place.
How PSA Software Helps Your Business Grow
Overall, PSA software can help you:
- Save money. Through automation, error reduction, and labor savings, you can save money with PSA software – oftentimes far in excess of what you paid for the software, to begin with.
- Save time. You’ll also save time, enabling your workers (and yourself) to focus on more important tasks and help drive the company forward.
- Improve consistency. Your customers and employees alike will benefit from higher consistency and reliability, with fewer errors to stand in the way of your workflows and fewer headaches overall.
- Better serve your customers. Ultimately, better project management, better billing, and other improvements will make your customers happier – and increase your revenues over time.
Together, these benefits allow your business to operate more efficiently and make a bigger impact in the market. With the right overall strategic direction and a good team of employees to make that vision a reality, there will be nothing left to stand in your business’s way.