Small businesses in particular should urgently automate parts of their day-to-day operations in order to have more capacity to serve their customers. Fortunately, there is no better place to do this than the Internet.

Having your own website can simplify and automate an extremely large number of processes.

To name a few examples:

Forms

• Customer support
• Customer inquiries
• Surveys
• Recording customer data
• Marketing Surveys
• …

Online stores

• Product presentation
• Product information
• Payment processing
• Statistics for accounting

Websites

• Answer frequently asked questions in a professional and structured way
• Provide knowledge
• Share company culture
• Tool for online advertising
• …

As you can imagine, this list can be continued as long as you like.all self-employed people have somewhere a dull job or one they don’t like to do, but which could be easily automated.one of the best tools to implement such a thing is “Zapier”. To counter this with an open source variant for self-hosting, I would also like to mention “n8n”.

Automate customer support and co.

Remember that 10 min per day per year (*260 days) is about one week of work (43.333 H), which you could probably better spend on marketing, customer support or product development. On top of that, you usually have more than one of these jobs. 

Especially as a self-employed person or small SME, you should minimize the activities that do not actively generate income and maximize and improve all activities that generate value for your customers. 

Automation should be done in small steps, so that you are not only busy with automation or have too little influence on what is happening. Nevertheless, you should think about what could be automated in your own company.