What benefits has your business seen as a result of using automation?

[maxpete]

Hey everyone!

ICYMI: Square recently released the Future of Commerce 2024 report. This report will give you inspiration, tactics, and tools to future-proof your business. Make sure to download your copy here.

In FOC 2024, the greatest benefit retailers have seen from investing in automation is an improved customer experience (47%), especially for retailers in the US (50%) and those retail businesses that earn $500,000 or more a year (51%). Forty-five percent of retailers have seen greater employee retention and increased profit as a result of their automation investments. Some examples of this include using automation for repetitive admin tasks like making reservations or checking product inventory.

What benefits, if any, has your business seen as a result of using technology or automation to decrease staff's hands-on time?

Excited to see all of your replies!

[tam-rvc]

Great insights in this thread @maxpete 

It sounds like a lot of the automation use cases mentioned here focus on order & inventory management, which probably makes sense since it's time intensive.

I also think Square marketing is a great leverage of automation. I used to have to setup multiple tools to do Email marketing, birthday campaign, ... But with Square marketing, it comes right out of the box. You don't have to import and export your customer list between systems. And since Square marketing already knows about the Square customers, it's so easy to send emails to custom audiences of very fine-grained targeting criterias. 

Being able to automate marketing/customer communications in an effortless way, I think, is very powerful for small businesses. Especially, since hiring agencies for email marketing can be quite expensive. I've seen many small business owners attempted to hire marketing agencies but unable to sustain or justify the cost in the long run.

It would be great to see more businesses learn, use and succeed with Square Marketing.

[maxpete]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this too @tam-rvc!

[Bronze_Palms]

We tap into automation by using Zapier to connect Square to our text software. It sends prep instructions, follow up texts and thank yous. Our text software also sends broadcasts. We save a lot of time this way and are just in charge of replies!

[maxpete]

Very cool and nice use case of Zapier!

[rtfulk]

The texting assistant has helped me out a lot in saving time, every week I get a text with the new customers that has signed up for Loyalty, email or their birthday.  I have it setup to automatically send out coupons to them. 

The other thing I like, I don't know if it would be called automation. Receiving messages in the Square app. It makes it so easy to respond to customers and my response time has got faster. Also being able to send photos through the messages helps greatly.

[maxpete]

This is a great way to see how the texting assistant helps save time! 

[rtfulk]

I wasn't sure about it at first, now I don't know what I would do without it.

[mike-sf]

I used Zappier and it has been a huge time saver. It automates almost 90% of our marketing activities and reduces a fair chunk of marketing cost. I love Zapier. Automation is the way to go.

[maxpete]

Very nice! I agree, it is great to automate what you can!

[doc_choc]

@maxpete always a difficult one when you are a small business but there are always areas of the business that can be improved through automation. Automation in the processing of online customer orders is always a bonus as this is very time consuming, simple things like linking address label printers to print when the order status changes, the new recent additions by Square for visually seeing the orders, status etc., has speeded up the process significantly. Although there is always room for improvement in this area 🙂  

[maxpete]

Glad to hear that Square has been able to help with this, and always agree with the mindset that there is room for improvement too!

[BofBArtStudio]

We are in the process of building an application that integrates with Square through the API so that we can scan our order tickets upon completion and update the customer record in Square and notify the customer of status.  It is an intense undertaking, and is somewhat similar to how Domino's Pizza shows when your pizza's being prepared, and when it is in the oven, and when it is being boxed up, and when it is ready for pickup and when it is completed.

I wish I had a little bit more free time right now to really focus on it because it is a huge project but when it is done it's going to make our lives so much easier and reduce our manual processing significantly.

[maxpete]

This is very cool! Very excited to see how it turns out when it's done!

[VanKalkerFarms]

We have lots and lots of automation in our greenhouses.  Our newest addition actually was in 2023 we bought a robotic transplanter that can take little baby plants from where they started as seeds into the container that the customer will buy the plant in.  It saves thousands of man hours a year, frees up people to do much more so we were able to expand our business and keep all the employees we had.

https://youtu.be/vRy3ZHXJ22o

[maxpete]

This is super cool!