Today’s fast-paced work environment demands multitasking and juggling various projects at once. Thankfully, there’s a lot of great technologies designed to make workloads more manageable. If you’ve not yet looked into utilizing automation apps for your business, you may be surprised to learn how they can improve efficiency.
To summarize, automation apps are used to automatically carry out an action that’s triggered when a user completes another action. Automation apps actually vary by different strengths, based on the other applications that currently function with the automator. By using apps to automate several of the mundane tasks throughout the workday, you can end up saving your company time and money by providing users with more control over their work routine.
Here are three automation apps of different strengths that are worth looking into for any company valuing productivity and efficiency.
If This Then That (IFTTT)
This is a simple automation app that’s fairly easy to set up and compatible with 320 web services. IFTTT uses a “recipe” that the user enters to select a trigger action along with the responsive action (if [trigger] happens, then [response] happens).
IFTTT can be downloaded directly from its website, and it includes mobile versions for Android and iOS. One advantage of IFTTT is its large user community that shares recipes with other users. You may be able to find something useful just by scanning the available recipes like, receiving a notification when a new subscriber is added to an email list, or incorporating receipts and orders into a single spreadsheet.
While IFTTT has a reputation for being a consumer-grade product, it has plenty of capabilities that businesses will find useful, like compatibility with IoT devices and many utilities designed for SMBs.
Zapier
Zapier is similar to IFTTT, except that’s it’s designed more for business use, and it offers a premium plan for $20 per month. The paid plan offers access to more app compatibility and longer chains of functions (referred to as “zaps”). As far as what Zapier can do for business, it features tools that assist with marketing automation, customer relationship management, and project management functions. In fact, Zapier has advertised on their website over 500 third-party apps designed specifically for business purposes, making it a solid choice for SMBs serious about automating tasks.
Flow
Flow may be the most attractive automation app for heavy Microsoft users. While Flow is limited to only 36 third-party apps, it offers robust options for Microsoft software functionality. Essentially, Flow comes off as a restricted version of IFTTT, although its strength is that it gives more opportunities for developers to create more apps for increasing Flow’s functionality.
Automators like these three apps have the potential to streamline your operations in some significant ways. If you end up giving them a try, then be sure to share your review with us in the comments.
