IT automation products help us to work smarter instead of harder. They help us simplify processes that would have otherwise taken up much of our time to focus our attention on more important tasks, thereby boosting productivity. With a plethora of IT automation products out there, you must know which ones are best for your AEC firm.
Daminion
All AEC firms have to handle a large number of digital assets. These are usually images and videos and can be in a variety of formats. It is best practice to have all digital assets utilized by your AEC firm in one location. This makes the management of these assets easier as they can be easily located and utilized. However, it is not enough to just have all your digital assets in one location as it can be exceedingly difficult to manage them. However, managing digital assets in an AEC studio is made simple with the use of digital asset management (DAM) software for architecture such as Daminion. Daminion has support for over 100 file extension types meaning you can manage all kinds of digital assets. You can also set it up on-site or in the cloud with up to 100 gigabytes of storage. Daminion allows you to share digital assets with your clients and collaborators using read-only links. Daminion integrates seamlessly with several other software solutions and makes it easy to locate digital assets with its advanced tagging and search functionality.
Asana
Asana is a workplace management dashboard and it helps your teams work together as one cohesive unit. Asana is developed to help different people work on a single project seamlessly. Using Asana, your company can split your projects so that it is easier to assign responsibilities and track these tasks. You can organize tracks and move certain functions to a priority list and add deadlines to essential tasks. Asana can also be used as a communications hub between teams in your firm. Asana allows for integration with most of the popular digital tools you use in your firm.
Zapier
Zapier is an automation tool that allows you to link different internet apps. Zapier allows you to automate actions across different apps. Zapier allows you to create customized and automated workflows that work across different apps. For example, you could set zapier up to automatically copy email attachments and have them sent to your personal slack account. Zapier allows you to do the work of a programmer without writing a single line of code.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is one of the best automated marketing tools for architecture firms. It offers several features for both email marketing and customer relationship management. With ActiveCampaign, you can send customized emails and newsletters and messages to your clients for a personal feel and great customer experience. ActiveCampaign tracks your customers’ engagement, allowing messages to be sent to them at just the right time. With sales automation baked in, ActiveCampaign helps you save time that can be utilized more productively.
Calendly
Calendly helps to automate the process of scheduling meetings and appointments. It helps you take out the long time you spend arranging meetings. Calendly gives you a lot of features to automate the planning of your meetings and appointments. It allows you to show your clients when you will be available for meetings. You can then choose to have them pick a meeting time and location, or you can retain control over these. Calendly then helps to synchronize any appointments you may have made with your calendar so that you can receive alerts and reminders. It can also be set to automatically send follow-up reminder emails to your clients. If Calendly isn’t for you, you can try another scheduling software for service business or a WordPress reservation plugin and see if that one is fit to your needs.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great tool for automating your architecture studio’s social media. As social media is one of the most important mediums of AEC marketing, your firm must maintain a great presence on relevant social media platforms. However, it can be quite tedious and time-intensive to maintain your online presence on all social media platforms at once. Hootsuite provides a solution to maintaining your online presence by allowing you to post to and monitor all your social media accounts in one place. Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts in advance so that you do not have to remember to post content yourself. It also allows you to view and respond to feedback on your posts from a single dashboard.
Grammarly
Every business needs to turn out content. From emails to social media posts and newsletters. However, it is important that any write-ups that proceed from your organization are free from grammatical and spelling errors. Grammarly helps you to clean up your writing so that it appears professional and projects a good image of your company.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks helps you automate your firm’s accounting process. It helps you create professional invoices with which you can impress your clients. It also helps to simplify the process of entering expenses, getting rid of the manual process, and allowing you to enter values by uploading snapshots of receipts. FreshBooks also allows you to receive payments for projects via credit cards. When it is time for you to review your company’s finances, your accountant can generate reports that are simple enough to read without eliminating any information. You can verify the accuracy of your books easily using FreshBooks’ automatic checks and balances.
CallHippo
While it is not a completely automated platform, CallHippo simplifies the process of dealing with your clients’ phone calls. You can share relevant pre-recorded messages with your clients using its interactive voice recorder. CallHippo offers seamless integration with other tools allowing your customer care representatives to handle calls effectively.
Leadsquared
Leadsquared is one of the best marketing tools around. From automatic lead capturing to customer profile tracking, it helps you send the right marketing material to individual clients. Leadsquared can be captured via several different platforms and integrated with the rest of your firm’s software tools for easy operation.
Conclusion
Automation helps make our work easier and faster while dealing with processes that cannot be automated. Automating parts of your firm’s processes helps boost productivity without sacrificing areas like customer relationship and experience.
