When introducing automation to your organization and, more importantly, your team, it’s essential to ensure that each member understands how automation can help them do their jobs better – and is not a tool designed to replace them entirely. While automation is excellent at creating efficiencies, having a reliable team performing human interventions and complex tasks is still very important to launching and maintaining a successful product or service.
Here’s what automation can (and can’t) do to help you run your ship as smoothly as possible.
Automation Can Remove Menial, Repetitive Tasks
The best part of automation is removing repetitive tasks that tend to be time-consuming and require a high level of attention to detail. Some organizations need forms to be filled correctly and checked for content accuracy, and traditionally, this was handled by team members. The downside, of course, is the level of human error that can occur. Moving a decimal to the wrong place or entering the wrong date, depending on the document, can lead to a loss of time or revenue for a company. Automating document creation and checking can remove humans from the equation and, in turn, remove the level of human error.
Automation Can’t Replace Creative and Collaborative Tasks
Once repetitive or menial tasks are removed, a team’s time can be allocated to much more critical tasks too complex for automation. After all, while automation can help with simple data entry or form filling, more significant creative processes or collaborative tasks are handled much better by human beings and often more rewarding.
Automation Can Help Guide Users Into a Customer Service Funnel
Being attentive to your user base and making customer service a seamless experience will help keep clients happy, and automation can help. Whether directing users to specific information on a website or scheduling them into a system for one-on-one time with a real-live sales representative, automation can help funnel users to the places they need to be to get the curated level of assistance they are looking for.
Automation Cannot Troubleshoot for Your Clients
Automation is limited in terms of being able to deal with customer queries. Therefore it’s not a system that can erase that human interaction your users base will still crave. While automation can direct a customer to the right place, it’s still essential to have a human on the other end to empathize with issues and troubleshoot on the fly.
Automation Can Submit Social Media Content
It’s easy to use automation to schedule content for posting or make sure a particular action happens in a certain way at a specific time.
Automation Cannot Create the Content Itself
While it’s OK to have an automated process in place to help you organize your content releases, you’ll still need talented, creative individuals to craft the content for you. Whether it’s a written blog, newsletter, social media post, video, infographic, ebook, whitepaper, or some other marketing-related content, you’ll need a team of creators to help you craft the perfect messaging.
Automation Can Help Organize Your Calendar
Automation tools are great for helping users take a step back from their calendars. From syncing calendars with CRMs to setting reminders to initiating follow-up protocols, automation can help keep even the busiest team members organized.
Automation Cannot Do High-Level Planning
While automation can fill in a time slot in a calendar and remind you of the meeting (and its general details), it can’t yet project and actively plan projects. Users will still have to estimate timelines for deliverables and coordinate with fellow team members (and other departments) regarding release dates, marketing plans, client outreach strategy, and more.
Conclusion
While automation is great for taking those little annoying daily tasks (like filling out forms and organizing calendars) off of our plate, companies, now more than ever, require dynamic teams that can focus more on the heavy lifting (like collaboration, creative outputs, and direct client support).
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