Is Automation Slowing You Down?
We tend to automate a lot of things nowadays. I’m in marketing and automation is huge for us marketers. Just today I scheduled some newsletters to send while I’m away on holidays and scheduled tweets for the day. Compared to bigger companies, I’d say we’re depending very little on automation but we are still building the process.
One thing I’ve noticed though is that even the biggest companies step out of the automation loop once in a while. I’ve had a very interesting experience with Hubspot recently. I signed up for a free trial months ago and regularly head up to their website to download eBooks or read article. At the beginning or July, I received a very customized email from them that couldn’t have possibly been automated.
Here’s what the email looked like:
Guess what? I replied. When I received the email, I had posted my article about B2B and B2C customers on Linkedin and got a lot of feedback on it. Greg’s timing was just perfect.
Up until then I forgot about the idea of using Hubspot. This quick conversation did more for me than all the automated emails I received earlier and didn’t even bothered to open.
Automation works best with real human interaction
There’s nothing new in this statement, and the problem is often to know when automation has to stop and when human interaction is needed.
Every single company is using some kind of automated process and it’s not limited to marketing. Hubspot used it for sales in this case, customer service is also partly automated, so is HR. It doesn’t mean you can just forget about human interactions. I would even say that everything in automation should push towards genuine interaction.
Marketing automation + human interaction
Let’s take the example of Twitter. At Customericare, we use both Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule posts on Twitter (Hootsuite for regular text posts and Buffer when we need to add a picture). It’s just a lot more convenient to schedule everything in the morning and then have them published automatically during the day. It also allows us to post late at night for the american crowd (our main target).
Posting is the one aspect of twitter marketing I feel can be automated without it deterring our followers’ experience. I on the other hand decided to stay away from automated “thank you for following” messages. I prefer sending personal messages instead to people in the industry when I have a question for them. This has actually proven to be quite effective, especially to reach out to bloggers.
You know what frustrates me the most about automatic “thanks for the follow” direct messages? I receive them quite often and here’s what people are asking: “Can you also follow me on facebook?” “Can you check our website?” “Can you take a second to fill in this survey?”. Excuse me, but what’s in there for me?
Here’s a message we received recently:
I like to check out surveys and I enjoyed answering this one. There wasn’t anything wrong with this automated message and still I am annoyed. I am annoyed because I took time to answer the survey, send a reply, and I got absolutely nothing in return. A simple thank you would have been more than enough…
This is the problem with automation: you need to remember that an automated message is just the beginning. It should eventually lead to messages that aren’t automated.
Automation in the customer service industry
In my opinion, customer service suffers the most from “too much automation”. It goes from robot/AI chat systems to simply using scripted answers. The problem with automation is that you can’t yet apply it to conversations. Companies have been trying to use scripts successfully for years and people still say they prefer when agents don’t use them.
With the arrival of live chat, scripts got replaced by canned responses which in my opinion make things even worse. Just start a chat with any average company and you’ll see how canned answers disturb the conversation. Sometimes it even makes it almost impossible to actually have a conversation.
You can find more on the subject in this article: Could canned answer be slowing you down?
The bottom line is: take a day to test your automation process from the customer’s side. See what could be improved and mark the steps where real interaction would be useful. Then ask a colleague or a friend to do the same. If you are not satisfied with your experience, how do you think your customers feel?
Sometimes, even a quick personal email can make a difference. Don’t get lazy, try doing something different sometimes and see how it works.
About Customericare: We offer a chat plugin including text, and video to help you connect with your website visitors. We’re all about human interactions so don’t hesitate to come chat with us or drop us a line at http://customericare.com
