Automation Growth What You Should and Shouldn’t Automate Ashley Glovasky Sep 17, 2021 6 mins read When it comes to digital transformation in the workplace, many people are talking about automation. As a company that creates simple automation solutions for every business, we obviously love how people are discovering what automation can do for them. But, we also know that in order for it to be the most beneficial, it’s important that you know what and what not to automate and to create an automation strategy that will best serve your needs. Many tasks are necessary, but they can be very time-consuming and repetitive for your team, who would rather be working on big picture projects that contribute to your bottom line. By giving your team more time, they can focus more on company growth and professional development. You can also avoid employee burnout and turnover. We share a non-exhaustive list of tasks that you should automate today to give your team the gift of time, along with some tasks that you shouldn’t automate entirely, but that automation can assist your team with so they can make informed decisions and ultimately optimize their time. Tasks you should automate Client onboarding Welcome messages, account setups, and training videos are vital to ensure your business makes the perfect first impression with your clients. Automated solutions like our Client Onboarding Wrkflows can ensure your clients get access to all the right tools to get started right away. Lead Generation & Nurturing Identifying potential future prospects takes time. With automation, your Sales team can get full lists of leads with minimal effort, classify them based on a set of criteria, and pinpoint relevant use cases instantly. Automating lead generation and nurturing can help you optimize communication with prospects to give you the best chance of conversion. Data Annotation We’re living in a digital world and as a result, we leave digital footprints every day. The data we leave behind all amounts to valuable information that businesses like yours can use for data annotation. The problem? Most of the data generated daily is unstructured and 95% of businesses say the need to manage it is difficult, costly, and time consuming. By automating data annotation, your team can identify key insights to drive marketing, finance, customer support, human resources, etc. decisions. Password Resets Did you know that a single password reset can cost a company upwards of $70? In addition, a range of 20% to 50% of all calls to help desks are for password resets, creating a backlog of work for both Customer Support and IT teams. The time lost can cause frustration for both customers and your employees. To increase productivity, automated password resets should be a part of any automation strategy. Ticket Routing Have you ever had to call a customer service or support line only to be routed to another department and explain the same problem over again? So have your clients. Ticket Routing & Escalation Wrkflows can significantly reduce operational costs and improve customer satisfaction and retention. Client reporting Client reporting is about tracking, measuring, and evaluating customer experiences. Having this understanding of customer activity and satisfaction can help you develop new marketing strategies for customer growth and retention. It can also help you understand what current marketing campaigns and efforts are working well. With automation, you can achieve your Customer Success goals more efficiently. Tasks you shouldn’t automate Strategy creation While automation can help you collect important information, it cannot create an operations, sales, go-to-market, etc. strategy for you. Your team needs to create informed strategies backed up with core data, and with the help of automation tools, they can do so quickly and efficiently. Relationship building Relationship building is key to all departments. Your Sales team needs to invest time in building relationships with clients just the same as your HR team and leaders need to invest time with new hires and longstanding employees. The average business loses between 20%-80% of customers annually due to poor relationship management. While bots can do a lot, they can’t keep these relationships going strong. But, automation can take care of the repetitive and high-cost tasks, like those mentioned above, so that your team can focus on relationship building, which is key to growth and success. Hiring & Training Hiring and training of new employees needs to be left to the pros on your HR and Management teams. Automation can’t pick the best candidate or train your employees for you. But, with Employee Onboarding Wrkflows, you can ensure new employees get off to a great start by automatically booking welcome meetings, submitting purchase requests for their new equipment, generating new email accounts, sending welcome emails, and more. Content creation You may use automation and text models like Grammarly. GPT-3, technology that creates human-like text, is beneficial when you are working to create content at scale, but humans are still required to ensure proper structure. In addition, Marketing automation may be able to help your team take some items off their plate so they can focus on doing what they do best, but at the end of the day, their creativity is required to generate the content that leads to brand awareness and conversion. Engineering Engineering processes will always need your skilled and innovative team to get the job done. Again, there are opportunities for automation to help streamline certain tasks, but your Engineering team’s expertise is required. Rob Britton, Senior Director of Technology at Wrk, shares why: Automation requires things to be precisely specified with zero ambiguity. Since it can do things very quickly and consistently, if there is ambiguity it will do a lot of work consistently wrong in a very short amount of time. “Software engineers are essentially experts in translating ambiguous human language into precise machine language. Replacing them would require other humans to learn not to be ambiguous, a tall order,” he explains. Create an automation strategy The bottom line is that while automation can certainly do a lot of things, it can’t solve everything. It will also never replace humans, nor should it. Automation should always be used in partnership with your employees, which are your strongest assets and advocates. Want to learn more about how automation can help your team thrive? Check out how we are redefining work. Featured Image: Tara Winstead Share This Article Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email