4 Steps To Automate Your Business Leveraging AI

Time is the most precious resource humans can have. If you ask a 60-year-old billionaire, if s/he wanted more time or keep his money, 10/10 times s/he’d say more TIME. Now why should you waste your time doing tasks that could be automated?

According to Zippia Up to 73 million US jobs will be lost to automation by 2030. That's an alarming 46% of the current jobs, which means automation will no doubt shake up the nature of the job market. Now this is something that’s most likely impossible to avoid if you’re a business owner trying to stay on top of your game. Unless you adapt, your business will fail, and there will be even more severe consequences. But don’t worry! You’re already reading this, so there might still be a chance for you yet! In this article I will try to take you from a “newbie” to a “little bit more understanding newbie”, step by step.

Step 1. Identifying time consuming tasks

Automating different tasks can help save budgets, time and frustration, but to do this right, you need to identify which tasks to automate, and which to not. To identify time consuming tasks is rather straight forward, you can do it in these steps:

• Find where the production line delays the most.
• Find out which tasks are “monkey work” (repeating work over, and over again)
• What tasks takes the longest time to do?

By finding tasks that contain these properties you may find weaknesses in your business. Lead generating can be incredible time consuming, or even following up leads if their quality isn’t top notch. Whether it’s writing emails, following up leads or even support, you will need to automate some parts to even be competing in today’s market.

Step 2. Finding ways to automate them.

As generative AI is on the market, new ways to automate tasks are coming in handy. Finding inspiration and correcting text is much easier. The same goes for pictures, art, web design and so much more. To find ways to automate tasks is often something that can save your business for many figures a year. Let’s say you have ten employees always working support, managing traffic. What consumes most time and resources? Their training? Their time to solve problems for customers? Or even the sheer number of customers calling in?

• “How do I automate these?”

You need to invest in tools. By having an Expert System, you may automate the support agents’ training. If they have a system that automatically takes decisions or find solutions for their problems, you only need to tell them to write the problem and read on their screen. Thus, removing tons of training costs AND their time to solve problems for customers. But how do you automate the sheer number of customers calling in? Is it even possible? Short answer: Yes. By having a self-service like a chatbot, or a search tool/troubleshooting tool the customers can find solutions themselves, instead of having them call you nonstop and wasting your budget and time. Now let’s bring the numbers to the table. What Is a Good Cost Per Call? Industry benchmarks suggest that an acceptable cost per call could range anywhere between $2.70 – $5.60, including “direct labor, indirect labor, and operational expenses.” according to CX Today. This is plain insanity. If you get 100 calls every day, you’d end up with $270 – $560 every day in costs related to calls, and that’s if it’s ACCEPTABLE low. Now if you can automate parts of this process, you’d probably save a lot. A business is only as strong as its weakest link. Identify it and plug it.

Step 3. What to avoid

Automation is great for businesses, shit for clients in many cases. You need to find the best ways to automate the best things. For example, if I as a customer want to find the answer to something quick, I don’t want to call the company and wait in long queues to find the answer. It’s better with a simple yet powerful self-help tool that I can directly find the solution to my problem. HOWEVER, if I missed a payment because my grandma just died, I crashed my car and my dog ate my homework, I’d rather call to get some sympathy. This is just how it is. Now I can’t speak for everyone, but I hope most agree with me here; it’s very important that businesses don’t lose the touch with their clients when automating something. This is because CX – Customer Experience is very important to maintain good relationships with your clients and ensuring your businesses future. You don’t want to be this big, faceless corporation feeding on your clients, I hope...

Step 4. Enjoy.

Whether you want to re-allocate resources, end your shift 2 hours earlier or help your family with something, you deserve it. Because by now I hope you have some plans, and some insight to the importance of automating parts of your business. I will gladly help you set up a self-service tool such as an AI chatbot or an AI Expert System to help your support agents training, or email responds. But please don’t become this big faceless junk of a corporation, losing touch with your clients as well. Be a hybrid, that offers the best solutions for every type of case to your clients. Your clients do deserve the best, eh?

I hope this article helped you get some answers to how you can automate some parts, while still maintaining good relations with your clients. While the payoff is huge, the risks are also big if you don’t know what to automate. We’d love to help you identify where you can improve. Contact us here if you’d like to schedule a call with us, or need any help with automation.