Many people are talking about automation when it comes to digital transformation in the workplace. As a company that creates simple automation solutions for every business, we love how people are discovering what automation can do for them. But we also know that 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 time-consuming and repetitive for your team, who would instead be working on big-picture projects contributing 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 and some tasks that you shouldn’t automate entirely. Still, that automation can assist your team with making informed decisions and optimizing their time. 

Tasks you should automate

Client onboarding

Welcome messages, account setups, and training videos ensure your business makes the perfect first impression with your clients. Automated solutions like our Client Onboarding Wrkflows can ensure your clients access all the right tools to get started immediately. 

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 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. Automating data annotation lets your team identify key insights to drive marketing, finance, customer support, human resources decisions, etc. 

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 is 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. Understanding 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 build relationships with clients like your HR team, and leaders must 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 your team can focus on relationship building, which is key to growth and success. 

Hiring & Training

Hiring and training new employees must 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. 

Engineering 

Engineering processes will always require your skilled and innovative team to complete the job. 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.

Tasks that require a hybrid approach

Content creation

You may use automation and text models like Grammarly, ChatGPT, and Bard AI, technology that creates human-like text, which 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 help your team take some items off their plate so they can focus on doing what they do best. Still, their creativity is required to generate content that leads to brand awareness and conversion. 

Talent Acquisition

Using automation to go through hundreds of applications is an excellent use of tools with automated steps. However, human intervention will be much more fruitful once the initial screening process has happened. Human HR teams or talent acquisition managers can then step in and conduct interviews and establish connections. You can use automated tasks to set up meetings and check references, but the combination of automation and your own team will get the best results.

Create an automation strategy

The bottom line is that while automation can do many 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? Speak to one of our Automation Experts today.