Do you have any fear, uncertainty, doubt, or lack of clarity about what the future if your job might look like with the coming of automation? If you do, then that’s a problem. And I’m sure you’re not alone.

What if I told you that only 3% of executives are looking into investing more money to upskill employees, like you, over then next 3 years, to be able to cope with automation – how would you feel?

What about customers, what do they think about companies who have already deployed automations?

59% say that companies have lost the human element of customer experience.

71% of Americans say they would rather interact with a human than a Chat Bot or some other form of autimation. Do you have funny experiences to share dealing with Chat Bots? I’m sure you do. See, you’re a customer too!

Actually, automation has a lot of benefits. But the truth is, automation costs money, upskilling people to cope with automation also costs money, and once you do that, paying them a higher salary bracket will cost even more money.

So I ask you, are we ready for automation?

Let’s talk about company growth. What’s the formula for Profit?

Profit = Revenue – Cost

I already talked about cost earlier, so let’s zoom-in on revenue. There are only 3 ways to make more revenue:

1. Increase the number of customers
2. Increase the frequency at which your customers buy
3. Increase the transaction size, so you can charge your customers more

What’s the common denominator between the three? CUSTOMERS.

So what is it that customers want?

When asked the question: “Once technology becomes advanced, we don’t need people for great customer experiences,” the vast majority strongly disagrees. Because the moment something goes wrong, we want a human being to talk to. Why? Because we human beings are an emotional species. Automation can’t give you that. In fact, only 3% of US consumers want their experience to be as automated as possible.

When customers are asked what stops people from doing business with a company, lack of automation accounts for less than 10% of what drives people away from brands. Brand reputation and employee interaction play a much bigger role.

Though we all know that technology is continuously improving. But we shouldn’t put all our trust in it just yet. Yes, Google’s AI has nearly twice the IQ of Siri, but a 6-year-old child is still smarter than both. And even if it does improve further, 75% if customers, like you, still say that they would want to interact with a real person more as technology improves.

So I would like to ask – are we ready for automation? Or should we be thinking about the human process first?

So what’s the answer?

Based on my own personal experience, the best way, in simple terms, is as follows:

1. Take the entire business and plot the end-to-end process
2. Break the process apart into pieces, segregating what’s waste, what’s automatable, and what needs human judgment
3. Rebuild the new process in a more streamlined and efficient manner with minimal handoff between humans and automations

Of course there’s a lot more to it and you may need a professional to help you achieve best results, but in a nutshell that’s the high-level strategy.

If you want to learn how to do this yourself, and perhaps become an expert at it, then head over to https://robbieagustin.com/courses to learn more.

Hope this helps!

Sources:

• pwc.com
• accenture.com
• cnbc.com