Let’s get real. As a founder (Cherie) you don’t always know when a pivotal moment is happening in your business. So when Jessie said in her interview (for a routine customer service role that I had always thought would remain static), “I want to automate myself out of a job in 12 months”, I thought “that’s cute”.
It only took her nine.
Led by Jessie, we completely outsourced her tasks to automation and AI. We essentially removed the need for BAU customer service and turned a $60,000 customer service role into one that now focuses on digital transformations that better serve our customers.
This wasn’t an exercise in reducing headcounts or marketing budgets. Instead, by embracing automation, we’ve increased our output and elevated the human contribution.
A good customer experience means an enquiry is dealt with quickly and efficiently. A great customer experience means they didn’t need to contact you in the first place.
So, an easy automation win starts with refining customer service procedures.
Rather than customer service representatives faithfully manning phones and inboxes, only to end up acting as gatekeepers or bottlenecks, good automation strengthens your customers’ experience by reducing friction and making their journey as seamless as possible.
We found that by getting clear on your customer journey, you can identify the pain points or themes and create pathways that automate that part of the process.
Identify common customer questions and themes that come into the inbox and use these to either develop website content that preempts customer queries, or create a direct link from the customer to the person in the business who can assist.
Beyond customer service, automation can also improve the customer experience in other ways too.
In marketing, businesses can automate transaction emails and the lead generation process.
At The Digital Picnic, we collect leads via automated forms and the lists are used for promotional email sends. We’ve also automated certificate widgets into our student site so upon completion, students can download a completion certificate which can be shared to their socials.
When it comes to our finance function, we have automated processes so customers can directly request an invoice at the time of purchase. We have a lot of government and education clients who are often unable to complete online transitions. Instead of contacting customer service, they can now fill out an online form which goes directly to finance to create the required invoice.
In isolation, the effects of automation can feel minimal. But when applied across the whole customer journey, they add up to significant time savings.
Rather than reduce the need for a customer service function, it frees the capacity for the team to focus on value-adding, and revenue-generating tasks. This is particularly important during a time when SMEs are competing for every dollar.
Contrary to wider industry concerns, automation doesn’t exist solely to facilitate job losses and redundancies. Used wisely, it can extend employee impact within the business when they no longer need to focus on task-driven activities.
Completely transforming The Digital Picnic’s customer experience journey through the use of automation has been a prime example of business intrapreneurship. By giving employees the freedom to act as entrepreneurs within a business, innovation happens across the entire company rather than via a top-down approach that is filtered down to teams to implement.
But to leverage intrapreneurial employees effectively means founders and managers need to pivot from ‘we’ve always done it this way’ to a solutions-oriented approach that harnesses their intrapreneurial spirit.
This not only fosters career growth of your employees; it boosts your business bottom line too.
At The Digital Picnic, we’ve set up automation that offers lifetime access to a course upon its completion. This significantly increased our revenue during a time when all businesses are looking for ways to even slightly increase the average order value.
To achieve this result, it was critical to strike a balance between transforming the way we do business, and service our customers, while ensuring that Jessie had the resources and structure needed to push her role further and reach her full potential.
This meant a complete review of Jessie’s job description.
Generally, job descriptions are updated yearly. Within three months, most of the KPIs within Jessie’s role were redundant. And after nine? She had automated so much of the role, her job didn’t exist anymore. Anything related to internal marketing administration, UX/CX, or web-based activity had simply ceased to exist in its current format.
A whole new role had to be created and Jessie was integral to its design. By co-designing the role together, we were able to better lean into Jessie’s strengths and transform the role into one that’s not only personally fulfilling, but also drives growth within the business.
It’s been a wild ride to map an evergreen job description and then watch effective automation make it redundant in a matter of months.
Automation can significantly improve business processes but knowing what to automate, and how to do it, can be a challenge. Like almost any transformational change, it starts with gathering the right team around you and ends with the customer in mind.
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Cherie Clonan is an incredibly proud autistic woman and the founding director and CEO at The Digital Picnic, a company that teaches digital marketing and manages a full suite of digital marketing efforts for its clients.
Jessie Zevaka is the marketing coordinator at The Digital Picnic.
