I’ve been doing this long enough to know that most businesses get this decision wrong. Not because they’re dumb, but because the industry is too new, AI, automation, it’s all too new, and most people don’t know how to think about it.
It is almost never the technology
It’s almost never a technology problem. The tools, they work fine. The problem is that people automate the wrong thing. And I see this all the time.
So a business owner gets excited about AI. They build a chatbot or whatever else for their website. It’s flashy, something visible, something they can show off and something that everyone else is doing. The things that everyone sees are not giving you the returns that you want.
But the thing that’s actually eating up their time and hurting their lead inflow is the really boring stuff. It can be lead nurturing, it can be honestly just replying to a lead or a new potential contact in less than a minute.
So if you’re not at the top of their mind when they feel that pain, when they feel that need for your service, then you might lose them in the next five to 10 minutes. So you want to catch them when it’s hot.
So the most expensive mistake is not building the wrong automation, it’s building the right automation for the wrong task.
Be careful what you hand to a robot
What would the impact be to your business if this specific task went wrong? This one’s important to think about and a lot of people don’t talk about it because the AI hype is all about automating the highest priority bottleneck tasks.
Where I see this a lot is with the AI receptionists. So you’ll have a company come in and take control of your phones and while it sounds like a great idea, if you’re a company and your main client stream comes through the phone, if you’re having robots answer your phone, most people don’t like talk to robots, you’re going to have some problems.
And if that robot messes up booking an appointment or says the wrong thing or doesn’t let the customer talk or doesn’t answer their questions, you’re in a position where I don’t see why the customer would want to do business with your company after that. You’re burning bridges by sacrificing almost the highest quality part of your business, which is leads and new customers.
I don’t know anyone out there who really has enjoyed the experience of talking to AI receptionists, AI supports. These systems aren’t there yet.
But if your company needs to bring in clients to make money, why would you automate the phones? Why would you automate the most important income stream for your company?
Automate the in-between work
The highest priority automations are going to be the ones that are the in-between tasks like logging, putting in data, responding to emails, these sort of things that it doesn’t require a person’s skill and creative touch to make work. It just needs a machine to handle it.