One of the growing questions in today’s world is how much automation or AI a business should use. Everyone wants to be quick to adapt to modern technology to save time; however, there is an argument to be made that with the use of technology, the human aspect and emotion are taken out of the equation.

So the question becomes: how much technology should you use to automate your business without losing the personal touch that made you unique?

The short answer is that it depends on the situation. As a rule of thumb, adding your personal touch should not inhibit or lead to a backlog of replies you have to send.

To best display this, it is best to use a real-life example.

Real-Life Example

Two clients of Goals To Results have similar automated lead pipelines. A contact enters the workflow after they fill out an inquiry form. Once that happens, they receive an email instantly. After a period of time without hearing from the contact, a notification is sent to the client alerting them that the contact has not reached out. The point of the reminder is to alert the client to create a personalized outreach email in hopes that it will spark a conversation instead of sending a generic automated email.

A Tale of Two Workflows

After reviewing the workflows with my clients, two different stories emerged.

Client One: The workflow was working perfectly and was able to keep up with the reminders.

Client Two: The number of people entering the workflow became too much to handle, and when alert notifications came in, they became backlogged because of the process of drafting the emails, leaving this client falling behind.

Solution

To improve Client Two’s workflow, we decided that more automation was necessary. However, we still wanted to keep the personality and human aspect of the outreach emails. After analyzing past emails, we noticed recurring themes and incorporated them into the automated outreach email. Instead of getting an email that sounds generic, we created an automated email that had details that made it feel like a personalized email notification. This removed the backlog for the client because it removed the work needed to draft the emails; they were sent out automatically. This saved the client time and also ensured communication was being continued, so no potential leads would fall through the cracks because of delayed responses.

This is the solution that best removes the bottleneck while keeping the personality in the communication.

Conclusion

This is one example of how you can balance automation and personal tones in a way that allows your business to never miss a lead from neglected outreach.

My best piece of advice is to take a look at data to see where the bottlenecks are and whether they can be automated while keeping your personal touch in the communications.

Automation is great because it removes the repetitive daily tasks that eat up your day, plus it means that the contact gets the follow-up communication and will not be forgotten. However, keeping the human aspect is important because you don’t want to dull your branding with template automated jargon that is the same as everyone else’s.

You want to keep your uniqueness while removing bottlenecks.