How do you automate your communication with customers?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I want to talk about how to automate communication with customers. And the reason I, I want to talk about this is a lot of startups and a lot of small companies that I talk to, one of their big concerns is, well, how do I optimize my team? I only have a small team. I don't have a huge customer service team. How can I really make the most out of what I have, optimize things so that I'm still able to help customers with my product, make sure that I, you know, I'm really taking care of the customers that are getting my product and not have to hire a huge, you know, room full of customer service Reps. And this is something that comes up often, and so there's a few things that I want to talk about. You know, first I'm going to talk about what is communication automation. Then, you know, should, should you automate customer interactions? Why businesses automate, benefits for startups, and then finally going over kinds of tools. And there's, there's hundreds Thousands really of different tools, but just I'll just from a high level talk about the types of tools that are used in automation. First, what is communication automation? So any communication that is automated, a machine is able to do it without you as a human interacting and telling it what to say or what to respond or how to how to reply to someone is automation. So when you are On a phone system and you check your bank balance or you schedule an appointment and you never talk to a human, that is automation. So automation really ranges from phone systems to chatbots to email systems to, you know, even other automation that may involve some hybrid as well. So There's a lot of areas that automation can really help in, in order to make sure that kind of those repeated questions are answered and make sure that customers are getting information that they need to that don't require a custom answer, so to speak. Second thing, let's let's talk about should you automate customer interactions, and this is a. debate for some people, others are hands down, they always will automate. And I think it really just depends on the kind of experience that you are wanting to create for your customers. And so customer experience is a huge piece. It's something that I talk about heavily. It's building legacy brands, your customer experience is going to help determine how long your brand is gonna last. and what people say about you. So if you're a high-touch, really custom boutique, or you are a really, really just a hands-on type of brand where your customers are expecting or you are creating the experience of you have a person guiding them through a process, it's a bespoke process, it is custom and tailored to them, you know, then automation is going to need to be limited because people are going to come to expect, or you're wanting to create the expectation that when they engage with your brand, they're gonna have this white glove service that you can't really get with automation. Now, some things you could have automated in terms of like, If somebody, if you have a chatbot on your website and somebody wants to know your address, they could type in, what's your address? And it'll give them the address, right? So you could still have a really low level of automation in it, but if you're really selling them on, oh, call us and we'll guide you through this, well, robot's not gonna do really well at guiding someone through especially really custom services. Or products, right? So you want to be aware of what the customer experience is, and that will help you determine whether you should automate or not and to what degree. Again, it's like a kind of on the other spectrum. If there really is nothing special custom, you're selling a product. You're not selling people on handholding or white glove service or or that kind of experience. You're just Here's a product. Here's answers to questions. This is you know our customer service doesn't need to encompass human interaction. It really is just some very basic things. You can automate 90% or more potentially of your customer interactions depending on what kind of customer interactions you have. Third thing I want to talk about is why. So the The why behind automation is, of course, to reduce costs. It is to reduce fatigue. It's to reduce potential of mistakes. So when you're answering the question, you know, what is our address? It's a set question with a set answer. There's only one answer to that. And even if you have multiple locations, you could still set up an automated system to ask which location first and then provide an address. So. Businesses automate that because someone could be asking that question over and over. From big companies, it could be asked 1,000 times a day potentially, and you don't really want to pay someone to answer that question if that's just a super basic question that gets asked and answered and it has a set response. So businesses automate that in order to cut costs and make it quicker. So instead of holding, holding on the phone waiting to talk to a person, Somebody could call in and select the option for getting an address, and they're out of the system. And so it also helps improve the level of customer experience with the questions that do require a human. So instead of having a bunch of people asking questions that don't need to be asked, there— or not don't need to be asked, but there are questions that don't need a human to answer, they just are informational set answers, then allows the people that do have those questions that do need a human to answer them because they require more information or more instructions and they're more accustomed to them, it allows them to have a better experience because they're able to get through to a person quicker. Now, 4th thing I want to talk about is benefits for startups, and the benefits are typically pretty big because it allows you to Multiply your— say you have one customer rep, and that person with automation being able to help answer a lot of the mundane questions, repeat questions that get answered all the time, FAQs, things like that. That allows them to only have to deal with things that require a human. And that means that as a startup, you'll be able to create a better experience for your customers with your products and services by having that automation in place so that you're not having to expend more than you should on customer reps and have them be able to actually take care of the customers who really need that handholding or questions answered that a machine will never know. Lastly, I wanna talk about tools. So automation tools, are all over the place. They're used on social media, they're used in websites and chatbots and texting and voice, and each one has its own systems. Some have multiple systems that are all blended together in order to create one tool, and there's a lot of different options for you. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different tools, and each one has a little bit of different use different pricing, different experience, different customizations. And it all depends on how customers talk to you. And sometimes the way that really benefits small businesses, kind of going back to that, is that with tools, with automation tools, maybe before you didn't want to have a texting number, but because of an automation line, you're able to add a new way To allow customers to talk to you that doesn't overload, you know, whoever's managing all the customer interactions. And so looking at those tools, you can also use them to help broaden the different ways that customers can talk to you and interact with you, which typically the more options you let— give people in order to talk to you, the easier it's going to be for them to get a hold of you. They're going to feel like you're able to You know, listen to them more because you'll, you'll be able to receive information from them on their preferred platform rather than only a set, you know, 1, 2, or 3 different ways. And so looking at tools for automation, you should look at both, you know, how do I optimize the ways that I'm using now, but also can I use an automation tool to open up a new channel for my customers that You know, and you can try it out. You can try it out and see if people do it, if people enjoy it, need it. If it doesn't get used, you know, you can get rid of it. But it allows you to easily and quickly go, okay, well, let's try all these different ways of communication, and the ones that get used are the ones that we'll keep moving forward, and the ones that don't, we'll move on from. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of an idea on You know, what automation is for communication and how you can go about creating a solution to integrate automation into your company and improve the customer experience. Hey, thanks for watching. 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