My younger brother, Alex, believes that the most time-consuming and labour intensive parts of any job can and should be automated in some way.

And, on the surface, it’s easy to agree. After all, everyone has parts of their job that they don’t enjoy, that take a long time and aren’t necessarily the most creative aspects of the day.

However, it’s very easy to extend my brother’s idea to the whole of an online business. It doesn’t help that many web developers and computer programmers are not the most gregarious, people-orientated individuals and the idea of automating things to a level where there is no client-provider interaction is often appealing to personalities of that type.

The result of this kind of thinking is that you end up with something like Google Adwords. Essentially, the whole of Adwords is completely automated : you create your ads, you choose your keywords, they go live, the bid prices, quality scoring; preferred cost bidding, etc….it is all automated.

From one perspective, this is great. One system can handle thousands of advertisers with only a minimum of staff. The holy grail has been found. Hallelujah. Praise Be. And Stuff.

However, it comes as no surprise to anyone that different people have different requirements; will require different levels of support and, often, just need that human touch.

From our perspective at Reach24, the fully automated lead generation system looked extremely appealing, but in terms of really delivering for our clients, it just doesn’t work the way you might expect.

We have competitors that have almost completely automated systems and, to be fair to them, we have heard positive feedback about how they choose to do business.

Nevertheless, you remove the human element of business at your peril.

There is no long term value in automating parts of your business if - in the process - you are unable to respond quickly to the particular demands of each customer.

Someone a lot smarter than me (OK, it was Gandhi) once said :

“A ‘Customer’ is the most important visitor on our premises.

He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.

He is not an interruption on our work. He is the purpose of it.”

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of dealing with ‘customer service’ (I used that phrase advisedly) from a company that is pretty much completely automated (I give you AOL or Google as prime examples), then you will know that - to really deliver to your clients - it is definitely not always the best policy to automate the time consuming and labour intensive parts of your business.

Those companies that can find the right balance are, ultimately, the ones that will succeed in the 21st Century ‘on demand’ economy.

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