Are You Over Automating Your Business?

Hi, it's Donna-Marie here. In this video I want to talk with you about automation in your business. Now as far as creating systems - or setting up systems - in your business and stream-lining things, making things easier for you to manage your business and making things flow smoothly, automation can be a brilliant process. It can also help your customers to get their results quicker. For example, if you're delivering or you're selling information products or digital products on the internet, then it makes it easier to deliver those products if your systems are automated so that customers can buy whenever they like and once they've bought the product it's automatically delivered to them. They get an email with the download link or they're automatically directed to a page where they can access their product. Right? So automation is brilliant. You can automate your emails - you can set up an email series whereby people subscribe and they get regular emails sent to them. All automated so that it's nice and easy for you - set it up once and then you just maintain it ... come back and check it now and then. It's absolutely brilliant. There is so much that you can do to automate things in your business and it's definitely something I recommend and something that I talk about and will be talking about in a lot of future videos as well. Today's specific question though, is... "Can you over-automate your business?" The answer is "Yes, absolutely!" Now, it's possible to set it up so that - just at a rough guess - about 90% of what you need to do in your business can be automated. Depending on the business you're in, of course, but for the right business model a good 95% or 90% can easily be automated. The thing is, I think that while that's good, you also need to show that you're a real person. And over-automation can get rid of that. So you need to let your customers know that there really is a person there. It's not all a computer with a mind of its own that's running everything. And the occasional email or phone call or face-to-face seminar or workshop - something where people can see you - is most definitely something that you should be doing in your business. It's amazing the impact that it has when you can give a person a reply. Most of the programs that I'm involved in where we provide support to customers, there are Frequently Asked Questions and we certainly ask people to use things like the FAQs or Knowledgebase which has got a lot of questions and answers. But if someone submits an email or support ticket and asks a question then we give a personal reply. And I think that's the sort of thing that can make a big difference in business because you're building relationships with your customers and your customers know that there is a real person there and that they're being taken seriously. That they're being acknowledged and that you're having some sort of personal communication with them. It's only a small thing but in this world of automation it really makes a big difference. I hope that's something that you can integrate into your business, that you can come up with some ways to add some personal contact with your customers if you're not already doing that. If you like this video and you haven't already subscribed for updates you can do that on http://Donna-MarieCoggins.com So if you're not already on that site, go there now, subscribe for updates and that way every time we have a new video available we'll send you an email to let you know. And if you'd like to share this with your friends or colleagues or anyone else you think might find this helpful, I appreciate that too. Bye for now.