When to automate a task instead of hiring someone to do it

Every growing business hits a point where the admin outgrows the people doing it. The
instinct is to hire. Sometimes that’s right. Often the job that’s eating the hours is one
nobody should be doing by hand in the first place.

The test

A task is a good automation candidate when three things are true: it happens
repeatedly, the steps are the same every time, and the decision at each step follows a
rule rather than judgement. Copying enquiry details from an inbox into a spreadsheet
qualifies on all three. Deciding whether to give a difficult customer a refund does not.

If a task fails any of the three, automating it usually creates a fragile process that
breaks the first time reality doesn’t match the rule — and then someone has to do the
work anyway, plus fix the automation.

What’s usually worth doing first

• Enquiry handling. Getting a new enquiry into your system, acknowledged,
  and assigned, without anyone retyping anything.
• Follow-ups. The quote that never got chased. This is the one that most
  often pays for the whole exercise, because the work was already won and then lost to
  silence.
• Scheduling and reminders. Particularly anything that currently involves
  three messages to agree a time.
• Moving data between systems. If a number is typed into two places, one
  of them is eventually wrong.

What to leave alone

Anything customer-facing where the value is that a person did it. Automated messages
pretending to be personal are transparent, and they cost more goodwill than the time they
save. Also leave alone any process you’re about to change — automating a workflow you’re
still redesigning means building it twice.

Do the boring prerequisite first

Automation amplifies whatever process you already have. If your customer records live
in three places and disagree, automating on top of that spreads the disagreement faster.
Tidy the data first, even roughly. It’s unglamorous and it’s the step that decides whether
the rest works.

Start with one

Pick the single task that annoys you most, automate just that, and live with it for a
month. You’ll learn more about what your business actually needs from one working
automation than from a plan covering twenty.

If you want it built properly rather than assembled from whatever integrations happen
to exist, Elite Dev does this kind of workflow and AI automation work for small businesses. And
if the thing standing between you and any of it is that your computers and network aren’t
reliable enough to build on, that part is us — Geeks IT Sydney, on 02 7247 6817.