You probably know you need to automate at least something in your business. Automation tools save you time, boost productivity, and make you an all-around more efficient business owner — but it may not be obvious where to begin.
As the founder of Business Tech BFF, an automation creation company, I’ve helped hundreds of businesses automate their workflows and create better customer relationships.
Today, I’ll tell you the biggest ways automation can help you improve customer communication. We’ll walk through five significant challenges automation can help with, and I’ll share some other helpful tips to help you get started.
5 major communication challenges — and how automation helps
As a small business owner, you may find it hard to juggle customer communication with everything else on your plate. Here are the most common challenges I see with my clients and how business process automation can address them:
1. Reaching out after an inquiry
If a lead comes in at 8:00 PM, what happens next? You probably don’t have customer support team members working around the clock, so you might not see the notifications until the next morning — or later. By then, another business may have already replied and snatched up that potential lead.
How automation helps: Setting up an immediate reply to acknowledge the person meets their expectations of an instant response. It lets them know their message was received and they’ll hear back from you soon. Your message might be personalized, or it might not be. The point is you make some type of contact with them as soon as you get that inquiry.
You can do this using auto-replies in OpenPhone or build it into a workflow on Zapier, which I’ll explain below.
2. Following up with leads
If you don’t hear back from a lead after your initial message, you should send additional follow-ups. This keeps the line of communication open, even if they’re busy with other things.
How automation helps: Automated follow-up messages like “Hey! Are you still there?” or “Still interested in our product/service?” can help keep a lead warm. You can also try using a message like “Hey there, it sounds like you’re really busy! Should I stop bothering you?” This speaks to a customer’s empathy and encourages them to respond.
How to set up automated immediate (and follow-up) responses in Zapier:
- Trigger: Someone fills out a website form to get in touch.
- Action: Contact information goes to Zapier and gets put into several systems: Google Drive, Airtable, OpenPhone, etc. (It’s good to have all of the info saved when you need to reach out.)
- Action: OpenAI API writes a personalized message by pulling information about the person’s business from the website they provided in the contact form.
- Action: AI-generated message gets sent to a Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM).
- Action: CRM starts an automated email workflow, which handles the initial inquiry and all follow-ups.
- Action: CRM sends an email with a scheduler link and the AI written message, including a disclaimer that the message was AI-generated (to be transparent and build trust).
While the automation software and the specific workflows will look different for everyone, this is a great example of how you can structure it.
3. Getting clear on the working relationship
When you start working with a customer, you should communicate what they can expect from you and what a typical working relationship entails. However, you may not have time to write a detailed message every time you onboard a new client.
How automation helps: You can set up email templates to send to new customers once they onboard with you. The automated email sequence will contain information about how to reach you, what to expect from your product or service, and other relevant details.
Don’t be afraid to show excitement in your automations. Telling people, “I’m really excited to work with you!” builds momentum and gets them excited, too.
4. Communicating throughout the process
Even if a customer is familiar with your company, you might still use automation to interact with them after they complete certain actions or milestones.
How automation helps: Here again, templates are your friend. Use a CRM system like HubSpot to track project touchpoints and an automation platform like Zapier to trigger new, personalized communications each time a touchpoint is activated.
For example, after each Zoom meeting with a client, you can set up a workflow to send out an email with a summary of the most important points from the meeting. This keeps you both on the same page and ensures no action items fall through the cracks.
By automating, you eliminate the time-consuming work of having to start over every time you face one of your repetitive tasks.
How to set up automated ongoing communication in Zapier:
- Trigger: Use your CRM to track project touchpoints. For example, you could trigger an action based on a client completing onboarding, reaching their first anniversary with your company, or upgrading their subscription.
- Action: A new templated message is created and sent via Zapier as someone moves through those different project touchpoints.
You can also associate auto-messaging with events. For instance, after each Zoom meeting, you could have a Zap send a text with a summary of the most important points of the call and any action items that were discussed.
5. Assessing customer satisfaction
You may not have time to ask every customer how they feel about you, but you likely want to know. After all, feedback helps you improve.
How automation helps: You can automate sending a text to clients once a project is over. Use a simple number scale to increase responses:
[CUSTOMER NAME], On a scale of 1-5, with ‘5’ representing an awesome experience and ‘1’ representing a negative experience, what would you rate us?
Then, depending on what they text back, Zapier can read that text message and take other specific actions. So if someone rates you a ‘5,’ maybe a thank you message goes out. But if someone rates you a ‘1,’ the system can flag that account for human follow-up.
3 best practices for automating client communications
Here are some of my top tips for automating your business:
1. Personalize
One of the biggest missteps I see is when business owners send the same generalized communication to every lead or customer. That feels impersonal and can be a big turnoff. At the very least, you want to add dynamic fields to add a person’s first name to the message.
2. Take notes
Document what’s unique about a customer, account, or relationship, and use that information in your marketing automation.
I still work with a lot of wedding businesses, and they’ll usually send a text or email one year after the wedding date to wish the couple a happy anniversary and share a special moment like ”Hey, wasn’t it so funny when your best man got up on the table and danced?!”
You likely won’t remember that level of detail a year later, so take notes soon after the event.
3. AI is your friend
Artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s API can pull in the person’s info from their website and other information you have on file. Train the tool in your brand voice and let it handle the communication. Feel free to include an AI disclaimer like the one I used above.
When a customer sees you’ve taken the time to personalize — even though it’s automated — it stands out to them.
Tips to avoid over-automating
There is such a thing as too much automation. As awesome as workflow automation is, you don’t want to automate everything. Humans need to interact with other humans at some point throughout the journey.
Here are some rules to follow:
Course correct as needed
If you have a workflow that always results in customers needing to talk to a human, consider un-automating it. We’ve all been that person on the phone with a chatbot, hitting the “0” key repeatedly to be connected with a human — it can be very frustrating!
In such cases, it makes more sense to start with human interaction and save everyone time.
Be mindful of how often you message
You want to be accessible, but you also don’t want to send 20 messages a day and annoy clients. There’s a delicate balance between neglecting and overwhelming people, and you want to stay in the middle.
The right amount of contact is something you’ll figure out with time. People will rarely tell you you’re sending too many messages — they’ll just block you. So be intentional when you’re setting up the workflows, and consider how often you’ll be reaching out.
Let customers know a human isn’t far away
Whenever I send an OpenPhone text, I end it with, “This is an automated message, but this is also my real phone number. If you’d like, you can reply, and I’ll get back to you in person.”
Acknowledging there’s a person on the other side of the message goes a long way. That customer now knows they can reach me if they need to.
Start automating communication with OpenPhone
Automation is fantastic, but nothing will ever replace human-to-human connection. What I love about OpenPhone is it allows me to have both. I use OpenPhone as my primary method of communication with my active clients, as well as to streamline my automated text messages.
I hope you can see now that automation makes those important touchpoints happen — even the ones you don’t have time to do. No matter what tools you use, automation can address the major challenges you face as a small business owner and free you up to check time-consuming tasks off your list.
See how automation can improve your customer communications with a free seven-day trial of OpenPhone.
