We believe that automation is a great complement to human talent. It's like having someone on your team who's always there to help and never sleeps.

What are the benefits of automation?

I sat down recently to chat with the team at Startacus, and talk about how we see automation changing sales and marketing.

We talked about some big questions: what are the advantages of automation? Is this something that will replace people? What do bots do well today, and where should they hand off to a human?

You should watch the interview in full, but here are a few themes we touch on:

Automation is something that complements human talent

Not everyone has the bandwidth to respond immediately. If you’re a solo founder or small team, you might have competing priorities.

And in bigger companies, it can be too expensive to have highly skilled people available to respond. There’s a lot of scope to use automation to complement human talent and make your team 💪 with technology.

Customers want answers quickly, so we think it’s more important for them to get a helpful response even if that means it’s automated.

Being available 24/7 can be hugely stressful

Installing live chat can feel great because it makes you more available and accessible.

But the incoming requests can also bring a big sense of obligation.

I was chatting to a new customer who told me that when they went out to dinner, they felt compelled to respond to questions coming in.

Automation is a great way to take the pressure off. It means you can help people faster. And when you leave the office, you can feel confident that you’re not going to miss anything.

Make it relevant

Using automation doesn’t have to mean that everyone gets the same experience.

An intelligent assistant is one that can adapt the conversation to be more relevant based on who they’re talking with, what they say and what they do.

One of the benefits of using Continually is that you can understand your customer’s intent and respond appropriately.

You can help customers by letting them choose the path that fits them best, and route the people who need to talk to a sales person straight to a meeting.

Relevance goes beyond the conversation. Once you’ve engaged someone, we build a rich profile about them so that when you do meet them, you have everything you need to know to talk about what’s important to them.