I am a huge fan of automation.

Used properly, it saves time, creates consistency and takes repetitive work away from people who could be doing something far more valuable.

We use marketing automation throughout The Last Hurdle, and I am always looking for sensible opportunities to automate more.

But there is an important word in there: sensible.

Automation isn’t something you set up, switch on and forget about. It still needs monitoring. It needs testing. It needs to account for the human beings on the receiving end of it.

Most importantly, it needs to produce the right result.

Good marketing automation uses technology to make repetitive processes more efficient without making the customer experience worse.

I was reminded of that recently by an experience with Sendible, the social media management platform we had been using for several years.

And, interestingly, the problem wasn’t Sendible’s people.

It was the automation around them.

A perfectly normal commercial decision

Sendible recently changed its packages and pricing.

For our business, the change represented a substantial increase in cost. The expanded package included additional functionality, but very little of it offered any practical additional value to us at this point in time.

That doesn’t make Sendible wrong.

They are developing their platform and growing their business. They have made a commercial decision about the direction they want to take their product and how they price it.

I made a commercial decision too.

The new proposition wasn’t right for us, so I decided to look elsewhere.

That’s business.

There were no hard feelings. We’d used the platform for several years and, if Sendible’s offering suits our requirements again in the future, I would certainly consider returning.

In fact, I particularly liked the way the person at Sendible handled the conversation when I explained why we were leaving.

They listened. They understood my position. Their response was friendly and professional.

Actually, I’d go further than that.

There was nothing tangible they could offer me. The new package wasn’t right for our business, and that wasn’t something the person dealing with me could change.

But they still managed to make me feel like a valued customer, even as I was leaving.

That’s good customer service.

Hats off to Sendible and, particularly, to the person dealing with me.

As far as I was concerned, we’d parted on perfectly good terms.

And then I received another email.

“I haven’t heard from you…”

The message told me they hadn’t heard from me and wanted to make sure I was good to go.

Except they had heard from me.

We’d had the conversation.

So I replied.

A slightly confused member of the Sendible team came back to me and, once again, the human interaction was lovely. We cleared things up and the conversation reached its natural conclusion for a second time.

Then I received another one.

Again, I was being told they hadn’t heard from me.

That was the point at which the penny dropped.

This was automation.

What had initially looked like one slightly misplaced follow-up was actually an automated sequence that hadn’t recognised that the conversation it was chasing had already taken place.

More than once.

And that’s when a very minor issue became rather more interesting from a marketing perspective.

Two unnecessary emails became six unnecessary communications

By the time I realised what was happening, two unnecessary automated communications had generated two responses from me and two further responses from Sendible’s team.

And then I had to send another message specifically asking to be removed from the loop.

Automation is supposed to reduce repetitive work.

This automation was generating it.

For me, this was a relatively minor irritation in what had otherwise been a very positive interaction.

But imagine the original conversation had involved something more serious.

Imagine the customer was already frustrated, disappointed or angry.

Imagine the person dealing with them had been slightly less understanding.

Or imagine your team had finally managed to resolve a difficult customer situation, only for an automated message to arrive suggesting that the conversation had never happened.

What does that do to the customer’s mood?

That’s where inappropriate automation stops being merely inefficient.

It can amplify friction that your people have already worked hard to resolve.