Friendly Automation

Charles Drayson

Aug 17 · 1 min read

Whether you automate processes that interact with customers or your suppliers or your employees, how will it make them feel? Do you care?

There are some processes that benefit everybody if done well: your suppliers will love you if you automate your accounts payable process so that invoices get paid correctly and on time. Your employees expect a slick process for managing annual leave requests or processing expense claims. Your customers recognise that automation of routine tasks is both efficient and less vulnerable to error. Automate those processes first.

However, can you use automation in a process that inherently requires real human interaction without causing annoyance? Can you automate staff appraisals, contract negotiations, selection and recruitment, or customer account management? Probably not, if automation is about machine-processing the end-to-end interaction. You probably have personal experience to inform your views on how that makes you feel.

The key question becomes:

HOW MUCH OF A PROCESS CAN YOU AUTOMATE WITHOUT CAUSING UPSET?

The answer to that key question:

Instead of thinking about automating a process, think about what you can do to help the human who represents your organization. Can you release their energies to focus more on exercising human judgment and spare them from the effort (and distraction) of looking for information, juggling competing tasks and complying with internal rules? Use automation to give your staff superpowers. Use solutions to augment rather than automate. For tasks that carry regulatory or compliance burdens, use solutions to help staff do the right thing by default.

Legito is more often used to support processes that feature documents. We don’t need to impose standard documents because we can create tailored documents. If you have operating companies in multiple countries, you can localise the content. Assuming that you want people to provide information using a document, you can at least pre-populate the items already known to you. If your organisation has many document templates, you can help your staff select the correct version rather than rejecting their application because they used the wrong form.

Automation doesn’t have to be about imposing your standardised processes: it can enhance human interactions.