There are a few books that have shaped my understanding of the world, and this is one of them. If you don’t own a copy. Buy one.
Time is an incredibly valuable resource. Creating more of it is what most teams, and brokerages that are looking to expand are trying to do. This is what brings most to implementing various forms of automation into their growth strategy. Many who discover the power of automation also eventually stumble into the catastrophe of automated error.
“Difficulties arise when we do not think of people and machines as collaborative systems, but assign whatever tasks can be automated to the machines, and leave the rest to people.” – Don Norman.
Norman also discusses the relationship between people and calculators. The human + calculator is a perfect combination; allowing us to do more by eliminating common errors and solving the problems we can’t do in our heads.
1. Automated Communication
Many an agent has made an embarrassing blooper when it comes to arranging automated communication. The most common ones I see…
- Message was sent too many times.
- Message was sent to the wrong people.
- Message was sent at the wrong time.
Our tendency is to let the machines handle the mundane tasks so we humans can solve the most complex ones. Norman discusses this in his book, and in a nutshell this relationship is sometimes backwards. In the above common errors what went wrong is not the sending of the message, but the when, who, and why it was sent. Sending messages is easy, but knowing the who, what, when, etc. is what is complex.
Consider flipping this around in some cases. In a previous post on Smart Prospecting I demonstrated how to use technology to automate the determination of who to prospect, when to prospect, and what to talk to prospects about. All the human has to do is send the communication or make the call. This is a relatively simple task, and one that can be done with a reduced amount of error.
What I see being done more often is the total opposite. We setup our long term communication plans to drip our leads for the next year. This frees us up from having to send hundreds of prospects the same message over and over. However by using technology that tells us the who/what/when to send, and tools like mass email; we can accomplish the same thing with lower occurrences of error, and better insight into what is happening in our database. As Norman discusses in his book the errors of automation often go unnoticed until it’s way too late.
“Should I quit using drip plans?” Of course not. Can you really email a confirmation instantly? Can you truly respond to certain requests at all hours of the day? Nope. This is where automation can be our friend. Just like the calculator relationship… If long division isn’t your strong suit then use the calculator to do your divisions. If you can’t be there at the right time consider automation to help you accomplish this.
2. Mass Communications
Second to automated communications where I see the most errors occur is in mass communication. What mass communications (such as mass email) automate for us is the task of sending a communication to multiple people. Sending an email to 10,000 users is a very simple task, but where the complexity occurs is again in the who/what/when, and where to send the communication.
We’ve all had the brain fart of hitting “reply all” before, and what do we exclaim afterwards?
“I didn’t mean to send this to those people or that many people”
Creating lists of people to receive tailored communications is not an easy task. Let machines help you do it. Let them analyze the user activity, let them do the math on numbers of visits, or the amount of time it’s been since the last communication. When the machine has assisted you in creating the list you desire then it’s usually a simple act of hitting “select all” to ensure that your communication goes out to that list.
Don’t Use Robots To Work For You. Use Them To Do Your Work Better.
Just so we’re clear… Automated communications are a great tool. Mass Communication is essential to any modern marketing program. What agents/brokers need to think about is striving towards that oh so perfect human + calculator relationship. How can we use technology to assist us in the complex tasks we’re most likely to mess up? That’s the question we should be asking. I see many working hard to transfer as much workload as possible to robots, and frankly the end result is bad marketing/sales being distributed with machine like efficiency. Collecting large amounts of useful data, and letting machines help make sense of it all is what the large real estate businesses of the future are going to master.
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