Anita Campbell Anita Campbell is the Founder, CEO and Publisher of Small Business Trends and has been following trends in small businesses since 2003. She is the owner of BizSugar, a social media site for small businesses.

4 Reactions
  1. It is about using the right tools for your business and being updated with the latest technologies.

  2. The technologies are Automation and Analytics. The article is worth clicking over to read in full

  3. Anita: I am all for automation and getting insights from big data, but could it be a risk that these technologies will cause us to miss a part of the human, personalized touch?

    • Hi Martin, If you use automation for the right things, in combination with human interaction, it actually helps you serve customers better.

      For instance, use automation for reminders and to automate the followup, but hand craft the messages you send or simply use automation to trigger a personal outbound phone call. That’s just one example of how you can use automation and the personal touch, together.

      Here’s another example: automation can automatically gather together all interactions with a customer through all your apps and social media. This gives you a lot more information at your fingertips, and minimizes the drudgery of having to manually look everything up. But you still talk with the customer personally. And you have a much more informed conversation with the customer because you effortlessly have all the information in front of you. You’re not annoying the customer by forcing the customer to repeat their history with your company.

      So there are lots of ways to combine automation and personal activity, and save a ton of time and deliver better results for customers.

      – Anita