Sara: 00:04

ZilckSound. You're tuned in to ZilckSound, where business gets real, trends get broken down, and you walk away sharper than when you hit play. Brought to you by zilk.com. Practical news for the modern entrepreneur. Now here's your host, Rob Henley.

Rob: 00:20

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to ZilckSound. Thanks for tuning in again. Tonight, episode 15, we're talking about automations. It's the software that answers your phone, the chatbot that greets your customers at 2AM, the system that sends the follow-up.

Rob: 00:33

So you never have to think about it because this was the year everybody finally did it. The tools got cheap, the setup got easy, and almost every business owner I know has automated something in the last twelve months. And most of them are proud of it. Some of them should be. But here's where we turn things around.

Rob: 00:48

We're not going to talk about whether AI is coming for your business. It's not a lecture telling you to unplug everything and go back to a paper ledger either. Automation is useful. We know that. Tonight is about a more uncomfortable question.

Rob: 01:03

One almost nobody asks before they flip the switch. What if the thing you just automated was the reason customers chose you in the first place? What if you automated the part they loved? Have you thought about this before? I have another story.

Rob: 01:17

Let me tell you about someone. Call her May. May runs a small catering business twelve years in. Her clients didn't find her through ads. They found her because someone at a wedding asked who made this.

Rob: 01:29

And here's the detail that matters. When you called May to place an order, she would talk you out of money. You'd ask for food for 80 people and she'd ask questions. What time is the event? Is there a cocktail hour?

Rob: 01:39

Are there kids? And then she'd say, you don't need 80, you need 65 served in two waves. That phone call saved her clients real money and it cost her sales in the short term. It was also, though she never wrote it down anywhere, the product. Last year, May automated her intake, a tidy chat flow on her website.

Rob: 01:59

Pick your head count, pick your menu, get your quote, pay your deposit. Response time went from hours to seconds. Fewer interruptions during prep on every dashboard, a clear win. And then over about six months, her repeat bookings started to slide. Nobody complained.

Rob: 02:16

Nobody sent an angry email. The old clients just quietly started getting other quotes because the chat flow gave them exactly what they asked for. 80 people. Here's your price for 80. It never once told them they were about to over order.

Rob: 02:29

The advice was gone and the advice was what they were loyal to. Now let me give you the opposite story because this is not an anti automation episode. This time is Andy. Andy runs a print shop. Two years ago he was drowning.

Rob: 02:43

Invoices done at midnight. Customers calling to ask if their order was ready. Files arriving in the wrong format. So Andy automated invoicing done automatically. Order status, a link that updates itself.

Rob: 02:58

File checking one app or software. And here's the move he made. Andy took the ten or twelve hours a week he got back and spent them at the front counter talking to customers about what they were actually trying to print and why. His business grew same year, same kind of tools, same size of company as May, opposite results, same software, opposite outcomes. So the difference was never the technology.

Rob: 03:23

The difference was knowing which part of the business is the business. And that's what tonight is really about. Some friction is always part of the product, and we've been trained to treat friction as the enemy. Friction is not the enemy. Every pitch for every tool says the same word seamless.

Rob: 03:41

And for most things, fine. Nobody's loyalty to you depends on how they paid an invoice. But trust gets built in the friction. The conversation before the quote, the question that catches a mistake, the human being who says actually let me suggest something better. From the inside, that looks like inefficiency.

Rob: 03:59

It's minutes, it's labor, it doesn't scale. From the outside, from the customer side of the counter, that friction is the experience. May's phone call was friction. It was also the only thing her competitors couldn't copy. Trust doesn't leave loudly, guys.

Rob: 04:14

Let me share a number worth sitting with. Forrester, the research firm, is predicting that around a third of brands will actively erode customer trust through self-service AI. Erode is the right word because erosion is quiet. When automation damages a business, there's usually no explosion, no viral complaint, no one star review that tells you exactly what went wrong. There's just drift slow, but steady drifting.

Rob: 04:41

A regular client who reorders a little less often. Another client who says we went another direction this year. And meanwhile, your dashboard is applauding you response time down, cost per inquiry down. The dashboard measures everything except the thing that's leaking because nobody has invented a metric for warmth. So you can win on every number you track and lose on the only one you can't.

Rob: 05:07

My recommendation, automate the back of the house for sure. However, keep the handshake. Not all clients appreciate you missing out on real life interactions. And now let's test this out. It's just one question.

Rob: 05:18

Would a customer ever say I chose them because of this? Ask it about every task in your business. For example, invoicing. No customer in history has said I love their invoices. Automated tonight, scheduling, inventory counts, payment reminders, file formats, order status.

Rob: 05:34

Automate all of it gladly, ruthlessly. That's the back of the house. But the moment the answer is yes, the moment a customer might actually say, I go there because she remembers my order, because he talks me out of the wrong purchase, because they answer the phone, you found the handshake. And the handshake is not a cost center. The handshake is the moat.

Rob: 05:55

Andy understood this instinctively. He didn't automate to remove himself from the business. He automated to return himself to the part of it that only he could do. And I'll admit something here, I automated my own newsletter replies for a while. A polite little auto response personalized or so I thought.

Rob: 06:12

A listener wrote back one line, she said, this doesn't sound like you. One line and she was right, and I turned it off that same day. Nobody's immune to this, me included. So let me close with this. And if you're sitting there doing the math on your own business, wondering which side of May and Andy you're on, here's what I want to leave you with.

Rob: 06:30

It's fine to automate ruthlessly everything your customers never see and never loved. You're allowed to answer some messages slowly because a real answer takes longer than an instant one. It's okay to keep one part of your business inefficient on purpose because that inefficiency is what people are paying for. You're allowed to be the business that still picks up the phone in an economy that treats picking up the phone as a bug. And you're allowed to tell your customers out loud this part will always be a person.

Rob: 07:04

And breaking news for you guys, if you haven't heard yet, that sentence is marketing now. This right here will always be a person. It didn't used to be. Well, it is in 2026. Because here's where this is all heading.

Rob: 07:18

The tools will keep getting better, cheaper, and easier, which means automation stops being an advantage and becomes the baseline. Everyone will have the seamless checkout. Everyone will have the instant quote. When every business sounds automated, the human part is the only part left to compete on. The question was never what can be automated, almost everything can.

Rob: 07:41

The question is what shouldn't be? Answer that one correctly, and the machines make you more yourself, more human, not less. And May, by the way, she is fine. She kept the chat flow for new inquiries, and she turned it off. For anyone who's booked with her before, old clients get her cell.

Rob: 07:59

Repeat bookings came back within a quarter. The fix took her one afternoon. Knowing what to fix took her six months and I'd rather it cost you one podcast episode. Instead, this is all for tonight. Thank you for listening.

Rob: 08:11

I'm Rob Henley. This is ZilckSound. See you on the next one.

Sara: 08:16

ZilckSound. ZilckSound.