Technology continues to reshape how digital businesses run. With the pace of technology change, its influence on e-commerce and digital businesses is transformative. Over the past 10 years, process automation has evolved significantly thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence. For businesses in the digital marketplace, it has optimized operations and improved customer experience.
This, in a nutshell, is the purpose of automation: delegating background tasks, allowing teams to invest their time and resources in the most significant projects.
In the dynamic e-commerce landscape, as technology evolves, customers increasingly expect better and more efficient service. In this article, we discuss the balance that must exist between technological optimization and human creativity.
What We Can Automate:
1. Product Information Syndication
As e-commerce businesses scale, they add more items to their product listings, which increases the amount of information that needs to be managed. Each product has its own descriptions, specs, prices, and media assets, which must be distributed across all sales channels. This is the perfect opportunity for automation implementation, since it reduces the time invested by teams and inconsistencies in information.
What’s most important is to have a single source of truth for product data. There are many solutions in the market that not only serve as centralized systems but also automatically format content to meet the requirements of each sales channel.
This way, you can update your product information quickly, and it will be synchronized across all platforms
2. Digital Asset Processing
Just as each digital channel has its own descriptions and specs formatting requirements, it also imposes specific demands on visual content, like background standardization, image resizing, and thumbnail generation.
Requirements are mandatory on many platforms, and failure to comply with them may result in disapproval of your products.
Adapting this content is time-consuming and can lead to human error, making this situation the perfect opportunity to implement automation.
3. Inventory and Pricing Updates
Inventory calculations are another task that’s best to automate. You’ve probably sold out of stock products due to a lack of synchronization; this is an example of a common scenario.
By automating processes, you can maintain consistent information across all your sales channels. Additionally, you can perform ongoing market price analysis to keep your prices competitive.
In many cases, companies implement it for tax and shipping cost calculations or even to schedule seasonal offer price changes.
4. Customer Communications
Smart bots and chats with excellent problem-solving capabilities are becoming increasingly common. They work perfectly for simple queries like shipping statuses, order confirmations, and basic FAQs.
These requests represent a large percentage of why users reach out to customer support, making them ideal tasks to delegate to automation.
What We Shouldn’t Automate
Automation is revolutionizing the way we manage our businesses, but many aspects still benefit from creative, expert human intervention.
1. Brand Voice and Storytelling
You are the one who must define your brand’s personality, your market purpose, and the emotional value that enhances people’s lives. While artificial intelligence can generate high-quality, functional content, having a human expert brings cultural and emotional context that truly resonates.
2. Customer Experience Design
Aspects such as customer journey mapping, emotional design elements, and friction point identification require human intuition and shouldn’t be replaced. Empathy cannot yet be automated, nor can the implementation of creative solutions.
3. Strategic Merchandising Decisions
When making business development decisions, adapting to market trends, or defining brand positioning, it’s essential to do so based on experience and deep knowledge of the field.
Decisions around generating new brand partnership opportunities or expanding into new product categories still can’t be automated, they require thoughtful human involvement from someone who understands the business model.
4. Complex Customer Service Interactions
Although recurring and basic interactions can be automated, there are certain situations that are prudent to handle personally. For example, complaint resolution, unique cases, emotional customer situations, and complex product consultations.
Customers value having access to a knowledgeable person quickly and seamlessly. That’s why it’s important to communicate our contact methods across all sales platforms
5. Crisis Management and Adaptation
Human judgment is vital in difficult decision-making, such as supply chain disruption responses, public relations challenges, market shift adaptation, or regulatory change navigation. Artificial intelligence still isn’t equipped to handle these situations, as it would need access to historical context and human discernment to respond appropriately.
Balance Is The Key
Automation and artificial intelligence are evolving exponentially every day; we are fortunate to live in an era of technological revolution where we have access to systems that help us grow faster and efficiently.
Most successful companies are already implementing solutions for those areas that can be automated. Tools like Catsy PIM work particularly well, as they allow you to manage your products and synchronize product attributes and digital assets from a single source of product truth.
Thus, we automate repetitive tasks while enhancing human decision-making.
The most important thing is to be able to recognize opportunities that require our human judgment, leveraging technology to create a competitive advantage.