What does automation mean to you?

Ah, the joys of automation…

Waiting for 8am to access the doctor’s surgery website so it can crash while you’re too ill to see and just trying to get an appointment…

Spending half your lunchbreak on hold on the phone waiting to speak to a human being…

Trying to get tickets for your favourite band or music festival, only to be kicked out at the last second, told you’re a bot, then logging back in to find all the tickets are gone…

Searching for a hotel or a flight, confirming with your partner and booking the time off work, then finding it’s doubled in price when you book it…

Being squeezed out of your job, or pushed harder and harder to complete work as if you’re a robot…

And a new entry for 2025: being inundated with long, meandering “reports” and other AI-generated slop that says nothing, and which you can only trawl through by getting an AI to summarise it for you before you respond…

This is the worst of automation. It’s wasting people’s time, it’s flooding every aspect of our lives with meaningless content and pointless hurdles and it’s making life worse for everyone – other than perhaps touts selling everything from Coldplay tickets to driving test slots,  and shareholders at big multinational corporations, who are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of laying off huge numbers of staff, cutting costs and cutting corners… all the while not realising that because every other corporation is doing exactly the same, there will be nobody left earning a decent enough wage to buy their products and we’re about to enter an economic doom loop of global proportions.

Anyway… after calming down and talking to a professional about my gloomy outlook, I’m here to tell you that for me, and for JKSL, automation is a way to remove the hurdles and the mindless work that nobody enjoys. It’s a way to make things more efficient and accessible for our customers. It’s a way to support and empower our site teams and to free them from unnecessary paperwork. It’s how we help our teams to focus on the work that we value; not the paperwork and admin.

We call this system JK Connect, and it’s been developed, tested and honed by our team over the course of several years, when the remote working and social distancing enforced by COVID forced us to do things differently and to provide as much information to our clients electronically, but which has evolved into a company-wide system for managing information and streamlining the workload of booking and reporting on over a thousand inspections every summer.

It’s not an “off-the-peg” solution designed with big corporations in mind; it’s not a solution for other industries that’s been butchered and bastardised to try to fit our needs – it was built from the ground up by people who understand how this industry works, how Japanese Knotweed Solutions works, and how we interact with our customers – and improved in-house when our customers provide us with feedback about how we can improve.

JK Connect doesn’t routinely use AI in our communications and when you contact us on the phone, via email or through our website, the first person you will talk to will be one of our team. We do use templates to make requests and provide information and reporting, but these are set up to streamline and personalise information as far as we can, and any replies, questions or requests (or complaints!) will be reviewed and responded to by a human being.

• We use electronic channels for all of our communications by default – pop us an email to confirm your appointments (or get your AI assistant to send it for you!)
• We follow up with in-person communications, a phone call or your preferred method (including Royal Mail for the clients who prefer it)
• We’ll automatically send you confirmations, reminders and reports – but if anything hasn’t gone to plan, this will be reviewed by one of our project managers and we will be in touch through the contact details that you provide us – whether this is by phone, email or snail mail.

99 sites out of 100 fit into these boxes; 9 visits out of ten are routine and everything is going to plan; the majority of our programmes are completed without a hitch – the client has given us access when required; they haven’t disturbed the ground or spread invasive species around; if they have sold the site, they’ve passed on the new contact details; the neighbours or tenants haven’t caused problems or refused access; the weather has been kind and any of a hundred things that could have gone wrong, haven’t.

But when sites are huge, complicated or when contractors (or clients themselves) cause unforeseen issues, we need to know, and we need a system to deal with it. Which we have.

Rest assured, when your site does not fit neatly into a box, the computer will not say no – a real person will do what they can to try to find a solution that fits for you, and our team will make the effort to ensure that this works for you.

If you want a client whose systems aren’t designed around the work that they do, and aren’t designed to make life easy for you, there are plenty out there… but if you want to be treated like a human being and looked after by a human being, Japanese Knotweed Solutions would love to hear from you.

We’d love to hear from existing clients, too, if you think we can improve our systems – get in touch and let us know! Speak to one of our team on 0161 723 2000 or put your thoughts in an email to [email protected] – we use automation but at the end of the day, what makes us different is that we value our team, the input and experience of our clients, and we are here to listen and improve.