Confer with personnel to coordinate business operations
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
Software drafts well and sends at volume, and vertical support agents now resolve a large share of inbound questions end to end. What does not transfer is the relationship, and the judgment about when a message should not be sent at all.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Routine communication and explanation |
| Jobs that do it | 9 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Communicating with Supervisors, Peers, or Subordinates (4.A.4.a.2) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 9 occupations that perform it.
- Write and present strategies for recreational facility programming using customer or employee data.
- Obtain information about customer needs or preferences by conferring with sales or purchasing personnel.
- Confer with staff, users, and vendors to discuss defective or unacceptable goods or services and determine corrective action.
- Meet with job search committees or coordinators to explain the role of the equal opportunity coordinator, to provide resources for advertising, or to explain expectations for future contacts.
- Consult with clients, vendors, personnel in other departments, or construction foremen to discuss and formulate estimates and resolve issues.
- Collaborate with other departments as necessary to meet customer requirements, to take advantage of sales opportunities or, in the case of shortages, to minimize negative impacts on a business.
- Confer with personnel concerned to ensure successful functioning of newly implemented systems or procedures.
- Confer with staff at a chosen event site to coordinate details.
- Confer with other financial engineers or analysts on trading strategies, market dynamics, or trading system performance to inform development of quantitative techniques.
- Conduct sales meetings to introduce new merchandise.
- Review catalogs, industry periodicals, directories, trade journals, and Internet sites and consult with other department personnel to locate necessary goods and services.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for routine communication and explanation, and what it costs.
Drafting replies costs nothing beyond the assistant you already pay for. Only move to a support agent billed per resolution once the inbound volume is large enough that the per-resolution price beats the hour it takes you.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
9 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Cost Estimators
- Entertainment and Recreation Managers, Except Gambling
- Equal Opportunity Representatives and Officers
- Financial Quantitative Analysts
- Logisticians
- Management Analysts
- Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners
- Purchasing Agents, Except Wholesale, Retail, and Farm Products
- Wholesale and Retail Buyers, Except Farm Products
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Communicate with others about business strategies”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.