Automated Customer Service: Advantages and Examples

Technology can make your life easier – but only when used in the right way. Not only will this minimize the cost to serve and the strain on your contact center, but you’ll empower your agents to make a meaningful impact too. The customers of today greatly prefer speed and efficiency over speaking to a human. With 89% of US customers expecting brands to have a self-service portal, there are customer experience expectations that businesses need to meet. You should look to customer service automation to empower your team to provide an excellent customer experience. If you have a heavy volume of customer contacts, consider a chatbot with responses populated from top call drivers.

With an IVR menu that answers those frequently asked questions, your agents will no longer have to respond to the same questions repeatedly. Instead, they can focus on more complex issues that require their full attention. Thankfully, automation technology is advancing in leaps and bounds. Now there are chatbots that can understand us as we speak, VoIP platforms to make calls over the internet, social media schedulers, and far more. Automation isn’t the best solution for every customer service interaction, but when it’s used well, it can save money, make your business more efficient, and even reduce human error.

How to Automate Customer Service to Save Time and Delight Customers

Scale your support by deflecting cases and lowering the cost to serve each customer. This will ultimately lead to, a positive impact on your customer satisfaction scores. Check out our related reading below to learn more about how you can get started on your automation journey. Get closer to your customers with the most popular chat app in South East Asia.

• The human-to-human experience is one of the most valuable aspects of any successful support service, and you should never sacrifice it for automation.
• Since IVR is capable of handling dozens of calls at a time and can even perform some simple tasks, having one can help your agents manage their workloads better.
• Customers love automated customer service because it enables them to get the answers they need, in an instant.
• If you want to send a Slack direct message to a channel every time your team receives an especially high-priority request, you can set up a trigger for that.
• Artificially intelligent chatbots aren’t just for Fortune 500 companies.
• With the tools and technologies widely available today, what excuse is there not to provide better service and support for your customers?

Companies are likely to shift their budget beyond one-to-one contact. Reps will need to become less reliant on scripts and provide more personalized support. If you don’t offer automated customer service, you’re limiting the level of service you can provide to savvy customers. Automating customer service processes comes with a host of benefits. Besides lower costs, let’s dive in to learn why more businesses are automating their customer service. On its own, automation won’t solve all of your customers’ problems – it needs to be supported by a strong knowledge base and answers from your support team.

The Million-Dollar Opportunity: Optimizing Your Customer Journey Touchpoints

Traditionally, companies have helped customers fix issues with a team of customer service agents. These support agents managed service interactions through inbound phone calls, email, and other channels. However, it is necessary to mention that not all automation is beneficial.

• Successful integration depends upon customer service management presenting intelligent automation as a complement to human customer support, not a replacement.
• There are quite a few automations available to put your customer service on autopilot.
• If your customer service team is overwhelmed and you aren’t using chatbots, it may be time to consider it.
• Customers who need information about their account, answers to frequent questions, or help finding a particular resource benefit most from this process.
• Include videos for greater interactiveness and have your support team review the content often for accuracy.
• The company, though, was growing concerned about its previous contact center solution—mainly, the lack of customer support.

If you automate your team’s customer service duties, you’ll save time on redundant tasks that can be dedicated to clients who need deeper assistance. They also improve accuracy and allow your team to offer a great experience that keeps clients loyal to your brand. Even though AI customer service tools such as chatbots and IVR can answer many clients’ questions, these are primarily simple ones. Like checking order status, setting up appointments, asking about opening hours, and other how-to inquiries. Often, customer support automation involves a combination of strategies.

Reduces Customer Service Costs When Used Correctly

Thinking of it this way may lead to customer-unfriendly automations that can quickly damage your company’s reputation. A better approach is to think of it as a customer service enhancement — something to implement in situations where it truly brings value to your customer. As increasingly more companies offer 24/7 support, customers are used to getting help at any time. If customers have a problem and you ask them to wait until the next day, you risk losing them. We can now find information on any topic within seconds or order a product in just a few clicks.

For example, your company’s chatbot could direct customers to a list of FAQs. Or your business could incorporate a chatbot into your social media platforms or website. Use AI to respond to the repeatable, and costly, issues that consumers ask about frequently such as return/exchange policies and processes. AI can also educate customers about complex services or products, like applying for a mortgage or comparing credit cards.

Effective customer engagement is business critical – insights from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services

Set up automatic customer feedback surveys — NPS, CSAT, CES — to collect the information you need to improve the customer experience. You can automate the time that these surveys are shared with customers so they can fill them out after completing specific actions (e.g. making a purchase, speaking with a rep over the phone, etc.). Ultimately, customer service automation can help you improve the customer experience. When a chat becomes inactive, it definitely clogs your team’s performance.

Moreover, provide employee training and onboarding for your agents to completely use all the benefits of automation with less resistance to changes. Not everyone is tech-savvy, and some people want human interaction. This is especially important when a shopper has an issue and wants to be heard and understood. Human empathy is also unmatched when dealing with angry customers.

What Is Customer Service Automation?

It improves your service quality by eliminating human error and improving consistency and accuracy, leading to a better customer journey and higher satisfaction rates. There is nothing wrong with using automated canned responses as long as they don’t sound robotic. Automated responses don’t need to be disguised as real people, but they must be customized and personalized according to relevant issues.

It’s the best way to learn what issues they have with your products and services. Especially since most customers like proactive communication and about 87% of them want to be contacted proactively by the business. Maybe the buyer just forgot their password, and it’s preventing them from shopping at your online store. Chatbots can handle inquiries outside your business hours, welcome all of the visitors to your website, and answer frequently asked questions without human involvement. Here are seven of the best customer service automation strategies.

• It’s predicted that by 2020, 80% of enterprises will rely on chatbot technology to help them scale their customer service departments while keeping costs down.
• Human empathy is also unmatched when dealing with angry customers.
• We’ve seen customers for whom Resolution Bot resolves 33% of the queries it gets involved in and improves customer response time by 44%.
• It needed a contact center solution that could let its agents and specialists handle email, chat support, and telephone support, even if they’re working remotely.
• For example, send tracking numbers and updates when the product ships or delays happen.
• In seconds, your customer service team can view this information.

If you prefer, you can use these notifications to collaborate without even leaving your Slack channel. You just need to choose the app you want Zapier to watch for new data and create a trigger event to continue setting up the workflow. Using tools like Zapier to deliver such gestures at scale is a great way to score extra points with your audience while Automation Customer Service helping you and your team along the way. If you’re using a tiered support system, you can use rules to send specific requests to higher tiers of support or to escalate them to different departments. When you’re not around, choose from multiple offline settings, including a customized away message, a contact form or hiding the chat box entirely.