Customer Service Automation: How to Save Time and Delight Customers
Most companies recognize the enormous benefits of using automation technology to augment their customer service team. Automating customer service processes offers a multitude of different benefits for organizations, no matter how big or small the company happens to be. Today’s businesses are increasingly reliant on interconnected digital tools, from apps and management systems to communication software and online platforms. Automation helps to bring these ideas together, and in doing so it allows companies to streamline their processes in a way that’s never been possible before. With automation, businesses have access to far greater capabilities than they ever would have had before. Enhanced efficiency makes it possible for organizations to rapidly ramp up their customer service offering, giving them new and improved opportunities to impress every single customer.
In 2023, there are several tools available to offer automated customer service. To prevent issues with these three types of customers, consider maintaining a list of questions that you don’t allow to be answered by automation. Customers who ask about pricing, who are identified as at-risk or “high-touch,” or trial users can be automatically routed to a team member for assistance. Though AI is learning to handle complex problems, for the time being, these customers will get the best service possible if you send them to a human, not a bot. Over the last decade, live chat has become the standard for companies wanting to offer top-tier support.
The wow: Improving data-driven insights with customer service automation
Automation can only handle simple tasks, such as answering frequently asked questions, sending email campaigns to your leads, and operating according to the set rules. And if the shopper has a complex issue inquiry that chatbots can’t handle, the client can leave their contact information for the representative to get in touch with them first thing in the morning. First of all—your customers expect you to be available 24/7 to answer their queries. In fact, a study shows that 51% of consumers say that they need a business to be available at any hour of any day. There are quite a few automations available to put your customer service on autopilot. Used wisely, it allows you to achieve the hardest thing in customer service—provide personal support at scale.
When customers are transferred between different communication channels or agents, they shouldn’t have to repeat their entire issue over and over again. Email remains a central part of the customer experience and a valuable tool for all stages of the sales funnel. Email automation software can track open and click-through rates and turn those metrics into insights that can help you test new automated email flows.
Fin, the breakthrough AI bot for customer service, keeps getting better
It will enable customer service teams to reduce the time it takes to acknowledge cases, reduce diagnosis time and create consistency in their approach. By identifying these tasks, organizations can walk through the current processes with customer service teams to understand the steps they follow. This process enables organizations to get specific in the tasks they want and need to automate to help shorten engagement time.
Lastly, while an effective knowledge base allows you to stay two steps ahead of your customers, there will be times where your knowledge base doesn’t cut it. Automating customer service creates opportunities to offload the human-to-human touchpoints when they’re either inefficient or unnecessary. Certainly, it’s dangerous to approach automation with a set-it-and-forget-it mentality. Yes, unchecked autoresponders and chat bots can rob your company of meaningful relationships with customers.
One key way that automation can improve customer service is by enabling 24/7 customer support. 24/7 customer support is necessary for scaling companies looking to expand customer service efforts and provide support at all times for more people. In fact, over 50% of customers expect a business to be available 24/7 these days. AI isn’t just helpful for automating responses and triaging incoming tickets, it can also help agents on a per-ticket basis and support them with relevant information to help resolve customer queries.
Customer service automation should be able to fill in the gaps and help you improve your customer experience while removing the most mundane and low-value tasks from their plates. Empowering agents with contact center software means giving them a helping hand on every call. Technology enables agents to take a more proactive role in raising revenue through upsell and cross-sell, customer retention, automating customer service and other activities. This empowers customer service and support reps to be more effective and efficient when Conversational AI releases them from the burden of routine activities. Now that AI has made real-time support a revenue resource, integration with social media platforms has expanded and achieving a positive customer experience is now considered an enterprise-wide target.
Integrate CRM Data To Automate Email Responses
According to Statista, the average wait time across all chatbox chats is 88 seconds, while waiting on hold during a call can take several minutes. But being able to answer common questions is only the tip of the iceberg. When you have true top-to-bottom automation across the entire customer journey, you’ll be collecting data and insights that can help every team, at every step. Automation tools can be a real boon for customer support agents, for instance, since they can help surface real-time prompts and customer-specific insight during each call or chat. Customers really respond to personalized offers and communications, but it’s next to impossible to do this at scale without automating the process. Customer experience automation can help you gather the data you need to offer truly personalized customer journeys, as well as provide the tools needed to actually deliver them.
