Customer Service Automation: How to Save Time and Delight Customers

Technology helps you ride the wave of growth, effortlessly adapting to handle surges in customer interactions while maintaining top-notch quality. By investing in these scalable tools, organizations can tame the beast of customer service demands. There is always a cut-off point at which a customer’s solution is too complex, or their frustration too high, to be resolved by technology. 49% of customers have encountered insufficient self-service options, leading to frustration and abandoned attempts.

They may leverage automation to handle customer interactions from start to finish or use it as a tool to assist live agents. Traditionally, companies have helped customers fix issues with a team of customer service agents. These support agents managed service interactions through inbound automated services customer relationship phone calls, email, and other channels. As the company grew, so did its need for more support staff.Unfortunately, hiring means added expenses for the company. As a result, customer service automation became a cost-reduction measure to scale support without sacrificing quality.

Self-service irritates some customers

Customer retention is an important success metric for any business, and automation can help streamline and speed up resolution times, a key factor in keeping customers happy. What’s more, you can infuse it with a little bit of personality to boost your customer experience. Starbucks’ seasonal superstar, Pumpkin Spice Latte, got its very own chatbot in 2016. Fans of the autumnal favorite got to chat with PSL just for fun—and while its responses didn’t always actually answer a question, it was certainly charming. Intercom is one of the best helpdesk automation tools for large businesses.

These tools relieve support teams of doing simple but tedious manual tasks every day, allowing them to focus their attention and time on customers. A lot of customer service work involves repetitive tasks that drain resources within a company. In an e-commerce business, customer service agents help resolve product or shipping inquiries, usually when things don’t go the way as expected. AI can help you deliver more efficient and personalized customer service. Explore Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, to discover how AI-driven chatbots and analytics are transforming the customer experience.

How does Zendesk help with automating customer service?

It improves the customer service experience and automates responses to straightforward queries, freeing up your customer service team to handle more complex issues. With automated customer service solutions effortlessly handling simple, high-volume tasks, your live agents can dedicate their time to providing support in situations that benefit from a human touch. For example, automation technology can help support teams by providing contextual article recommendations based on customer feedback and automatically routing requests to the right agents. This helps boost agent productivity and allows agents to focus on resolving issues that truly require a human touch. Customer service agents and supervisors might view the automated customer service systems as a threat.

The real problem with customer support automation lies with an over-reliance on technology to do the jobs best left for real, live people. Once you collect some of the common customer service questions with your live chat tool, you can start setting up your bots. This way, the bot will recognize different ways of asking questions and respond to them appropriately.

And if we have a question or problem, we want to get customer support right away. Using SleekFlow has reduced our “drop-offs”, improved the response time, and solved niggling issues with CRM integration. This would minimize the chances of customers approaching calling your Help Center, thus enhancing the capacity for them to deal with more complex customer issues. It should come as no surprise, then, that for every dollar spent on email marketing, the average business will achieve an ROI of $40 — far outpacing ad categories like SEO and banner ads. Using an automated email tool to send a drip series of actionable tips will influence customers over an extended length of time. Customers want answers fast, and as a result, more would rather have their cases resolved through a web chat than over a phone call.

By automating data entry, validation, and verification processes, errors are eliminated, and data integration becomes seamless. Customer service teams and AI can work without the burden of data inconsistencies, ensuring smooth operations and efficient service delivery. When you implement support automation in your business, you have a 24-hour communication channel. So, for example, when your automation system spots a new message from a customer, it can immediately send a confirmation of your choice. Customers will definitely be more satisfied if they don’t have to wait so long for the first response from your side.

Expert Tips for Transforming Transactional Customer Service into Relational Service

But when you have a business, your representatives’ errors can lose you customers and decrease the trust shoppers put in your business. You can’t always be on unless you spend thousands of dollars to hire agents for night shifts. RingCentral’s automated call distribution system worked like gangbusters for them. This small business out of Nebraska designs T-shirts for fundraisers.

It’s important to think of automation as a living, breathing thing, not a switch you flip once and walk away from. Help desk and ticketing software automatically combine all rep-to-customer conversations in a one-on-one communication inbox. The platform through which you communicate with customers, regardless of channel, should already offer many ways to automate tasks.

HubSpot Help Desk and Ticketing Software

Support reps don’t have the time to conduct an in-depth analysis in every call. Automated customer service tools like Call Pop surface context-sensitive intelligence before answering an incoming call. Below is an example of what a Call Pop notification would look like to one of your support reps. They can deliver a top-notch customer experience without navigating a myriad of tools, tabs, or spreadsheets. On the other hand, automated customer service provides 24/7 customer support without interruption.

• It can be difficult to keep the same tone and voice across communications — especially as it’s impacted by each individual, their experiences, and even their passing moods.
• This is probably the biggest and most intuitive advantage of automation.
• Then, as a result of your rep successfully assisting the customer, HubSpot automatically compiles and provides data for that ticket — this includes information like ticket volume or response time.
• Customer support automation is one way you can get more customers the answers and assistance they need with a small support team.

With these out of the way, agents’ productivity and engagement increase. They can finally apply their unique human talents to more complex and challenging cases. By the way, for this reason, it’s a myth that automation causes people to lose their jobs. Here are some of the most impactful benefits of automated customer service that help your customers and your support team to save time and get more done.

Artificial intelligence has developed to the point where chatbots and virtual assistants can have more nuanced interactions with humans—and that opens a wealth of possibilities. This will ultimately save you agent workload time and cut overhead costs. This customer service outreach reduces churn and yields valuable insights for improvement.

You can use this to assemble an automated system which replies to people asking common questions with links to knowledge base articles or another similar resource. From the outside in, customers don’t want to use mystic software systems to “open a ticket.” They want to use what they know and like—be it email, social, chat, or the phone. But also, customer reviews can increase the trustworthiness of your website and improve your brand image.

If your customers can’t reach a human representative when they need one, you risk leaving them with a bad customer experience. Fortunately, you can avoid this by providing your customers with a clear way to bypass automated service systems and speak to a human when necessary. Automated customer service has the potential to benefit both small businesses and enterprises. Read along to learn more about the benefits of implementing automated customer service, from saving time and money to gaining valuable customer insights. When it comes to automated customer service, the above example is only the tip of the iceberg. Next up, we’ll cover different examples of automated customer service to help you better understand what it looks like and how it can help your agents and customers.

For example, chatbot software uses NLP to recognize variations of customer questions. With that in mind, Salesforce and other companies have taken that concept one step further by looking for ways to combine conversational intelligence with technology. In fact, through these efforts, AI-powered conversational intelligence has vastly improved over time. This started with simple text recognition in which it’s fairly easy to achieve a significant degree of accuracy.

Additionally, automating customer service streamlines various processes, such as data entry and ticket routing, resulting in faster handling of customer interactions. The improved efficiency leads to shorter response times, quicker issue resolution, and reduced customer turnaround time. Automated customer service empowers your customers to get the answers they’re looking for – when and how they want.