The What, Why and Wow of Customer Service Automation

You can see an example of this in action within our support article on setting up call forwarding. Intelligent chatbots can collect contact information from leads without filling out any forms. Then, that chatbot escalates the lead to a sales agent so they can call them the next day. Anticipating customer needs before they arise is an example of excellent customer service.

If you have a large team or are looking for the best solution, these offerings are going to be right for you. As this space evolves, the providers are often focused on the intelligence that goes into routing conversations more than solving conversations directly. Virtual assistants are common and they are often paired with an agent to create more powerful and efficient support agents.

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Some customers love rolling up their sleeves and digging into help center articles, while some customers aren’t interested in more than a quick scan. And if they need more help, your customers can still follow up with a support rep. With both live chat and automation in your arsenal, you can truly meet your customers anywhere and at any time they need you. 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.

One of the best steps to automating your customer service is to switch to automated ticketing software. Poorly planned customer service automation often leads to poor customer experiences. Each customer receives the same acknowledgement that their ticket is being handled, the same notifications of status changes, and timely responses guaranteed by automated SLA management. For instance, assigning customer issues to the support agents with the wrong expertise leads to transferring customers from one support representative to another.

Automate Ticket Routing

An automated workflow will keep you up to date and in the loop without having to actually remember or know when it’s a lead’s anniversary using your product. Like most of the other processes in this article, it’s essential to maintain regular account reviews to keep up to date on where different customers are in their product journey. The problem was, customer support used to be a manual form of work, sitting by the phone and waiting for customers to call. In automation, macros are pre-made responses used to quickly accomplish recurring and repetitive tasks.

For customer service automation success, you need to take feedback from customers as well as employees. Similarly, take regular feedback to understand if employees are facing any challenges adapting to the new technology. Chatbots use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to hold meaningful conversations with customers, help you generate leads, and boost engagement. Even when your customer service team members aren’t available, chatbots can interact with prospects or customers and resolve their basic questions. Although modern customer support tools are relatively easier-to-use, agents might need some time to adjust to them.

Customer service automation is an effective cost-reduction measure to improve the customer experience without compromising quality. As it reduces the need for human involvement, you get to spend less on hiring, training, and managing customer support reps or employees who handle customer queries. Of course, one of the biggest complaints about automated customer service is that it lacks a personal touch. Even though customers can talk to a live agent, the agents working with canned responses might not personalize them enough and will instead sound robotic, causing further frustration for customers.

It is crucial to identify the tasks that are taking up your employees’ time and look into what can be automated. Automating customer support or data entry tasks will free up time for team members to focus on relationship-building activities. While support automation may have been optional in the past, it’s becoming an integral part of business operations today. The importance of providing timely support to both customers and employees is overwhelming. Even the most highly-skilled agents aren’t exempt from committing errors, especially when performing repetitive tasks.

Information silos are a major obstacle to a successful omnichannel strategy, and the same is true for automation. Likewise, customers expect consistency above all else across service channels you offer. That doesn’t mean that all channels are equal when it comes to being automated. You wouldn’t go to the trouble of introducing a supplementary channel if your customers won’t use it; so don’t automate a channel if it doesn’t benefit your customers. A chatbot might be a solid idea, but it could also prove frustrating if the bot doesn’t suit the needs of the customers. If your automated customer service leaves them frustrated of feeling taken advantage of, they’ll disengage from your brand altogether.

For example, chatbots lack the required empathy to de-escalate frustrated customers. Less sophisticated ones point customers to irrelevant articles and create a confusing experience. 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.

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