What Is Customer Service Automation? +Pros, Cons, & Best Practices

In certain situations, the efficiency and convenience of automated tools are preferable. Conversely, there are times when the comfort and personal touch of human agents are desired. This complex decision-making process highlights the intricate nature of Customer Service Automation.

But how can you implement personalized, automated customer service in your business? One of the most important things to consider as you wade into automated customer service is usability for your team. If your team is unable to use the technology easily, it brings everything to a screeching halt. Automated customer support can take over most data-related tasks, such as retrieving customer feedback and handling purchases. It can pull customer data from different business databases and perform updates swiftly without any mistakes. For example, if it takes one hour to respond to 10 customers traditionally, an automated customer service system will complete the job in less time.

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In this article, we will delve into automation in customer service by explaining its use cases, benefits and best practices for achieving it. Some companies offer “premium support” as part of a higher-priced plans. This is one popular way to set this up to work on the back-end—moving requests from specific customers (i.e., those on the higher plan) to the front of the queue. As your business grows, it gets harder to not only stay on top of email, but the multiplicity of communication channels in which your customers live and breath. Automating customer service creates opportunities to offload the human-to-human touchpoints when they’re either inefficient or unnecessary.

To successfully begin automating your customer service and increasing customer satisfaction, consider following these six steps. Automated customer service tools such as chatbots allow you to provide omnichannel, personalized customer service at scale. AI automation makes it easy to test, measure, and learn so that you can continually optimize the customer service experience. You should look to customer service automation to empower your team to provide an excellent customer experience.

Only able to handle simple queries

Luckily, self-service help centres and chatbots can actually work 24/7. Speed of adaptivity plays a key role here, as consumers tend to have their expectations for customer service increasing. Companies feel immense pressure to catch up – and that’s where customer support automation can save the day. You can also combine bots + live chat software to ensure hybrid support where bots will manage FAQs while agents will be ready to handle more complex chats. Customer service automation software makes it simpler to build and maintain relationships with customers.

These automated functions reduce customer dissatisfaction due to long response times. Email automation is a lifesaver for businesses receiving extensive inquiries and support requests. But less sophisticated systems might send customers to irrelevant articles, leading to a bad experience, bruised brand trust, and even escalations that require human intervention. So, sit back and read on to find out what makes customer service automation a game-changer. You don’t have many inquiries yet, and you can easily handle all the customer service by yourself. It’s the best way to learn what issues they have with your products and services.

Customer service automation use cases

Your contact center will receive two broad categories of queries; those that can be handled by chatbots or virtual assistants and those that need the intervention of human staff. This prompts you to make data-backed decisions faster so you can focus on the tasks that require your full attention like meeting up with your agents. Customer service automation is the process of addressing clients’ requests with minimal human interaction to enhance the customer journey.

By automating routine tasks, employees can focus on more complex and rewarding tasks, which can improve job satisfaction and reduce burnout. Advanced AI can predict when a customer might encounter an issue (for instance, based on their usage patterns) and proactively provide assistance or resources. Automation can tailor promotional messages and offers based on individual customer preferences and behavior.

Automated customer service will be able to solve questions and free up resources for your skilled agents.You may also be ready if you have a remote workforce across different time zones. The monumental shift here is to view customer service as vital to maximizing customer lifetime value versus a cost center. Tying in your CRM with customer service tools is necessary to achieve that goal. By creating pre-built responses for top call drivers, you can equip your team to support customers via email, chat, social media, and phone. 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.

There are simple automated solutions like a Twitter scraper that can regularly and tirelessly monitor social media for mentions of your company. Customers are becoming both particularly rewarding and punishing in this respect, and expectations rise. On the one hand, if everything goes well, they are more likely to praise or recommend a brand on social media. At the same time, every 2nd customer expects a response from a company’s social media within a 24h period. Which just means social media is an important channel to cover for customer support and staying vigilant is the solution.

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They’ve leaned in on automation with RingCentral’s help, creating automated text message campaigns tied to their CRM. Not every customer is going to speak your language, literally and figuratively. The vocabulary you use for your products and services might not line up exactly with how customers would talk about them. Website chat also reduces typo errors and redundancy from handling multiple queries manually. Plus, you can collect lead information from website visitors directly through a chatbot so you can follow up or nurture them through the funnel later.

This frees up human agents to handle more strategic tasks and complex user queries. Automating certain processes improves efficiency of any customer service organization. In fact,  88% of customers expect automated self-service when they interact with a business. CRM systems empower businesses to elevate their customer service quality. A suitable first step for automating your customer service is to create a knowledge base.

Caring for customers with automation that feels personal

If customers can’t reach a human representative ASAP, that can impact their takeaway impression. You can simulate sympathy and empathy with a chatbot, but it’s hard to fake realistically. Human beings tend to be better at providing an honest emotional advantages of automated customer service response. You can also drill down on the specifics to precisely measure the impact of new content. Do this by comparing the number of customer support cases before and after implementing a new section or updated article in your knowledge base.

• Some examples of AI customer service include AI chatbots and automated ticketing systems.
• Or who likes to deal with an old piece of software when it’s the 21st century already?
• Customer service agents and supervisors might view the automated customer service systems as a threat.
• 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.