Crisis or not, here’s why you should be automating customer service
A crisis in customer service can take on many different shapes and forms. For airlines, for example, news of a plane accident might lead to a big number of customers wanting to cancel upcoming travel plans. In retail, mass production of a faulty product can mean a spike in order cancellations or returns. Even predictable peak seasons in sales, such as Christmas or other holidays, can turn into a customer service crisis if a team is not prepared to handle the increase in customer requests. But none has been quite as ubiquitous as the Coronavirus pandemic, which has hit virtually all economic sectors on a global level.
Ever since March 10th, when the World Health Organization declared the Coronavirus pandemic, businesses have been, with more or less difficulties, adjusting to a “new normal.” But for some, taking the time to step back, plan and think about the best way to adapt to the situation wasn’t an option. The tourism sector was immediately affected by travel restrictions and borders closing down; brick-and-mortar stores were forced to close their doors and rely exclusively on the internet to keep sales afloat; supermarkets saw their online orders and home deliveries spike. All this took its toll on customer support teams who, already faced with the challenge of shifting to remote work in the blink of an eye, were also caught by a never-before-seen increase in customer requests in just a matter of days.
A customer service crisis
Since the start of the pandemic, Zendesk has been analyzing support ticket behavior of over 20.000 companies worldwide and sharing the results on its Benchmark Snapshot report. During one week alone, between the 15th and the 22nd of March, Zendesk observed a 20% increase in the number of tickets created compared to the same period of 2019. According to the report, the top three impacted businesses were remote conferencing and learning platforms (up 216%), airlines (up 199%) and grocery brands (up 39%).
As the situation evolved, volumes shifted a little. Just over three months into the pandemic, grocery delivery businesses moved to the top of the highest number of customer service tickets, with an increase of 85%. Next come gaming companies, with an increase of 43%, remote conferencing and learning platforms with 40% and e-commerce with 37%. Despite the initial spike, airlines are now seeing customer requests drop 29%, with the continued resolution of complaints and cancellations resulting from travel restrictions and no significant number of new reservations being placed at the moment.
Yet even for businesses that are seeing their customer interactions go back to normal, Zendesk reports that customer service tickets are still up 48% on average compared to their usual pre-pandemic values.
Not surprisingly, since an increase in customer requests isn’t the only challenge industries are facing. In the midst of the economic crisis derived from the pandemic, many businesses were forced to do major budget cuts, which, more often than not, involved laying off a significant amount of employees or shutting down operations altogether in a few locations. Expedia, one of the biggest online travel agencies, had to lay off 3000 employees; Macy’s, a North American department store company, laid off 9% of its headcount and closed one of its contact centers in Arizona; Lufthansa has 87.000 workers on government-backed shorter hours schemes, and is still likely to have to cut 22.000 full-time positions.
So not only are customer request volumes increasing, but, in a lot of cases, there is a reduced workforce left to deal with them. Managers and employees alike might feel lost when it comes to this, and it feels like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. One thing that can really make a difference is automating customer service operations.
Automation to the rescue
Automation in customer service is nothing new and it’s been around for a while, with the rising popularity of chatbots and AI-generated knowledge bases, for example. Yet, you may or may not be surprised to learn that, according to 2019’s Salesforce Report on the State of Customer Support, only 24% of businesses currently use AI in their customer service strategy and that, consequently, between 37% and 57% of customer service representatives still spend a significant portion of their time doing mundane and repetitive tasks, while they could be handling more urgent or complicated cases, answering phone calls or replying to customers through social media or other channels.
Bots, automated replies and knowledge bases are valuable tools that take over these sorts of tasks, while also empowering your team and increasing productivity. By taking at least part of the repetition and monotony away from agents’ daily work, and reducing each agent’s backlog of tickets in the process, automation leaves them with enough time to focus on those requests where they feel like they are really making a difference. And this isn’t just a matter of how agents feel at work — it has an impact on business as well.
Customer service is well known for having high turnover rates. According to Contact Babel’s UK Contact Centre HR & Operational Benchmarking Report, in 2018 agent turnover rates were at an average of 21% across all industries, with that number being even higher in larger companies. This poses a need for constant hiring and training, as employees leave and need to be replaced, which in turn has associated costs that could be invested elsewhere if employees didn’t decide to quit.
Even when they don’t, demotivation and a low team morale have an impact on business performance, with less-motivated agents often being inclined to doing to the bare minimum, with no interest in delivering the best possible outcomes for the cases they handle.
Of course, its repetitive nature isn’t the only reason why customer service is challenging. Dealing with complaints on a daily basis isn’t easy, especially given that, a lot of times, customers tend to forget they are talking to another human being whenever they contact customer service.
Now take all of the regular stress that comes with the job, add a global pandemic to it, and just try to picture what tough times customer support teams are having. Of course, managers and team leads can’t control outside factors, but if there are internal processes and solutions that can be implemented to make an employee’s daily work run more smoothly, these are worth investing in.
What (not) to automate
Automation obviously doesn’t only have a positive impact on agents’ experience, but on the customers’ as well. In the case of chatbots or automated email replies, they significantly shorten the amount of time a customer has to wait for an answer, with it coming within just a few minutes instead of hours or sometimes even days if agents have to manually reply to all requests and have an ever growing backlog. A knowledge base that is kept up to date by AI also improves the experience of looking for an answer and actually finding it without any help, removing the need to reach out to customer support altogether.
But automation shouldn’t be faced as a quick-fix that can just be implemented and done with, or else it could backfire. If chatbots aren’t trained well enough and just give nonsense replies, or if the automated emails sent out don’t match the customer’s questions, customers are likely to end up sending more requests on top of their original ones, further adding to agents’ backlogs and increasing their workload, which in turn makes reply times become longer and only makes customers more angry.
If you’re thinking about adding automation to your support operations, a good place to start is by doing an analysis of your customers’ requests and pinpointing their most common queries that always require the same answer. Think of “how do I reset my password?” or “how do I change my account details?”. From there, with the right AI solution in place, there is a lot you can do. You can do a triage of all incoming tickets and assign them into different categories. You can generate a knowledge base with all common questions and answers and email templates that your agents can use to reply to emails with just the click of a button. You can even have AI reply to your customers’ most common requests automatically, without them needing to go through the hands of a human. And the best part is, you don’t have to do it all by yourself.
If you want to start adding automation to your support operations and leave your agents to focus on the cases that can’t go without a human touch, request a demo or reach out to us to learn more about how Cleverly can help your business. It is impossible to predict when the next crisis is going to hit, so it’s best to be prepared. And, crisis or not, it’s always a good idea to implement solutions that will improve the experience for customers and support agents alike.
