Automated Customer Service: Examples and Benefits
Have you been thinking of ways to improve the efficiency of your business and enhance its growth? By using an automated customer service, you can eliminate manual processes, human error, and unhappy customers. It gives your support team the opportunity to manage more issues, provide quick solutions, and please customers. The aim of customer service automation is to reduce the need for human labor in customer service, especially for repetitive tasks, resolving common problems, and responding to straightforward inquiries.
In this blog we will uncover the reasons for, the advantages of, and the methods to automate customer service, while still maintaining a personalized experience and avoiding costly investments in artificial intelligence.
What is automated customer service?
Automated customer service refers to process of using automation technology to replace manual tasks. Automating your customer service allows customers to resolve issues without interacting with an agent and customers service representatives to reply to customers swiftly.
Customer service automation lets companies offload human interaction when it is unnecessary or inefficient. Unlike people, automated support systems are accessible 24 hours a day.
You must comprehend the demands of your consumers in order to design a process that will satisfy their goals and make it simpler through automation.
Examples of automated customer service
These are examples of automating customer service.
Knowledge base
The secret to success when it comes to customer service is providing fast responses to customers’ questions and issues. By offering a self-service knowledge base, customer satisfaction is increased, and support ticket volume is decreased.
When customers search for solutions on your website, automation provides knowledge base articles using the keywords in their search terms. This helps the customer to find answers to common problems and questions quickly and at any time, since articles are always available.
Ticket automation
Ticket automation refers to the process of assigning a client’s inquiry to the correct agent or department. Automation rules are utilized to execute recurring, ticket-related activities. These rules can include ticket properties, requester properties, and other filters to determine whether an issue should be escalated or routed to a specific employee with the right expertise.
Despite being an activity that takes place in the background, it still has a huge effect on the customer experience. Spending hours being continuously shuffled among agents is an avoidable frustration. In the absence of special properties, tickets can be automatically distributed according to agent workload.
Customer feedback surveys
To enhance your customer service strategy, you should implement surveys that provide real-time customer feedback. It’s hard to improve something without measuring it first. Your customer service team has the potential to gain valuable insights from customer interactions daily.
You can automate the sending of feedback surveys when purchases are made on your website and when support representatives have resolved customer issues. The surveys will be sent to obtain feedback regarding their experience with your products and customer service. Gathering feedback not only makes customers feel appreciated, but also allows you to refine your products and processes.
Importance of customer support automation
These are some of the reasons why automated customer service is essential.
Lowers operational costs
No matter the size of your support team, automation can help you to grow your successes. Automated customer service allows you to provide more assistance and address more customer inquiries without having to hire more people or overwork your existing support team. This way, you can provide an excellent customer experience and a positive employee experience, while also saving money.
Minimizes waiting time
Speed is paramount when it comes to customer service. By automating your customer service tasks, your support agents can cut out time-consuming parts of the process like emailing customers with updates. Customers can receive automatic notifications when the status of their tickets change, instead. Agents can become more productive and can process customer service requests faster. Automated knowledge base search results also provide customers with simpler answers they need quickly, thus respecting their time and creating a positive customer experience.
Empowers customers
Today’s customers value speed and efficiency over interacting with a person. Automation is revolutionizing the way customer support is provided, putting customers in the driver’s seat by offering them the option to get their issues resolved quickly without having to interact with a human.
While some consumers are only interested in speaking to a real person, others enjoy solving their own problems by reading through help center pages. The trick is to cater to both. Your clients can still contact a support agent if they require more assistance.
Offers 24/7 support
The use of automated customer service offers the advantage of providing support to customers regardless of their circumstances, location, or time zone. This is particularly beneficial since automated tools are not limited by contact center operating hours, and customers can quickly solve simple issues without needing to contact support agents.
This is why automation is especially useful for answering frequently asked questions, either through self-service or automated replies that include links to articles with keywords from customers’ input. This helps to reduce the amount of frustrated customer complaints, as they are still able to receive assistance.
Cuts down on human error
Being human means making mistakes, and this is especially true for repetitive tasks. Automations and templates can be beneficial in fast-paced environments, as they reduce the likelihood of human error. By utilizing automation, it is possible to increase speed and decrease mistakes.
Encourages support team cohesion and minimizes confusion
Automated customer service tools can assist in boosting cohesion among teams and put an end to any uncertainty about who is responsible for a certain support ticket. All tickets are automatically assigned to an agent. Automation can also be set up to identify tickets that have not been updated for too long and escalate them, ensuring that no ticket is overlooked.
Improves support team efficiency
Implementing automated customer service can enable businesses to provide assistance to a greater number of customers without having to increase their staff size significantly. Automating repetitive customer service tasks can increase the productivity of agents, giving them more time to focus on issues that need a more personal approach.
Supports a more uniform, process-driven workflow
Automation software helps to standardize and streamline customer support by making sure each query is tagged, prioritized, and given a ticket, all in the same way. 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. This process makes it easier for your team to manage their workflow, as it is more predictable and organized.
Conclusion
Customer support automation is providing high-quality resolutions to consumers on their own terms, while also enabling human support agents to work more efficiently. These automation options are available in help desks like BoldDesk.
Book a live demo to learn more about how BoldDesk can help your business automate its customer service tasks today. Try out a free trial to see what else it can do for your company. For any questions, please contact the BoldDesk support team for assistance.
Originally published at https://www.bolddesk.com on March 16, 2023.
