Improve the Operator Experience with Automation

The advent of automation is here; it’s practically all anyone can talk about these days. And, yet, a lot of companies are still slow on the uptake. At the moment, automation is still in its infancy, and it’s still going through some growing pains. So, it’s understandable why quite a few businesses are hesitant to jump on board. But it’s precisely those companies that are incorporating automation into their customer care that are reaping the most rewards. After all, customers want you to automate; they want faster resolutions and painless customer service.

In fact, according to a study by inContact, 67% of customers still prefer agent-assisted customer service to self-service. And that means it’s as important as ever to make sure your service is fantastic, so there are some aspects of your customer communication that can — and should — be automated right now if you want to stay ahead of your competitors and keep your customers happy.

FAQs or Simple Tasks

Most companies have FAQ pages, that’s pretty much a given. But not every FAQ has the same answer for the same question. “Where is my order?” or “how much money is in my savings account?” has a different answer for everyone.

Here’s where automation comes in. Introducing your humble front-end bot. These bots have a natural language understanding engine which means a programmer can feed the bot phrases and the bot can learn to understand them — and even possibly similar phrases to the ones its already been given. That means they can handle all kinds of FAQ questions.

You can set bots up in quite a few places that you’re already receiving customer queries. But the most common is social media where bots are gradually taking over the customer service scene. Facebook Messenger alone now has 100, 000 bots, and counting. These bots are easy to setup and to integrate into your systems, and they’ll cut down on your handle time and contact volumes by a surprising amount.

Really, the question is: why don’t you have one setup yet?

Data Gathering

But we can take it further. The bots can also handle tasks and they can be programmed to pass the interaction to a human if the bot can’t complete those tasks (such as collecting information or resolving a query).

As I said before, bots with a natural language understanding engine can understand what a customer is saying to them, even if it’s presented in a different way than they’ve been taught. That’s incredibly useful when you combine them with workflow automation. They end up being able to do some of the time-consuming tasks for your operators because they’re intelligent automations. Although the bots can’t quite come up with their own answers or make their own decisions right now, they are able to pick the best solution from the ones you’ve given it.

This means that not only can they pull data from external systems to answer FAQs, they can also gather customer information for a human operator. Operators waste precious minutes asking customers for relevant information just to solve simple queries. But a bot that understands language can ask these questions for you. These bots can ask for information (such as order numbers) and can determine data such as why the customer is contacting your customer care team. Combining the bots with workflows means all that information the bot has gathered can be passed on to an operator to resolve the query.

Software like Gnatta uses APIs to connect your systems together, meaning data can be pulled from different systems and brought together into one interface. And, if this customer has contacted your team before, all that history can be stored and easily accessed. Because what’s more frustrating than contacting customer service on a different channel and having to go through the whole process again?

When you consider that over 60% of customers want businesses to be contactable and responsive through messaging apps, you can’t really afford to not be paying close attention to your social media. And if you are, you can’t afford to slow your team down by refusing to integrate bots.

Content Responses

So, once your operators have figured out an answer to the query, it’s a simple case of writing a reply and wrapping up the interaction, right? But, like everything, it takes time. Time taken away from speaking to another customer. In customer care, saving minutes, or even seconds, per interaction is crucial. The more efficient and effective your operators can be, the better your customer experience. And that’s why automaton can help here too.

We’ve all heard of canned responses. They can be quite useful; send the appropriate response and job’s done. They’re an easy way of making your operation that little bit faster. But they can also be kind of stale. And, more importantly, they can feel, well, canned. Robotic and unfeeling, neither are a good look on a customer care operator. And, on top of that, they don’t always hit the nail on the head. They’re not always exactly what the operator is looking for in a response.

But Content responses in Gnatta work a little differently. They’re suggested based on conditions that our clients set; every company is different after all. So that means every conversation, every reason for contact, and every resolution can have a corresponding Content response for the data wrap section on the interaction. Each response can be drafted and reviewed before it is ever published for operators to use, leaving room for no mistakes. It also means you can add responses for certain periods — like promotions — and then disable them when they’re no longer applicable.

So, content responses — like canned responses — save the operator time, and allow them to quickly wrap up interactions and move onto the next with ease. But they go further than canned responses because they also allow operators to show a unique, professional affability to every customer that makes good customer care truly great.

Reviews

Once an interaction is finished, it’s time to ask for feedback. But asking your operators to do it just slows them down. They could already be on to the next interaction. Let workflows do it for you. With workflows, you can set up a trigger to fire when an interaction is completed. And the best part is that you can tailor the messages to suit your company.

Through workflows, you can send out automated surveys to gather CSat or NPS scores so that your operators don’t have to. That means you’re improving your handle time and CPH and prompting more reviews than ever.

But to really get ahead of the competition, you need to go omnichannel. With software like Gnatta connecting all your channels together, you can automatically feed reviews from any channel into the platform. It can gather all the appropriate data from the review and determine whether it needs a response, automatically assigning it to an operator if appropriate. Your customer care team can be on top of every negative review and turn it around without breaking a sweat.

In fact, Since Gnatta began working with one of our clients, their TrustScore increased from an average of 6.5, to a 9.6. So, if you remember anything from this blog, remember that. Remember that automation works.

So, what’s the take-away?

The ultimate point is that automation is the way to go if you want to keep ahead of your competitors and continue growing your business. Automation improves efficiency and your customer experience to the point where you can’t really afford not to switch over. And the above are just some of the parts of your customer care that you can automate. At Gnatta, we’re experts when it comes to communication technology so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to learn more. Or, alternatively, you can read our whitepaper on implementing automation here.