How Automation Can Help Customer Service With Proactive Outreach
The best way to keep your customer service teams from being overwhelmed by a surge in call volume is to proactively reach out to customers with assistance before they need to call in. In the old days, this required a great deal of manual coordination between teams, but new automation tools can help you delegate proactive outreach to software — and preserve the sanity of your customer support teams at the same time.
Support call volume tends to surge when there is an interruption or change in your service; the only question is whether that service interruption was planned or unplanned.
In the case of scheduled downtime or planned major product changes, the engineering or product teams at your company can (and should) be expected to give the customer support team a substantial advance warning, both so they can staff up for the surge, and so they can proactively warn customers of the impending outage (and thus minimize the call surge).
Modern software tools can automate this coordination, integrating with development management and project planning tools to monitor key terms or events. If your DevOps team schedules a service outage, or your product team schedules a major feature release, automation should immediately create a task or a project for the customer support team to prepare for the resulting customer call surge.
With the help of artificial intelligence, your support automation solution could go so far as to compose and possibly even send proactive messaging directly to the customer. Given enough details in the project plan, AI could draft an email that informs affected customers of the coming outage.
This same process can be repeated for unplanned outages, but with your customer service automation solution triggering its activities in response to notice from your internal uptime monitoring tools. If your server goes down for a sufficient length of time, or your application throws a particular type of error, automation could warn both the customer support team that a call surge is coming and send automated notices to the customer to help mitigate that volume.
So long as the automated messages inform the customer when they can expect service restoration and also promise to contact them when that restoration is achieved, most customers won’t need to call in.
And, for maximum effectiveness, you can also wire in your support automation tools to customer success and usage metrics. For example, if your solution allows the customer to send marketing emails, and their volume of emails suddenly drops, they may be experiencing a malfunction or misconfiguration of the solution. It may not (yet) be widespread, but there’s no reason to wait for the customer to call before you offer assistance.
A support automation agent could note the drop in customer activity for follow-up, and either assign outreach to live support representative, or fire of an automated communication of its own. Sometimes, the best way to get ahead of a customer call is to start one.
With the help of smart automation tools that take direction from your service environment, your customer service teams can avoid mindless work and leave proactive outreach to their software.
Talla is building the customer service automation solution of the future. If you’d like to start your journey to more efficient, effective customer service, contact Talla today.
