What is Automated Customer Service?

Automated customer care is considered anything that allows your clients to solve problems without dealing with another human. Taking humans out of the problem-solving equation may appear paradoxical at first. However, the software has advanced significantly since the days of urgently trying to reach a human on the other end of an automated voice recording.

Unlike humans, automated support systems are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They’re also less expensive than real-life customer service workers. They also help your customer service team by handling easy, repetitive duties and routing tickets to the proper departments. This frees up your reps’ time to focus on consumers who truly require human assistance.

Know more about Automated Customer Service Software.

Importance of automated customer service

Speed: When it comes to customer service, quickness reigns supreme. Customers nowadays expect to acquire what they want as soon as possible. You risk giving your customers an unfavourable opinion of your customer service if your response times don’t keep up with their busy lives. 

Convenience: Customers want to be able to communicate with their favourite businesses using the means that they prefer. Some people prefer to call, while others prefer to use Facebook Messenger or other social media platforms, and yet others prefer to use email. Automated Customer services can be incorporated into your firm’s CRM platform to ensure that any support person interacting with a customer has a complete view of that customer’s history with the company.

Autonomy: Many consumers want you to assist them in assisting themselves. Many people would rather solve a problem themselves than have someone else do it for them. Customers may do simple activities on their own using automated customer service, cutting out the middleman and allowing them to resolve difficulties on their own time. It doesn’t get any easier or faster than a solution that the consumer can apply themselves.

Even with the best human support team in the world, these goals for speed, ease, and autonomy will not always be met. However, with support automation, you can ensure that your customers are heard while not overworking your staff.

How to Automate Customer Service on a Website

Before knowing how to automate customer service, you must make sure the following is included in the automation process:

  • Portals for self-service and knowledge bases for customers
  • Email responses that are pre-programmed and canned
  • Automation in the workplace using “if this, then that” reasoning
  • Chatbots and live chat (overseen by customer support)
  • Assigning requests to the appropriate department or person as soon as possible
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning(ML) are also useful

Follow these steps to automate customer service.

  • Collect historical data from your recorded calls and message logs and do some study. What are the most frequently asked questions? Can you change your app, service, or product to meet these concerns?
  • Recognize trends and divide incoming requests into categories such as service requests, product questions, marketing inquiries, and so on.
  • Reduce the number of inquiries by identifying areas where your product, service, or app could be enhanced. Based on the data from step 1, go over your how-to and help pages and make sure they’re relevant and helpful to your users.
  • Create various customer service teams based on their skill sets. Billing and technical support, for example, should be handled by separate groups.
  • For quick access, monitoring, and analytics, combine your communication channels into a single solution. This not only saves your team time by eliminating the need to move from app to app, but it also enables the easy extension to other services and platforms.
  • Set up automated routing to allocate each request to a certain agent. This ensures that no inquiry “slips between the cracks” and goes unanswered permanently. The time it takes for an agent to respond to an inquiry is dramatically decreased because inquiries are automatically assigned to agents.
  • Prepare response templates so that your agents can tackle the most prevalent problems fast.
  • Implement an artificial intelligence (AI) answer suggestion algorithm to assist your agents in selecting relevant responses even faster. Another time-saving measure: why waste time scrolling through a list of pre-written responses when an AI can do it in a fraction of the time?
  • Deploy a chatbot interface to handle the most common requests and inquiries, freeing up your agents to focus on what matters most: providing excellent customer service even in the most challenging support scenarios.

Pros and cons of Automated Customer Service

Pros:

  • There are less human errors.
  • Cost savings as there will be no requirement of employing more employees.
  • Wait time was reduced, which resulted in an increase in revenue.
  • Support is available around the clock.

Cons:

  • Human touch is missing.
  • Inability to resolve increasingly difficult problems as it is not possible to automate everything.
  • Changing an employee’s usual workflow because of new technological changes.

Check out ways to automate customer services.