What is Customer Service Automation & Support?

Customer Service Automation Benefits and Examples

For these cases, make sure you’ve got a “contact support” option available on each and every page so your customer doesn’t have to go looking for it once they’ve realized they need personalized support. This will be an AI-driven system that collects data and then delivers suggested topics to give customers the help they need but aren’t finding. To identify what’s working in your knowledge base and where you can improve, track metrics like article performance, total visitors, search terms, and ratings.

An automated customer service platform collects consumer data across touchpoints and analyzes it to provide personalized support. The platform uses sentiment analysis to understand customer intent and emotions to drive the flow of conversation. The following five examples explore how an automated customer service software solution can help you deliver personal customer support by removing redundancy, clutter, and complexity. Automated customer service (customer support automation) is a purpose-built process that aims to reduce or eliminate the need for human involvement when providing advice or assistance to customer requests.

Their app can get hundreds of thousands of chat interactions every month. To provide trustworthy responses while keeping their support staff to a budget-friendly size, Tata 1mg uses Sendbird’s chat messaging feature inside their app. Here are some of the best ways in which your business can automate customer service. The self-service option afforded by automation in customer service is especially important when you consider that most customers already expect you to have a self-service support portal.

Automated prompts during support calls

The AI software picks up keywords from the description provided by the customer and directs the customer to an article in the knowledge base. The knowledge base or the help document gives simple instructions to customers that might solve the issue at hand. Lightening fast resolution of customer requests is made possible by automating customer support tasks. This is a common problem faced by custom support executives because customers reach out to them as soon as they have an issue or need advice. In most cases, these tickets or issues need to be handled outside working hours. The influx of tickets is what greets customer support executives with a pile of fresh tickets every morning.

Automating incident management enables project teams to work through incidents quickly and solve them effectively. The gap between a ticket management system and a business communications platform can be effectively bridged by a chatbot. This entails selecting an easy-to-install customer support platform like Sendbird Desk, on which you can layer your own customizations and integrations. With this customer support solution, scalability, risk management, new feature development, maintenance, and security are all baked in. All you have to worry about is making it your own and using it to its fullest potential to upgrade your customer — and employee! However, a Gartner survey found that 58% of customer service leaders today intend to contribute to overall business growth.

We’ve all navigated our fair share of automated phone menus or interacted with support bots to get help. The customer conversation data can help improve the knowledge base and conversational agents’ performance. Customer service automation through chatbots enables customers to get personalized service all throughout the year.

Email automation and simulated chats can make the job of collecting feedback more efficient. For example, you can set a rule to automatically send an email to customers who recently purchased a product from your online store and ask them to rate their shopping experience. You can also ask for your customer reviews about the service provided straight after the customer support interaction. AI chatbots are one of the most common examples of AI in customer service. They are bots that, as the name suggests, are powered by AI – artificial intelligence. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This means they can understand the intent and complexities of language so they can engage in more natural conversations with customers and handle more complex questions, as well as complete tasks.

Providing the Ultimate eCommerce Customer Experience

automating customer service creates opportunities to offload the human-to-human touchpoints when they’re either inefficient or unnecessary. An AI chatbot can even act as a personalized shopping assistant, seamlessly asking about a customer’s preferences and sharing product information to enrich the shopping experience. This functionality brings each customer a personalized conversational experience, keeping a human-like touch despite being AI-driven. So let’s walk you through some of the key advantages of customer service automation. With these kinds of results, it’s little surprise that analysts are predicting that AI chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for a quarter of organizations by 2027.

Customer service isn’t just a cost of doing business anymore, it’s a chance to wow your audience and open up new streams of income. Thanks to sophisticated omnichannel platforms, client care is transforming, becoming quicker, more streamlined, and a lot more rewarding for everyone involved. When customers can’t get through to a live person, they’re left feeling frustrated and ignored. If your automated system struggles to understand and properly route client inquiries, it ends up causing more problems than it solves, turning what could be a solution into a problem. Consider the following customer service automation examples before integrating them into your operations. There are also many unique and complex problems that your customers have that automation can’t solve.

In essence, to reduce your collection points down to a single, all-inclusive hub. Better still, the button takes visitors not to PICARTO’s generic knowledge base but directly to its article for anyone having problems with activation. Automation should never replace the need to build relationships with customers.

For example, a telecommunications company might deploy a chatbot on its website to help customers with plan upgrades, billing queries, or troubleshooting steps for connectivity issues. With automation, enterprises can ensure consistent support across various channels—be it chat, email, or social media. The right tools for a scaling business trying to empower their agents and help their customers can find their solution in a full AI platform such as Forethought.

• Automation can only handle simple tasks, such as answering frequently asked questions, sending email campaigns to your leads, and operating according to the set rules.
• Customer support automation is the best way to improve the quality and speed of customer service.
• Automation allows for efficiently scaling customer support operations without a corresponding increase in costs or resources.
• Furthermore, this enables them to upskill — taking on new responsibilities or learning to manage your virtual agent can lead to more prestigious career opportunities within customer service.

These platforms are available on a per-user or subscription basis, offering flexibility in scaling up or down as per business needs. This cost-effective approach ensures businesses pay only for what they use, allowing them to adapt their customer service capabilities in line with their evolving requirements. Setting up a chatbot can be the pillar of customer service automation at your company. Fielding queries, rerouting to the right agents, and collecting data — a chatbot can do all this in the background with no extra cost to you. Data is collected and analyzed automatically and can trigger automated actions.

Automated technology helps companies respond proactively to simple inquiries, manage data, and provide self-service options. Businesses often use surveys to garner customer feedback to understand their experience and sentiment. Keeping a tab on customer responses and responding to them promptly entails a lot of effort for the customer support team. Automating this process helps the team track customer feedback and respond to them promptly. When customer service agents aren’t bogged down by repetitive tasks, they can spend more time doing the customer-facing work that really matters – that’s helping your customers! Automating the redundant bits helps improve each agent’s efficiency and means that they can move through the customer service queue more quickly.

These channels include various resources such as knowledge bases, FAQs, and chatbots that empower customers to resolve their issues without needing direct assistance from a support agent. Knowledge bases, FAQs, and chatbots can all be automated to allow customers to find answers and resolve issues independently. By enabling self-service, automated customer service reduces dependency on human interaction and empowers customers to access the information they need quickly.

Using automation in customer service means that you can employ chatbots to answer customer queries any time of day or night. You can also use automation to set up automatic email replies to queries. These are just two examples of how automation can provide instant responses to customer queries. So even if they’re not resolved until a live agent can pick up and action the query within business hours, the automation means that your customer is still getting a response no matter what time of day or night. Customer service automation technology such as chatbots can instead be implemented to help manage customer queries outside business hours. If you’re receiving a ton of customer support requests and your team is getting overwhelmed, you may want to automate that process with a help desk or ticketing solution like Zendesk.

Use canned responses

At its core, customer support automation involves the use of intelligent systems to handle customer queries, execute repetitive tasks, and streamline the overall support process. It means that routine inquiries like order status updates, basic troubleshooting, or frequently asked questions can be handled by automated systems. These systems are designed to provide quick, accurate responses, enhancing customer experience while freeing human agents to focus on more complex problems that mandate a personal touch.

Now, you can use pre-made templates or create your own, teach the system to answer clients’ requests, assign or reassign chats, and do so much more. High-performing service organizations are using data and AI to improve efficiency without sacrificing the customer experience. You can use live chat for customer care, enhance your marketing, and use a conversational sales approach.

Customer support automation tools

Our platform can analyze customer interactions, survey responses, and feedback, giving you a clear understanding of your business’s performance and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach is crucial for continuously refining customer support strategies and maintaining high satisfaction levels. Let Yellow.ai’s dynamic platform empower you with a chatbot solution that streamlines and enhances customer interactions effortlessly.

Ultimate’s, for example, can recognize 109 languages thanks to our built-in-house language detection software. This means that expanding your service to new markets or broadening your support without hiring additional agents has never been easier. Not only does automation directly influence how many people actually end up speaking to an agent, it makes everyone’s lives easier once they do speak to an agent.

Once you set up an automation, it’s easy to fall into the “set it and forget it” mentality, thinking that the process can be left to run on its own. That’s definitely a bad idea though – when automation is left to run unattended, it only takes one second of delay or an unexpected error for everything to go awry. By using an IVR menu and call routing, callers can also reach the right agents straight away without having to talk to multiple people first. Audit your support content regularly for accuracy, readability, and findability.

Then, it can automatically assign tickets based on what it finds based on your set conditions. This is why it’s vital that you choose a platform that has high functionality and responsiveness. As you determine the best way to incorporate your software into your company’s workflow, keep in mind that it should be powerful enough to keep pace with changes.

Service Hub delivers efficient and end-to-end service that delights customers at scale. With service-focused workflows, you can automate processes to ensure no tasks fall through the cracks — for example, set criteria to enroll records and take action on contacts, tickets, and more. Lastly, it’s important to continually monitor your automation processes to ensure your customers receive high-quality service. Alternatively, you’ll also want to identify specific customer service tasks that live agents should perform.

An automated support system can handle multiple requests simultaneously, saving you significant labor and operating costs. When it comes to automated customer service, the above example is only the tip of the iceberg. Next up, we’ll cover different examples of automated customer service to help you better understand what it looks like and how it can help your agents and customers. Remember to start small, monitor and adjust, and leverage your data insights.

Similarly, if a person has repeatedly struggled to get the service they need from a human, they may elect to use automated customer service as often as they can. These systems automatically triage tickets and assign incoming support tickets to the most suitable agent, streamlining the resolution process and enhancing customer satisfaction. Customer service automation is the strategic application of technology to streamline and enhance customer support processes, primarily through reducing or eliminating the need for human-agent interaction.

This approach can also help you convince senior leadership that automated customer service is a worthwhile investment. Automated customer service is a must if you want to provide high-quality, cost-effective service — and it’s especially ideal if you have a large volume of customer requests. Some examples of automated services include chatbots, canned responses, self-service, email automation, and a ticketing system. You can do this by sending out an automated email asking for customer feedback or embedding a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the support interaction.

A robotic, flat response is one risk of an AI-powered system, but improvements are arriving every day. The ability to empathize is being built into AI to de-escalate such frustration. This feature will come in handy if, let’s say, a customer doesn’t reply to an agent’s message for quite some time. Don’t forget to specify the exact time after which you want an inactive chat to be closed.

By identifying these tasks, organizations can walk through the current processes with customer service teams to understand the steps they follow. This process enables organizations to get specific in the tasks they want and need to automate to help shorten engagement time. From here, organizations can tailor their journey to automation based on the specific tasks and processes they have identified. One last issue businesses face when looking to automate their customer service is finding a product that has limited integrations and can’t connect to their agent help desk. Many products will have limited integrations but it isn’t difficult to find a competitive solution that does integrate with your current tools and could actually perform better for you and your teams. Implementing the wrong technology can cost companies time, money, and energy.

Read our Director of Support’s guide to prioritizing customer support requests. For example, you can automatically prioritize pre-sales questions that come in on live chat — these kinds of questions often block sales for someone who’s actively shopping on your site. To automate the request process for returns and exchanges, you can use a tool like Gorgias. Gorgias Order Management Flows let customers request a return, request a cancellation, or report an issue with their order in an easy, structured way. They don’t have to type out a message — just log in and make a few clicks. The best way to automate the returns process is to set up a self-service return portal with a tool like Loop Returns.

Needless to say that people appreciate talking to a real support rep and that is what keeps them coming back. Still, even the most powerful automated systems aren’t capable of replacing a human completely. And sometimes, they are annoying as the answers they give are off-the-mark and don’t contribute to effective customer interactions. But remember to train your customer service agents to understand a customer’s inquiry before they reach for a scripted response. This will ensure the clients always feel that the communication is personalized and helpful.