Every business should provide a great customer experience. But what is this excellent customer service? Each sector has different answers to it. For the sales team, it offers easy access to their benefit. For the customer support team, providing instantly accurate is good customer service. Customers are the face of any business showing their trust and loyalty. But to answer all, good customer service is being present around the clock and answering queries. As 46% of customers love to use chatbots during their site visiting. And for that, customer service requires automation.
Customer service automation is the new trend in the e-commerce world. It is one of the best solutions without any additional cost. Although it may be confusing for newcomers, automation is the right choice for businesses. You might be wondering why would you need automation. Customer service automation helps your customer get assistance even during ungodly hours. It also provides help with issues by using automated and self-service responses.
If you want to integrate customer service automation in simple steps for your business, continue reading the article to find out about it.
Even in artificial intelligence and chatbots, one cannot be present for 24 hours without any.
What is automated customer service?
Automated customer service uses AR and AI-powered solution dispersal systems to keep help desks open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Customers must fill in their problems here. The support team is informed. If the problem is minor, the self-service platforms will take care of it; otherwise, it will move forward to professionals. A service desk like this may be connected across all platforms and provide 360° omnichannel service.
Matching consumer needs with service quality is the most challenging difficulty in automating customer care. Continual supervision is required to examine the behavior, pattern, loops, and other aspects of a bot or AR/VR service to track its shortcomings.
Pros of Customer Service Automation
Less human errors
Automation eliminates the human aspect of your organization, lowering the risk of inactivity, data entry errors, and other issues.
Cost savings
You don't need to engage additional staff to handle administrative chores related to support. However, there may be small fees for the first software installation and subsequent maintenance.
Reduced wait time
All internal procedures, such as contacting another department, monitoring support issues, and following up with a client, will be faster with customer service automation. As a consequence, the consumer will receive faster service.
Increased earnings
Because your service is now faster, you can manage more client inquiries, increasing customer loyalty and word-of-mouth.
Support is delivered 24/7
Staying online during off-hours is easier with automated customer assistance. You can provide services even while your support personnel is on vacation, resulting in fewer irate complaints.
Cons of Customer Service Automation
Lack of human touch
Clients may feel devalued if they get automated communications. Furthermore, the assistance they require may be unique. Thus it cannot be entirely planned.
Inability to resolve more complex problems
It's hard to foresee and automate everything because the answer may have more possibilities, need more time to resolve, and demand immediate attention.
Changing an employee's usual process
More in-depth information is a result of new technology. Customer service representatives retrained to learn more technical information to provide better service.
Top 3 popular customer service automation solutions
AI chatbots
Routine queries can be automated using chatbots. Your chatbot may connect directly to your knowledge base and retrieve real-time responses. You can also teach it to respond to common inquiries over time.
Self-service
Your customers don't want to waste their time or patience waiting for a reply from your customer service team. Therefore self-service is here to stay. Customers want businesses to provide the same experience as search engines have taught us to discover rapid answers with easy queries.
Automated workflows
Automated processes are a fundamental concept that may significantly influence customer satisfaction. They will talk directly to the person most relevant to their query with a computerized system. The first will go to accounting. The second will move forward to a chatbot that can answer the question immediately or an agent with inventory access. Behind the scenes, there is no need for back-and-forth or manual routing.
Suggested Reading:
Customer Service via WhatsApp: The next revolution in customer service!
How to ace customer service automation in 5 simple steps?
Step 1: Determine your needs
Ask the first question of whether or not you require automation. If your staff is constantly overwhelmed by repeating queries, you likely do. Or if measures like average handling time have increased. Examine your customer care experience to identify if and where automation might help you eliminate inefficiencies. It's also good to assess your current tech stack and discover any gaps that require attention. So, before you install customer-facing solutions, be sure you know what your audience wants.
Step 2: Set up a chatbot
Customer support chatbots are the new big thing. Why waste your agents' time dealing with the same questions repeatedly when they might be dealing with more complex requests?
Chatbots are the pinnacle of customer service automation; they offer a simple interface to execute even fairly complex jobs. Chatbots can now hold their own in a discussion due to natural processing language. Many companies utilize chatbots to allow customers to track deliveries, book appointments, check account balances, and more.
A chatbot may be the cornerstone of your company's customer service automation. A chatbot may answer questions, reroute calls to the appropriate operators, and gather data in the background at no additional cost to you.
Step 3: Build up your knowledge base
Please use your well-organized resource center in your customer support chat interface now that you've developed it. Service agents may swiftly look for desired items and provide them to consumers without having to leave a conversation.
Furthermore, if your customer support technology enables it, you may easily incorporate a knowledge base into a chat widget. Clients will get rapid replies in a conversation lot more quickly. They don't even need to contact a customer service representative.
You may also use an answer bot to take your automated customer support to the next level. This high-tech gadget can assess and process consumers' queries during a conversation, suggesting appropriate knowledge base items that meet their requirements.
Step 4: Implement templates and routing
There will always be specific recurrent questions, regardless of the enhancements you made to your product, app, or service in step three. As a result, your agents will have to retype the same answer repeatedly, spending time on senseless repetition.
Canned replies, or response templates, are the apparent option. Many brands have large spreadsheets with reactions to various events, but we strongly advise against it. Make sure your template sheets don't fill up with replies that aren't relevant to a specific team, much like you have various teams for each service region. You can attempt to save time at every opportunity, including eliminating tedious scrolling through mile-long spreadsheets.
Step 5: Integrate channels and humans
The only way to improve customer service without sacrificing the personal touch is to give them options. Your emphasis may shift depending on your target audience. Still, it's always better to have channels open and be able to turn them on and off as needed.
Channels don't have to be separate; they integrate into one solution. You can effortlessly blend automated and human customer care without data loss or inefficiencies. For example, we can link Chatbots to living chat, email, and phone assistance. It creates a consolidated perspective of consumers, allowing for improved personalization.
Conclusion
Customer service automation is a complex topic with modern tools. But once you get a grip, it is straightforward to use and serves as great assistance for your business growth. Having customer service automation in your business can help improve and streamline your process. Automation is not a fully developed platform. Instead, automation is a continuous process where the human touch is required every once. It grows with constant adapting to the shifting customer and market conditions. A good customer service team incorporating customer service automation can provide a top-notch customer experience. After all, using proper tools and practices is the backbone of business growth.
If you want to have a good user service automation chatbot, try BotPenguin. It produces a high conversion rate and presents around the clock.