Experts believe 80+ percent of issues will be resolved without human intervention within the next few years. But for autonomous support to happen, companies need to set up an automated customer service support system.
From AI-powered customer service chatbots to translation automation, customer service automation is on the rise, helping teams deliver high-quality, seamless customer experiences. AI-powered customer service automation allows your team to focus on what truly matters: solving complex problems and building relationships with customers.
In this blog, we’ll help you learn more about automated and AI-powered customer service automation, including how it works, how it benefits businesses and how you can implement it in your business today.
What Is Automated Customer Support?
It is a form of customer support enhanced by automation technology and artificial intelligence (AI). Businesses can use it to resolve customer issues, with or without involving an agent, to offer customer support around the clock, and to cut down on costs associated with hiring more staff. Think about all the mundane tasks that bog down your support team: answering the same FAQs, triaging tickets, manually routing issues and sending follow-up emails. Automation of customer service takes care of these tasks so that your agents can concentrate on more complicated and valuable interactions.
For example, automation technology can help support teams by providing contextual article suggestions based on customer feedback and automatically routing requests to the right agents. This allows your team to focus on resolving issues that truly require human intervention.
How does automated service work?
Automated customer service works by leveraging technology: conversational intelligence software and customer intelligence solutions, to efficiently handle customer interactions. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how automated customer service works:
- Instant resolution of basic queries: When customers ask common questions like “What is the current status of my support ticket?”, automation handles it. Automated tools like AI chatbots pull answers directly from your knowledge base, delivering quick and accurate responses so your agents don’t have to waste time on routine inquiries.
- Smart ticket routing for complex queries: When enquiries from consumers need more detail than chatbots can provide, automation sends tickets to the right team or agent. Furthermore, AI also analyses the content of the inquiry. This prevents tickets from being sent to the wrong agent and cuts down on back-and-forth for the customer. For example, a billing issue will land directly with the finance team rather than bouncing around to multiple agents before it's addressed.
- Surface data-driven insights: When a ticket gets to the right agent, AI-powered automation brings up useful information like past tickets with similar problems or solutions given by the previous agents. This gives your team the tools they need to answer questions more quickly and accurately. For example, a customer faces a technical glitch. The AI can give the agent an answer right away that worked for a similar problem in the past, which cuts down on the time spent troubleshooting.
- Proactively notifying customers: Automation aids in providing proactive customer service in addition to reactive customer service. Automated systems can notify customers when a situation occurs, such as a service outage. This keeps them informed and reduces the need for them to contact you in frustration. For instance, an automated email informs clients of the delay while offering next steps, which helps you avoid bulk emails wherein they are asking why the software isn't functioning as it should. Automation guarantees that you meet 83% of customers' expectations that businesses will notify them in advance. This helps to reduce inbound inquiries.
- Learning from outcomes: Every interaction your automated tools handle provides valuable data. This data helps you identify trends, pinpoint recurring issues and continuously improve your support approach. Over time, this will make your customer service even better. For example, 20% of the conversations your chatbot engages in are about the same problem with a product. That insight allows your team to proactively address the root cause or update your knowledge base to better serve future customers.
How to automate customer service?
Here are a few examples of how you can use automation to improve the efficiency of your team:
- Chatbots: A chatbot can help reduce call or case volume by handling routine tasks such as tracking your order status or scheduling appointments. The most advanced bots use generative AI to personalise their responses to customer questions more personally. Perhaps that's why chatbot popularity is on the rise.
- Email and social media autoresponders: As the number of customer cases increases, agents may not be able to answer all questions right away. Autoresponders, whether through email or social media, can automatically acknowledge customer inquiries and provide initial information.
- Automated triaging: With workflow rules, you can automatically categorise and route simple support requests to the right customer service agent for quick handling. AI can easily surface the more complex inquiries that need an agent's attention.
- Automated surveys or feedback requests: How can you improve your organisation's customer service? An automated system can send out a survey immediately after an interaction that helps to gather essential insights from customers.
- Proactive support: Keep your customers in the loop by notifying them of issues like shipping delays or system outages by automatically sending them updates. You can include a contact number or links to knowledge base articles so they know what to do next.
What are the benefits of automated customer support?
Here are some of the most common benefits of automating customer service:
- Able to achieve consistency in your responses: People make mistakes, especially when they have to answer a lot of questions. On the other hand, automation makes sure that customers get the exact and accurate answers no matter how or when they contact you. For instance, AI-powered systems can use a single source of information to provide the same information to all customers. This consistency makes your First Reply Time better, so customers always get the correct answer the first time.
- Improved customer satisfaction: Customers get quick, accurate, and personalised answers to their problems because automation handles repetitive, manual tasks, while agents focus on more complex questions. Customers are more satisfied when they get the answers they need without having to deal with frustrating handoffs or long wait times, and your business will see improvements in key customer service metrics, such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT). To make each customer interaction more satisfying, address common customer pain points and offer solutions accordingly.
- Ensures 24/7 availability: Automated customer service makes sure your business is open all the time, whether it's through chatbots, email autoresponders, or interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Imagine a customer looking for product help at 2 AM. A chatbot can answer their question or point them to the right resource right away, instead of making them wait until they clock in.
- Allows businesses to scale: When your business grows, so do customer questions. If you only use human agents, it becomes expensive and inefficient to scale your support. Automation makes it easy to deal with an increasing number of requests without compromising the quality of service. For example, as the number of tickets increases, automated systems can quickly sort and route questions, making sure that no question is left unanswered.
- Helps businesses reduce overhead costs: It can get costly very quickly to recruit additional staff to meet the needs of more customers. Companies can grow rapidly without having to hire more people by automating routine support tasks. AI-powered chatbots and ticket triage tools can answer most of the same questions. This saves a lot of financial resources on hiring new agents.
How do you know if your automated tools are working?
By regularly evaluating these areas, you can fine-tune your customer service automation to ensure it consistently meets customer expectations:
- Track customers throughout their support journey: Are people leaving your chatbot before they get a response? Or are they looking through your knowledge base and leaving without reading an article? These are indications that your customer service experience isn't complete.
- Monitor customer sentiments and feedback: Look at what customers say and use it to make changes or improvements. If you can, segment the input by the automation tool that was used to fix the problem.
- Keep an eye on key metrics: Use KPIs such as response time, average handle time, and agent admin time to gauge how well your automation is performing. It's often a good idea to take these parameters both before and after you automate customer support.
- Analyse customer service interactions: Look over conversations between customers and bots to find any problems that keep coming up and need to be fixed. You can also use these conversations to help train agents or revise processes to make the user experience better.
Another way to know is to test the customer service experience yourself on a regular basis. Use all your automated support options, such as interacting with a chatbot or emailing customer service, and record your experiences.
Examples of automated customer service
Automated customer service can be easy or hard, depending on the scale of your business and the type of work you do. When you set up automated customer service for your business, consider the following examples of automated support:
- AI assistants: AI agents are the most autonomous customer service bots, trained on billions of fundamental customer interactions, and can fully resolve even the most complex customer problems.
- Automated ticketing systems: AI-powered ticketing automation sends questions to the agent who is best able to answer them, which speeds up the resolution process and improves customer service.
- IVR software, or interactive voice response software: An automated customer support tool that can greet callers, route them to the right place, complete the payment process and answer frequently asked questions with automated responses.
- Autoresponders: Tools like email automation software that send direct and consistent answers to customer questions across different channels, such as email and social media.
- Predictive analytics: It is the use of data to find out what works now, what the workforce might need in the future, what buyers expect and more.
- Automatic translation: Translation services that let teams help customers all over the world, reaching a wider demographic without putting more strain on resources.
Ready to try automated customer service?
Let's be honest: customers today won't wait for a long time. They want quick, personalised help, and if your support system is stuck in the past, you're not just behind, you are also losing customers. Set up a customer service automation tool that connects all of the parts. It doesn't just handle tickets; it also predicts challenges before they get worse, sends tasks to the right people and keeps everyone on the same page.
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