What Is Automated Customer Service? How To Guide for Humans

A 2020 study by Smart Insights stated that 63% of customers will stop buying from brands who offer poor personalization tactics, so it’s essential to make sure your automation still feels personal. We’ve all navigated our fair share of automated phone menus or interacted with support bots to get help. Check out these additional resources to learn more about how Zendesk can help you improve your customer experience.

This type of deflection will reduce support tickets and save your customer support agents time and let them focus on bigger and more valuable tasks. Customer service automation refers to using technology and software to handle customer interactions and other tasks without human effort. While the phone remains one of the most widely used customer service channels across all generations, that trend is evolving. Northridge Group reports that younger generations embrace communication channels outside of placing a phone call to receive support. As digital natives, Millennials and Gen-Z are increasingly comfortable solving problems by themselves.

Optimize service and support

Click the Add Chat button, located at the top right-hand corner, and set up your first chat widget. You can customize the widget to match your brand image with custom colors, support agent avatars, and more. Even if a human isn’t immediately available, at least give customers a way to submit a message that your agents answer via email once they’re available. Your tool’s pricing may vary, but Gorgias’s Automation Add-on handles an average of 30% of all tickets, for 1/5 the cost of a customer service agent. This helps your customer service agents offer the most relevant, accurate information possible without forcing them to switch tabs and copy/paste the customer’s information.

To successfully begin automating your customer service and increasing customer satisfaction, consider following these six steps. Automation is a great way to speed up basic customer service tasks such as ticket routing, simple issue resolution, and reporting. However, it’s crucial to match your automated customer service strategy with your workflows and goals.

Customer service chatbots for common questions

In fact, you put your support team in a better position to handle more complaints, offer speedy resolutions, and delight customers. 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.

Instead, integrate them to provide an improved information flow among your support employees and your customers and operators. Understand that AI-based support tools scan and monitor an endless stream of interactions on your website. It offers help to your visitors without waiting for them to reach out to you. And this proactive way of showing your customers that you care about them can only make them think even better about your brand. If your solution runs as expected after testing, integrate it into your customer service workflow.

This stat alone is big enough to show how big of an impact automation is having on customer service. This not only frees up your customer service reps’ time to do what they do best (helping people) but will help your company as it scales its operation. By streamlining your approach to customer service, you’ll be able to grow your company while building loyalty amongst your customers. When you implement customer service software, such as helpdesk software and customer relationship management (CRM) software, it means that all of your customer information will be in one place.

• When we refer to agent assist, we’re talking about technology that makes agents more powerful and efficient.
• You should also keep in mind that automated tools require constant improvement, occasional upgrades, and frequent control checks to provide optimal results.
• Vidyard reports that 68% of people would rather watch a video to solve their problem than speak with a support agent.
• This will allow you to scale your support team without linearly hiring new team members.

While technology and automation can be fun (at least I think it is), don’t lose sight of the exceptional customer service you provide today. Here are a few of the critical systems to look out for and how you can leverage these systems for automated customer service. Some of these blend, so it’s not a perfect landscape, but should give you an idea of what’s out there.

Use automation to personalize more, not less

It increases efficiency, consistency, and reduces hold times and transfers. You’re either responding to a customer question or proactively helping a customer before they reach out to you. Predictive support is the newer and obviously preferred option, but it’s much harder to achieve. In fact, it has only become possible in the past year or two with the advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Not if you invest in a provider with an interactive onboarding program, use historical support data to set up your bot and assemble the right team.

Rather than blatantly promising that you will solve the problem, try to understand what’s the exact issue they are facing and how it has impacted their work or life. You can also personalized recommendations based on their past purchases and appreciate them for being loyal to your brand. Over 1500 customers – including the likes of Harvard University, HubSpot, Vacasa, Upwork, and Canva – use Hiver to deliver delightful customer experiences.

types of customer service automations to make agents more efficient

Customers always prefer fast answers whenever they reach out to the support team for assistance. For customer service to be termed effective, the speed of responses has to be fast. If you’re using Dialpad as your contact center platform, then this functionality is already integrated.

For example, you can use customer support data to write better FAQs, or you can use it to identify customer pain points and find ways to fix them. Another way to automate your customer support process is to create tasks that are triggered by certain events. For example, you can create a task that reminds your team to follow up with a customer who hasn’t replied to a support ticket in seven days.

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