What Is Customer Service Automation? +Pros, Cons, & Best Practices

Leverage AI in customer service to improve your customer and employee experiences. Lastly, it’s important to continually monitor your automation processes to ensure your customers receive high-quality service. Automation features can help your team members effectively manage their workflow and keep things moving quickly. For example, you can set up an automation to close tickets four days after they’ve been resolved.

When determining your customer service automation requirements, think about where automation software will have the biggest impact. For example, if your phone inquiries outpace your email inbox, you might want to focus on an IVR system. But remember not to neglect customers’ preferences for omnichannel support—you need to provide a consistent, reliable communications journey across channels. In addition to answering customer questions, automated customer service tools can proactively engage with your customers.

Top 5 Tools for Automated Customer Service in 2023

Every customer thinks they’re having a unique issue with your product or service. But, ultimately, you’ll be seeing the same common support requests come through time and time again. So, first, let’s look at when it makes sense to use customer service automation and when a human-first approach is more appropriate. In this article, we’ll show you exactly how you can leverage automation. To help you get started, we’ve outlined 5 ways you can automate some elements of your customer service offering.

• This platform can assist your teams and boost the efficiency of your work.
• This will help your business store customer data in one place, keep track of customer interactions and implement intelligent routing so agents don’t have to keep asking the same simple questions.
• Businesses who are able to integrate help desk software with their existing business tools are able to offer the best customer service and support.
• Your chatbot can be directly connected to your knowledge base and pull answers instantly.

The right tools for your teams will be easy to implement and set up and will provide value instantly. Forethought’s AI tools fall in this category, they can be deployed quickly and can begin helping customers much sooner than other AI tools. If you’re wondering whether your business could benefit from automated customer service, we’ll discuss the pros, cons, and how you can get started.

How to Automate Customer Service and Increase Customer Satisfaction

Some companies offer “premium support” as part of a higher-priced plans. This is one popular way to set this up to work on the back-end—moving requests from specific customers (i.e., those on the higher plan) to the front of the queue. The moment a customer support ticket or enquiry enters the inbox, the support workflow begins. And with it, a bunch of manual tasks that are repetitive and inefficient. However, the challenge remains that these companies need to figure out how to provide that level of customer service at scale.

Automated customer service empowers your customers to get the answers they’re looking for – when and how they want. It improves the customer service experience and automates responses to straightforward queries, freeing up your customer service team to handle more complex issues. It’s important to remember that automated tools can’t help with everything. Other automated service solutions like AI chatbots can handle recurring customer questions without human intervention, reducing costs as your support agents dedicate their time to the customers who need it most. This signifies that your automated customer service options are fleshed out enough to deflect issues from reaching customer service agents.

To make sure your knowledge base is helpful, write engaging support articles and review them frequently. You can also include onboarding video tutorials or presentation videos to show your customers how to use your product instead of just describing the process. It’s more helpful and adds an element of interactivity to your knowledge base. Chatbots can handle inquiries outside your business hours, welcome all of the visitors to your website, and answer frequently asked questions without human involvement.

With a few simple backend integrations, answers and resolutions can easily be automated. Knowledge bases are databases of information that chatbots and human agents can use to answer customer questions. Knowledge bases can be accessed by both bots and agents in real-time, which allows for faster and more accurate responses to customer inquiries. Customer service automation can come in many types and forms, some simple and others complex. In this blog, we will cover some of the most common automated customer service examples that you could adopt to improve your team’s and agents’ efficiency and productivity.

Automate your support ticket routing

Personalized customer service can be a big selling point for small businesses. So, you may be hesitant to trust such a critical part of your business to non-human resources. But with the right customer service management software, support automation will only enhance your customer service. If your response times don’t keep up with your customers’ busy lives, you risk giving them a negative impression of your 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.

Customers can access services throughout the year without extending customer support hours or adding new agents. The bot transfers complex queries to human agents, now tasked to handle more value-added work. This leads to optimal utilization of agents leading to high productivity. With the availability of a wide variety of customer service automation platforms, it can be overwhelming to select the best platform for your business.

When support teams turn to automating customer service, they’re able to quickly see the benefits, and there sure are a lot of them. Aside from transforming your support orgs’ perception of being a cost center to being a revenue driver, let’s discuss why more businesses are automating support and how everyone involved is benefitting. Data is collected and analyzed automatically and can trigger automated actions. For example, if a customer starts buying various pieces of ski equipment, an email can go out to them with other relevant products. Or, if a customer keeps looking things up in the knowledge base, the chatbot can pop up to ask whether they need more help.

Canned responses enable more efficient human work instead of automating the whole process. Since you know what the advantages and disadvantages of automated customer services are, you know if it’s the right choice for your business. And since you’re still here, it’s a good time to look at how you can automate your support services. 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.

Satisfy customers with seamless handoffs.

Go beyond whether a customer endorses your brand and discover why they love your company. Read the case study to see how Telia uses automation to generate direct revenue via customer support. Ticket automation is the automation of anything that enters your CRM as a ticket — whether that be an email or a DM on Instagram. It also encompasses process automation, including triaging requests, tagging them, routing them to the right person and more. With Dialpad Ai Contact Center, our supervisors can create Real-Time Assist (RTA) cards for tricky topics and set them to trigger when certain keywords or phrases are spoken.