Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
Table of Contents
- What is Customer Support Automation?
- How To Implement Automation in Customer Support: 7 Ways
- 1. Chatbots
- 2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Software:
- 3. Automated Customer Feedback Collection
- 4. Email Automation
- 5. Automated Support Ticketing System
- 6. Automated Notifications
- 7. Customer Insight Analytics
- What are the Benefits of Automation in Customer Support?
- Provide 24/7 Real-time Customer Assistance
- Cost-saving Customer Support Solution
- Efficient Support Service
- Personalized Conversations
- Reduce Human Errors
- Start Implementing Customer Support Automation Today
Created time
Feb 16, 2024 07:44 AM
Author
Tags
Image
Publish date
Feb 20, 2024
Slug
customer-service-automation
Featured
Featured
Type
Article
Ready to Publish
Ready to Publish
A 2022 study found that US firms adopting automation technologies saw a significant 11.4% increase in labor productivity. So, if you’re running a business and striving to achieve more, automation is essential.
Customer support is one aspect of your business that can benefit from automation. If your team deals with high customer traffic, implementing automation can help your staff promptly address people’s needs, leading to maximum customer satisfaction.
Read on to learn more about customer support automation and discover how it can elevate the quality of your business’s support service.
What is Customer Support Automation?
Customer support automation refers to the use of technological tools to automatically resolve customer issues without the need for human interaction.
Human agents typically assist in all types of customer concerns. However, as the volume of queries grows, it becomes challenging for staff to respond immediately. Hiring more agents is a possible solution, but it adds extra costs to the business.
A cost-effective alternative is to implement automation in customer support. By using automated software such as chatbots and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems, you can provide instant responses to basic customer queries. These tools operate 24/7 and can handle multiple queries simultaneously.
Of course, automation tools can’t solve all types of issues. They only serve as “smart assistants” to finish repetitive, menial tasks that eat your staff’s precious time.
Suppose that many customers repeatedly ask for information related to your software products, like subscription plans, account setup, or certain features. Using live agents to explain this stuff is time-consuming, but by using automated, self-service knowledge bases, customers can get an answer in a blitz.
Another example is an automated password reset system. Instead of using human staff to manually assist customers, you can use an automated system that sends emails to customers when they click “Forgot Password” on your website.
This email contains the reset link where they can verify their identity via security questions or verification code. Once their identity is authenticated, they can now reset their password.
How To Implement Automation in Customer Support: 7 Ways
Here are some customer support automation techniques and technologies for your business.
1. Chatbots
This usually appears as a chat widget on the corner of a website. Your customer will type their question, and the chatbot will respond instantly.
Many chatbots are now created using artificial intelligence to understand human language. Hence, they are capable of understanding customers’ intentions and emotions, as well as remembering conversation context, and providing personalized answers to basic queries.
Answering FAQs is not just the use of this tool. A chatbot can also give relevant product suggestions by analyzing customers’ purchase history, creating support tickets, and providing interactive customer onboarding assistance.
2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Software:
IVR software is an automated telephony system that “responds” to customer calls. Your customer can interact with this system using voice inputs or by pressing keys on their phones.
Suppose that a customer calls your team to update his/her subscription status. The IVR system will greet using a computerized voice recording and provide a series of options to continue like “Press 1 for account information”, “Press 2 for billing”, and so on.
The customer can also request via the IVR system to connect with a live agent if she needs further assistance that needs human involvement.
3. Automated Customer Feedback Collection
Businesses can collect customer feedback and reviews via email, phone calls, or social media. But a great feedback strategy is to use automation tools that can ask for people’s feedback during strategic points like after they made an online purchase, talked with live agents, or tested out a new feature.
4. Email Automation
There are various ways to use AI for business, one of which is to create an email automation tool. This program can understand people’s questions and generate responses instantly that are aligned with your writing style and branding tone.
For complex concerns, the tool can automatically send an initial response and queue the concern for a live agent to address.
5. Automated Support Ticketing System
There are times when chatbots or self-service knowledge bases can’t help your customers, so they want to connect with a live agent. Through an automated ticketing system, their concern is routed to assigned representatives who can help them.
This system also allows customers to check the status of their concern, whether it has been resolved already or is still in the queue.
6. Automated Notifications
This technology automatically sends updates about the progress of a customer’s concern, new features released, or scheduled maintenance. It can also send reminders to your agents about pending queries or resolving tickets so they won’t miss anything.
7. Customer Insight Analytics
It’s difficult to manually pull out customer insights from hundreds of conversations daily. Fortunately, advanced AI-powered automation tools are capable of analyzing customer data in real-time, helping you create data-driven decisions for your business.
These analytical tools can point out commonly raised issues or understand customer trends and behavior from their purchase history and site visits.
What are the Benefits of Automation in Customer Support?
Automation has been a crucial part of our daily lives since the 20th century with the rise of computer and data storage technologies. In terms of customer support, automation is a game-changer, providing time-saving, cost-effective, and accurate support services for all enterprises.
Here’s how customer support automation solutions can help your business.
Provide 24/7 Real-time Customer Assistance
People need fast answers. Every minute delay can push them to your competitors. But with automated tools like chatbots, customers can get instant, personalized answers they need.
More importantly, these programs are up 24/7. Unlike agents, they need no rest or sleep. So even if a customer has some troubles past midnight, he can still get in touch with your customer support.
Cost-saving Customer Support Solution
Instead of recruiting additional personnel, let automation technologies perform menial, redundant tasks like ticket generation, email correspondence, or feedback collection. It's cheaper to get a subscription for AI-powered automation tools than to hire and train new staff.
Efficient Support Service
Automating repetitive, simple tasks like addressing customer FAQs, routing calls, troubleshooting issues, and creating tickets gives your CS team more time and energy to handle complex issues.
This makes your customer support more efficient with shorter average handling time (AHT) and improved customer satisfaction.
Personalized Conversations
Automation tools can analyze customers’ previous conversations and interactions using machine learning algorithms, allowing them to provide recommendations and suggestions tailored to customers’ interests and preferences.
Reduce Human Errors
Your live agents might be competent and brilliant, but they’ll surely commit mistakes due to oversight, stress, or miscommunication. Unfortunately, even accidental human errors can leave a sour taste on customers and give your brand a bad image.
We’re still far from achieving 100% accurate artificial intelligence (and AI hallucination is still a thing!). However, AI automation tools can always provide precise responses as long as their training data is on point.
Unlike live agents, stress and fatigue can’t compromise their performance, allowing them to provide consistent, high-quality support service.
Start Implementing Customer Support Automation Today
Automation is now vital to survive in this cutthroat market. At present, around 50% of customers are willing to wait for up to 3 minutes only. They want lightning-speed responses to their queries, and it’s feasible only with the help of technology.
My AskAI can provide you with cutting-edge automation tools to improve your customer support up a notch. Create your AI-powered automation assistants with no coding required and integrate them into your business productivity tools. Start automating today.
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
