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?
- What are the Benefits of Using Customer Support Automation?
- Around-the-Clock Support
- Improves Team Collaboration
- Avoid Agent Burnout
- Minimize Human Error
- Cost-Effective Solution
- 8 Ways to Save Time with Customer Support Automation
- 1. Use AI Chatbots To Deflect Basic Customer Queries
- 2. Develop a Self-Service FAQs Page
- 3. Adopt a Smart Ticketing System To Handle Tickets
- 4. Use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Technology To Address Phone Calls
- 5. Collect Customer Feedback with Automated Surveys
- 6. Address Email Queries Using Email Automated Assistants
- 7. Utilize an Automated Notification System
- 8. Automate Schedule Appointment Management
- Save Time and Increase Efficiency with Customer Support Automation Today
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Time is precious to a business’s customer support. Minutes wasted due to a slow and inefficient helpdesk can leave your customers annoyed or, even worse, inclined to shift to your competitors.
You might have a team of skilled service reps. But as your business grows, a deluge of customer concerns will flood your company’s inbox and overwhelm your team, ultimately compromising the quality and speed of their responses.
Fortunately, your business can save time with customer support automation. Tech innovations like AI chatbots, ticketing tools, feedback collectors, and intelligent routing can join your team and boost your support service’s efficiency.
Read on to learn how automated customer support saves time, money, and loyal customers.
What is Customer Support Automation?
Customer support automation is the use of tools or software to automate and streamline tasks related to customer support. An automated customer support technology performs basic and repetitive workflows so human agents have more time for complex problems that require critical thinking and judgment.
Here’s an example: answering a large number of basic customer queries is a simple yet time-consuming task for a support service team. To save time, you can create an AI chatbot that automatically “talks” to your customers, understand their problems, and provide personalized and helpful responses.
The best thing about chatbot support software is its ability to respond instantly to common customer queries, much faster than a live agent who may spend minutes searching for references and typing responses. This automation tool eliminates long wait times and queues, making your customers happy and satisfied.
What are the Benefits of Using Customer Support Automation?
Purely human customer service is already as old as the hills. It’s slow, inefficient, and expensive to manage. As customers demand faster and more reliable support services, it’s now essential to adopt automation technologies for your team.
Here are some of the benefits of customer support automation:
Around-the-Clock Support
Automation tools like AI chatbots, IVRs, and automated email responses ensure that customer queries are addressed instantly 24/7. Unlike human agents, who can work only for about 8 hours, these tools can work around the clock; they don’t need rest or bathroom breaks!
More importantly, automated customer support benefits businesses operating across different time zones. Even if it’s midnight in your country, your AI chatbots are ready to respond to customers from the other side of the globe.
Improves Team Collaboration
Perfect team harmony leads to efficiency and productivity. Businesses can adopt a shared database, centralized inbox, and intelligent routing for seamless communication and collaboration among customer support agents.
Avoid Agent Burnout
The main purpose of automation in customer support is to delegate simple tasks from live agents to digital technologies. Hence, automation reduces the workload of your agents, giving them sufficient time to work on complicated matters and ultimately avoiding burnout.
Minimize Human Error
Automation tools are designed to strictly follow algorithms to perform customer support tasks. As long as your codes, prompts, instructions, and training data are on point, these tools will never provide inaccurate or false information to your customers.
For instance, agents are prone to give incorrect responses to customers because of stress, exhaustion, or miscommunication. However, AI chatbots and other automation tools are programmed to consistently provide accurate information to queries.
Cost-Effective Solution
Recruiting new employees for your customer support team entails additional costs including salaries, benefits, and training expenses. So, a budget-friendly way to improve your support service is to integrate automation tools instead. It’s much cheaper to avail of a subscription for AI chatbots and other digital solutions than to hire new staff.
8 Ways to Save Time with Customer Support Automation
Now, let’s see different options for how automated customer support saves time for your business.
1. Use AI Chatbots To Deflect Basic Customer Queries
AI chatbots typically appear as chat widgets in business websites or communication platforms. Their goal is to provide instant answers to customer’s questions with absolute accuracy.
Before, chatbots were designed using prewritten rules and responses. Unfortunately, this design limits them to providing personalized and nuanced answers.
Businesses train chatbots using machine learning and natural language processing to “comprehend” customer queries and provide intelligent responses. They can understand message context and intent, enabling them to provide personalized responses to users.
The best thing is that you can create AI chatbots in minutes. Just upload your business files or web pages, and your chatbot will use them as a reference to answer queries. Moreover, AI chatbots learn and improve from every conversation they have with customers, leading to enhanced performance over time.
With AI chatbots, your business can automatically respond to customers’ simple questions. You can also make an AI chatbot an internal assistant. Instead of wasting minutes browsing over files and databases, an AI chatbot can give you the information you need in seconds.
2. Develop a Self-Service FAQs Page
A FAQs web page allows customers to click specific buttons to automatically get answers to common queries. Unlike chatbots, customers don’t need to type their query. Instead, they can just look for a FAQ related to their problem and see the corresponding solution written by your team.
3. Adopt a Smart Ticketing System To Handle Tickets
Give your agents a leg up with a smart ticketing system to help them manage and address tickets faster. An automated ticketing system not only stores tickets in a centralized database but can also sort them out according to priority, urgency, and assigned representative or department.
Moreover, a smart ticketing system can also provide automated responses once customers create tickets for their concerns. It can also provide regular updates whenever a customer attempts to track their ticket progress.
4. Use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Technology To Address Phone Calls
Many customers use phone calls to voice their questions and concerns. One way to address (or deflect) the bulk of incoming phone calls is to adopt an IVR solution. IVR uses pre-recorded voice prompts to give customers options to help them address their problems.
For instance, an IVR may prompt a customer to press 1 on their keypad for subscription matters, 2 for basic troubleshooting, 3 for account management, or 4 to speak with an agent. The IVR can also collect the customer’s information to prepare it for review when the call is routed to an agent.
With an IVR system, there’s no need for agents to address all callers. They only have to talk with a caller if the concern is escalated for agent intervention.
5. Collect Customer Feedback with Automated Surveys
Businesses can collect customer feedback in different ways. However, the most efficient and quickest way is to automate the feedback collection process. You can automate the instances in which customers are encouraged to answer your survey when they interact with your business.
For instance, when a customer renews their subscription or connects with your help desk, your feedback collection tool can automatically pop up to invite the customer to answer your survey.
6. Address Email Queries Using Email Automated Assistants
Businesses are also adopting the best AI email assistants to help their teams address queries sent via email. Instead of wasting time responding to emails one by one, an automated email assistant can draft emails in response to simple customer queries, saving your team precious time for more important stuff.
Aside from automated responses, there are also AI-powered email assistants that can help in inbox management, lead generation, and even sales copywriting.
7. Utilize an Automated Notification System
It’s important to notify your agents regularly to remind them of crucial tasks they must accomplish, such as responding to tickets, addressing an urgent customer request, or reviewing customer information. With an automated notification system, your agents will get a heads-up to complete tasks that are left unfinished.
8. Automate Schedule Appointment Management
Some customers want to schedule appointments with your business to address their problems or to learn new features. Unfortunately, appointment management can be a tedious task for agents, especially if you’re planning to handle multiple appointments.
You can enhance your AI chatbots with an appointment reservation system where customers can set a schedule for their appointment that automatically goes straight to your calendar. With this solution, you can keep track of incoming appointments, ensuring you’ll never miss an important meeting with your loyal customers.
Save Time and Increase Efficiency with Customer Support Automation Today
Over 75% of customers consider rapid support response crucial for their experience with a business. This isn’t surprising. With our current, fast-paced environment, the last thing customers want is to painfully wait in lines.
Hence, customer support automation is now necessary for businesses more than ever. You can’t keep your customers satisfied if your helpdesk is sluggish and stuck with traditional solutions.
My AskAI provides automated customer support tools like AI chatbots to elevate your business’s support service. Try it today and automatically address queries with absolute speed and accuracy.
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.
