AI in customer service: 11 ways to automate support

At a recent NPR Intelligence Squared debate, IBM Project Debater challenged a top debater in real-time, adapting to counter-arguments dynamically. In some cases, they can turn a simple question into an explosive complaint. To address these, it typically requires even more human intervention to resolve. There are dangers, of course, when it comes to relying on technology to carry out tasks. But being data-driven is near-impossible if you do not automate the collection and hygiene of it. We want information at our fingertips, and would prefer to troubleshoot ourselves before having to contact a support center.

• Automated customer service refers to the use of technology that provides customer support without human assistance.
• There’s no better time to automate redundant customer service tasks and increase your customer support team’s bandwidth.
• Brand metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Service Satisfaction (CSAT) are valuable, but there’s a better way to use them.

Customers are still very much aware they’re chatting to a machine, not a human. And this can be a source of real frustration when human agents and automated service aren’t integrated properly. In fact, not being able to reach a live agent is the single most frustrating aspect of poor customer service according to 30 percent of people. In this day and age, customer support automation is incomplete without chatbots. Modern customers demand faster responses and 24×7 assistance, and what better way to meet these expectations than developing chatbots for your own team.

The why: Advantages of customer service automation

With a knowledge base software, customers and support agents are able to access information and get solutions or answers to support issues by themselves. Your automation solutions should integrate with your other software and tools to create one central hub for customer information. If you’re like most companies, this means making sure your chatbot software integrates with your CRM (customer relationship management) software and contact center platform.

Canned messages are pre-defined answers to frequently asked questions from customers. Agents can select the message response with a click of a button, rather than typing out the full response. As well as public canned messages that all agents can access, individual agents can also create their own private canned messages. Despite this progress, many customer service operations are stuck in the past, based on a traditional call center model. This is costing companies dearly – in high operational costs and low customer satisfaction, which harms  brand reputation and fuels customer churn. Explore how customer service automation can empower your support strategy and help your customers get the answers they’re looking for – when and how they want.

What Is Automated Customer Service?

With the repetitive questions no longer on the agent’s agenda, their inboxes become less cluttered and it frees up valuable time for them. While one minute doesn’t seem like a lot, when it comes to solving problems – conversations with support agents can feel long and drawn out. This can be particularly frustrating when the issues are trivial in nature. There are many situations where customers spend 5-10 minutes on the phone just to find out basic information, such as learning a product’s return policy. And by keeping items reliably in stock, effective inventory management can keep stock-related inquiries from ever reaching service agents. AI learns from itself, so it can use analytics to adapt its processes over time.

Every support interaction should end with a survey that allows customers to rate their experience and provide customer feedback. Their input lets you make necessary changes to improve your automated customer service experience. A smaller business is less likely to have an army of customer support representatives.

This ensures all issues are resolved properly and in a timely fashion, thus boosting agents’ productivity. Most people have interacted with it before when calling their bank or an airline, and it can deflect many questions and save time for both customers and staff. This way, supervisors don’t have to personally coach every call, but agents can still get the information they need to help customers and learn how to talk about challenging topics.

You’ll need constant vigilance, as well as the willingness to impartially consider your own methods. If your automated channels and processes aren’t mutually influenced and affected with your human representatives’ tasks, then collaboration and efficiency will take a hit. This article will explore the advantages of customer service automation for your business, and detail the perils of the process as well. Sentiment analysis actually registers and identifies the emotional tenor of a customer, and it’s becoming a part of the customer service measure. The utility is flagging a customer who may be upset and then alerting a team leader or agent to interject and de-escalate the situation. An email can contain many such placeholders to help you deliver personalization at scale.

With automation features such as a self-service knowledge base and chatbots, your support team can handle more requests, complaints, as well as customer queries. You can even handle customers that come from different time zones and make sure reliable assistance is available round the clock. Customer service automation is the process of replacing manual tasks with powerful automation technology and tools. When you automate customer service, you put an end to manual processes, human errors, and unhappy customers.

You can send questions related to automated service alongside regular NPS or CSAT surveys or separately. What’s more important is to pay attention to feedback and do something about it. Most customers don’t expect their opinions to translate into action so it’ll be a good look for your company to prove them wrong. And be sure to ask them over time to capture shifts in perspectives, too. Automated service doesn’t usually happen in a silo — most effective customer experience systems provide multiple routes to automation and integrate with CRMs and other databases. This way, data in a centralized location and easily accessible for analytics and reports.

How to build a successful chatbot strategy?

Automating customer service processes offers a multitude of different benefits for organizations, no matter how big or small the company happens to be. Measuring the performance of your automated customer service is important to make it better. Most importantly, you need to check if it’s making a positive difference in customer satisfaction. For automated workflows to work, you need to integrate tools with one another so they can speak with each other without human intervention.

The best way to cut that overhead is by leveraging automation to bring all your support channels into one location. In essence, to reduce your collection points down to a single, all-inclusive hub. For these cases, make sure you’ve got a “contact support” option available on each and every page so your customer doesn’t have to go looking for it once they’ve realized they need personalized support. This will be an AI-driven system that collects data and then delivers suggested topics to give customers the help they need but aren’t finding. To identify what’s working in your knowledge base and where you can improve, track metrics like article performance, total visitors, search terms, and ratings. When your customers have a question or problem they need solved, the biggest factor at play here is speed.

Reps can easily access previous customer conversations, so they don’t have to waste time searching for information about the customer. NICE is an AI-powered tool that helps businesses increase customer success. Its “Omnichannel Routing” feature helps employees streamline conversations across several support channels, and its analytics turns important customer insights into actionable results. HubSpot’s Service Hub is a service management software that enables you to conduct seamless onboarding, flexible customer support, and expand customer relationships. Service Hub delivers efficient and end-to-end service that delights customers at scale.

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. It provides support to your customers when you’re not available, saves you costs, and much more. It can be difficult to keep the same tone and voice across communications — especially as it’s impacted by each individual, their experiences, and even their passing moods. Because of that, the “face” of the company the customers see can be very inconsistent . But with automation, errors can be reduced and the brand voice can be heard consistently in every customer interaction.

• And if you don’t have returning customers, you are likely losing out on more sales opportunities than you could have imagined.
• If you’re one of those leaders, you may consider automated customer service as a solution to providing the high-quality, seamless experiences that consumers expect.
• With the repetitive questions no longer on the agent’s agenda, their inboxes become less cluttered and it frees up valuable time for them.
• What started with assembly lines in the manufacturing space has now moved into knowledge-based work involving digitisation and data, such as marketing and customer service.
• Keep your automation processes streamlined by dedicating a separate profile for your support activities.

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