What is Automated Customer Service?
Automated customer service provides customer support through automated technologies such as chatbots. The ultimate goal of automating customer service is to minimize the amount and importance of human labor in customer service, particularly when carrying out repetitive tasks, troubleshooting common issues or answering straightforward questions.
Using automation tools, technologies, and entire platforms, organizations can automate essential parts of their customer service functionality. Automating certain processes makes a customer service organization more efficient and the experience of both agents and customers more pleasant, expedited, and streamlined.
Why Does Automating Customer Service Matter to Businesses?
Accenture says that 61% of customers stopped doing business with at least one company in 2017 because of poor customer experience. Nearly a quarter of customers said they trust companies less than they did five years prior, and often, when they switch providers, it’s because of trust.
Given the decline in consumer trust of companies, it’s now up to businesses to do all that they can to ensure that every customer’s experience is a good one – and automation is integral to this effort.
With automation, businesses have access to far greater capabilities than they ever would have had before. Enhanced efficiency makes it possible for organizations to rapidly ramp up their customer service offering, giving them new and improved opportunities to impress every single customer.
Whether a customer approaches the businesses with a query or complaint, a potential buyer has questions about their order or a previous purchaser is looking to repeat an order, automation can help.
New automated tools provide the means for organizations to excel where customer service is concerned, turning every customer experience into a great one that buyers can’t help but rave about.
Customer Service Automation in Action
Technology is developing at an incredible pace, and automation tools are at the very forefront of this change. With new and increasingly innovative solutions being launched, there’s never been a better time to start investigating what automation could do for your business.
Today’s businesses are increasingly reliant on interconnected digital tools, from apps and management systems to communication software and online platforms. Automation helps to bring these ideas together, and in doing so it allows companies to streamline their processes in a way that’s never been possible before.
Automating customer service processes offers a multitude of different benefits for organizations, no matter how big or small the company happens to be.
A brand can quickly increase its response times with the introduction of bots that automate workflows, for example. Bots can be used in a huge number of different ways, to resolve common issues and help customers quickly.
Ticket routing can also be automated, and this too can make a real difference to the customer experience. By automating routing, businesses can make full use of the incredible opportunities of AI, helping customers and learning about them as they go.
Automation can also be used to improve efficiency by quickly categorising different tasks. In doing so, automated processes will bring any more complex or time-critical queries to the top of the priority list, bringing them to the attention of a relevant team member to be resolved.
These are just a few of the most common uses of automation in customer service, but in reality there are endless ways of improving the customer experience with the use of this cutting edge technology.
Whether a brand needs to cut costs without sacrificing customer service, speed up its response times or make improvements to its customer experience to bring retention rates up, automation is key. Read on to learn more about how our automation options work and what they could bring to your organization.
Automated Support from Helpshift
Helpshift’s customer service automation offering helps you respond to customers faster, resolve issues more effectively, lighten agent workloads, and lower customer support costs. Here are just a few ways that Helpshift enables customer service automation:
- Bots that automate workflows. Bots use decision-tree logic to respond (and sometimes even resolve) customer queries by taking an appropriate course of action. They can also loop in a human agent if they’re not able to resolve the issue on their own. With no code required, Helpshift’s visual bot builder makes it easy to build bots rapidly and test them instantly, so you can create automated interactions across your particular customer journey. (more info)
- Intelligent issue classification for automated ticket routing. Helpshift’s classification engine automates ticket routing and replaces manual triage and keyword-based tagging by labeling issues and triggering automated routing to the right agent or specialized bot. Because it’s AI-enabled, the classification engine continuously learns based on agent feedback.
- Automated issue routing. Helpshift’s automated routing enables you to separate and prioritize urgent and high-value cases and route them to the right bot or agent.
Customer service automation today can be highly customized with the use of AI and machine learning, as well as the abundance of customer data available. And with Helpshift’s Connected Customer Conversations approach, the merging of customer service automation with agent interaction is seamless and friction-free for customers.
Additional Information About Customer Service Automation
If you’d like to see out more about how automating customer service could maximise the capabilities of your teams, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Our team is on hand to talk you through how automation works, and show you what it could really mean for your brand. Schedule a demo to see Helpshift in action.
For further information, take a look at some of our most popular automation products, or visit our blog to explore the options of automation.
