5 Big Reasons to Automate Customer Service

Are you looking to save your company money and provide efficient service to your customers at the same time? Have you wondered about automating your customer service?

Years ago, automated service brought to mind frustrated customers yelling at phones to get them a real person. Yet today, automated systems can deliver more efficient service than even customer service representatives. They can win customer respect and save you resources at the same time.

Consider the following additional reasons to automate customer service.

What Is Automated Customer Service?

Automated customer service gets provided by an automated help center, chatbot, or other artificial intelligence. A self-serve online or phone prompt library reduces support volume and increases customer satisfaction. 

Automated customer service support can be provided 24/7 and get used to assist and reduce the cost of human support services. 

Automated services can receive, process, and respond to requests for service.

Your service may take the form of a collaborative inbox that supports email, SMS, chat, social media, and other forms of communication with customers. This improves the customer experience because each service rep gets access to the same information about the customer. You can also automatically assign conversations to particular employees in order to avoid sending multiple responses to customers.

Some software is designed to help you plan for future events, eliminate repetitive tasks, and manage new tickets. It facilitates communication between team members and helps you gain important insights into customer interactions.

Now that you know what it is, here are five compelling reasons to consider it.

1. Reduce Labor Costs

Automated customer service can help you reduce labor costs by 30%. Your people will spend less time waiting for customers to assist and answering questions they could easily get the answer to without picking up a phone.

In addition, you will only need to train your customer service center once. Hiring and training can cost your company a lot of money, particularly if you have high staff attrition, which is a common problem at call centers. Automated systems allow you to provide your agents with more help for being successful, thus reducing your turnover. 

When one of your processes changes, you will need only to re-configure your software, rather than re-train and entire staff. They can also help free up your employees from routine support requests they get tired of working on. Energy can be focused on more challenging and creative aspects of meeting customer needs.

2. Support Is Always Available. . .

Automated customer service allows you to provide support to your customers at all hours of the day or night.

Your customers can get the answer they need in the middle of the night, or even during national holidays. 

3. And It’s Always Reliable

One poor customer service interaction can turn away a new customer for good.

With an automated system, you can be certain that the type of support your customers are getting is reliable. Automated service is not dependent upon the error and personality issues that come into play when working with live agents. The system will not take concerns personally and is trained to forward calls to management if the problem cannot get solved.

4. Efficient Service

Today’s customers want fast service that can be delivered while they are on a lunch break or after they put the kids to bed. They are looking to have their questions answered quickly before returning to their busy lives.

Customers who receive a quick resolution to their question will equate it with good customer service. 

Live agents will be more efficient with a virtual assistant by their side as well. They will not have to spend their time answering common FAQs that can be quickly looked up online by customers.

5. Reduced Friction

Long wait times are a problem when customers are holding for live agents. Automated responses help to shorten wait times, thus putting your customers in a better frame of mind.

Call recording, voice recognition, and usage monitoring can help you keep track of how customers are interacting with your product, support team, and sales funnel. This allows you to zero in on customer problem points before you speak to them. It will also improve your customer retention. 

Best Practices

A poorly configured system can leave customers feeling frustrated and taken advantage of. To have an effective automated customer service design, you will need to choose the right tasks for automation in the first place. This may include repetitive support cases, self-service resources, knowledge bases, checkout pages, and usage monitoring. 

You should, however, remember your target audiences when planning. Consider how comfortable they will be using basic or more involved technology.

Merging your service channels can help ensure that your system is more collaborative. If automated services are not influenced and affected by the tasks of customer service representatives, efficiency could be negatively impacted.

Your customers may become frustrated if they have to repeat themselves to a human agent. Make sure your processes integrate with one another and your other tools. These may include chat logs, phone call recordings, support tickets, and emails. 

Savings in time and funds shouldn’t lead you to neglect the human needs of your team. Better training and tools can help them to work efficiently with automated systems.

Always give your customers an option to speak to a person if that is what they prefer. Don’t be afraid to ask them for feedback so you can keep tweaking the system to meet their needs. 

When It’s Time to Automate Customer Service

You may be wondering if it pays to automate customer service. With the right system design, you could be saving money and providing customers with better service in no time.

For more information on collaborative inboxes, schedule demo today.