What is Automated Customer Service? Examples, Pros and Cons Faster, smarter customer support software for eCommerce

Chat is faster than email, more personal than traditional knowledge bases, and way less frustrating than shouting into an automated phone system. Most customers expect business websites to offer self-service and provide 24/7 support. So, it’s best to provide both and give customers a choice between self-service and a human agent to ensure a great customer experience with your brand. At the start, human-to-human interactions are vital so try to be personal with your shoppers to gain their trust and loyalty. So, if you can handle both your customer service queries and growing your business, stick to communicating with your clients personally. This will help you boost your brand and customer experience more than any automation could.

• It should be the result of careful planning and based on customer service needs and expectations.
• The right tools for a scaling business trying to empower their agents and help their customers can find their solution in a full AI platform such as Forethought.
• The challenge with this growth comes from the fact that servicing customers in different regions generally means that there will be times when you’ll need to be able to support other languages.
• Customer service managers can craft informative answers to the most frequently asked questions.

As the use of technology within customer support grows, it’s important to keep the focus on your agents and customers and not the technology being used. Implementing customer service automation could mean more reliance on technology when really, that should be on your support team. Relying on AI tools may weaken the bonds formed with customers and could result in missed customer metrics. As much as automation can greatly benefit teams by solving simple and repetitive customer issues, there are some issues you can’t trust automation tools to solve for you. Fortunately, automating the large loads of repetitive tasks frees up agent time and gives them bandwidth to take on some of those too complex tasks.

Top 5 Benefits Of Automated Customer Service Tools

To dive into automating customer service deeper, it’s important to mention ticket routing. This is a process of assigning a client’s query to an appropriate agent or department. By adopting such an approach, your customer service will be exceptional and complete. To put an idea in your head, here is what you can do – integrate a knowledge base into a chat widget if your customer support tool allows it. It will be much easier to find quick answers for customers right in a chat. As the solution may have several customer service options, need more time to resolve, and require urgent attention, it’s impossible to predict and automate everything.

Customer service automation is the process of using technology to carry out certain aspects of customer support. Automated technology helps companies respond proactively to simple inquiries, manage data, and provide self-service options. One last issue businesses face when looking to automate their customer service is finding a product that has limited integrations and can’t connect to their agent help desk. Many products will have limited integrations but it isn’t difficult to find a competitive solution that does integrate with your current tools and could actually perform better for you and your teams. Although human error usually results in only small mistakes, when compounded, those mistakes can cause a large issue and create bottlenecks in the support process. People seeking support will leave negative feedback and your agents will see their metrics go down.

Method 1: Prioritize, categorize & assign tickets automatically

Customers would much prefer to do their own research and solve issues themselves if the process is well-designed and offers them the proper tools and information. Organizations that face hyper-growth tend to need larger customer service teams to support customers and their business needs. However, most organizations that don’t take the customer service function seriously also stand witness to high churn rates and have a tough time with customer retention rates. An individual may prefer human service or automated customer service interaction, based on the nature of their inquiry. If they have a simple question or need a simple issue taken care of, automated customer service may be perfectly acceptable.

• The questions are interpreted through NLP (Natural Language Processing) and responded to via text-to-speed technology or pre-recorded audio files.
• Solving similar queries isn’t the best use of a customer service agent’s time.
• You can send questions related to automated service alongside regular NPS or CSAT surveys or separately.
• If you’re receiving a ton of customer support requests and your team is getting overwhelmed, you may want to automate that process with a help desk or ticketing solution like Zendesk.
• For example, instead of merely processing a return, your virtual agent could suggest replacement products or make buyers aware of a promotion that’s going on.

For example, try an email autoresponder and see the impact on your customer service metrics. This approach can also help you convince senior leadership that automated customer service is a worthwhile investment. As a leader in their industry, ShipEX delivers high-quality transportation and logistics services to their clients, and has a team of 450 employees and over 350 drivers.

Don’t forget about automating training and development

When clients land on a website, they want to see solutions at light speed. Provide a self-service knowledge base to reduce the burden on a support department and boost customer satisfaction. But with such a broad-ranging selection of omnichannel customer service today, you are free from picking and choosing.

It provides support to your customers when you’re not available, saves you costs, and much more. Automating your customer service allows you to handle more queries and rapidly execute tasks that would be difficult and time-consuming to do manually, such as coordinating Uber rides in a matter of seconds. This frees up human agents to handle more strategic tasks and complex user queries. Automated tech support refers to automated systems that provide customer support, like chatbots, help desks, ticketing software, customer feedback surveys, and workflows.

If you’re using a tiered support system, you can use rules to send specific requests to higher tiers of support or to escalate them to different departments. This means implementing automating customer service workflows and automations to send questions to the right person at the right time. No doubt, there will be challenges with the impersonal nature of chatbot technology.

Instead, they can focus on more complex issues that require their full attention. We can always switch to another brand if the current one doesn’t meet our expectations. In fact, 61% of consumers have changed brands after a poor service experience.

However, let’s cover a use case to help you better understand what automated customer service may look like. If you want to automate customer service, start with CS software (we’ll review some options below). Automated customer service software runs 24/7 while completing time-consuming and redundant (yet critical) responsibilities for reps. Teams using automated customer service empower themselves by integrating automation tools into their workflows. These tools simplify or complete a rep’s role responsibilities, saving them time and improving customer service.

RPA has proven it can dramatically lower costs while boosting efficiency and cutting processing time. Some inquiries are too strange or complicated for simple automated systems to handle. For complicated requests, a human customer service agent may be more effective.

Does Service Hub integrate with other apps and HubSpot’s other tools?

Crucially, you can deploy them across your customers’ preferred communication channels, meeting your users where they’re already spending time. Service Hub makes it easy to conduct team-wide and cross-team collaboration. The software comes with agent permissions, status, and availability across your team so you can manage all service requests efficiently. Overall, these ‘cons’ can all be overcome by devising the right strategy and using the available automation tools thoughtfully and within the correct context.

On the backend, a simple chatbot can retrieve answers to FAQs and surface self-serve resources from your knowledge base. If you’re receiving a ton of customer support requests and your team is getting overwhelmed, you may want to automate that process with a help desk or ticketing solution like Zendesk. These platforms offer a central place for agents to handle customer issues from multiple channels in one space. As I mentioned earlier, a good knowledge base empowers both your customers and support team to handle most troubleshooting on their own in a more efficient way. This type of deflection will reduce support tickets and save your customer support agents time and let them focus on bigger and more valuable tasks.

Once you have the right system, pay attention to creating the right chatbot scripts. Then, construct clear answers — they should be crisp and easy to read, but also have some personality (experiment with emojis and gifs, for example). Compounding matters further is the shift to hybrid work, which has led to teams becoming more distributed than ever before. This has created a major need for digital collaboration and for adopting automation as a critical capability to capture and validate customer problems and share information with all relevant team members. For example, chatbots lack the required empathy to de-escalate frustrated customers. Less sophisticated ones point customers to irrelevant articles and create a confusing experience.

Some people feel disconnected when they have to engage with chatbots and other automated tools. Talking to a human customer service representative makes your brand seem more responsive and the experience is more pleasant for many people. 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 customer service refers to the use of technology that provides customer support without human assistance.

We’ve all navigated our fair share of automated phone menus or interacted with support bots to get help. You can do this by sending out an automated email asking for customer feedback or embedding a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the support interaction. This helps you reduce churn and increase customer loyalty to your online store.