Automation in Customer Service: Use Cases, Benefits, Best Practices in 2023

It’s an increasingly popular solution, with as many as 77% of the respondents in one survey having used a self-service support portal to solve their issues. The customer service team can use the knowledge base to find the right answer when communicating with customers. When you implement customer service automation the right way, it reduces the number of unnecessary or inefficient interactions between your support staff and customers. You’re able to deliver high-quality, multi-channel support so that customers get what they need, when and where they want it. Also, customers who want to upgrade or downgrade their subscription package prefer to talk to a human agent instead of a bot.

Because of this staggering statistic, companies are turning to customer support automation to streamline business processes and increase customer retention. In addition to customer queries, there are some processes too that can be automated. Identify as many processes and queries that don’t require human interaction and automate them.

Ultimate to automate support across channels

This lets you surveil product adoption and improve your customer retention, as well as zero in on frequent problem points in order to remedy them. Focus on simple, repeated tasks that eat up the majority of your support team’s time. This includes troubleshooting for defective products, verifying user accounts and identities, gathering customer data, and other tasks that automation can handle.

With Olark, you can monitor and analyze customer behavior on your website in real time. This enables you to proactively engage with customers, resolve their issues quickly, and provide the best possible support. The tool consolidates all your customer data into a single platform for a 360° view of customers, so you can offer contextual and personalized support at every step. Make adjustments to improve the customer experience and ensure that your automation strategy continues to meet the evolving needs of your customers.

Aligns with the preferences of modern customers

While automation is a great way to improve customer service, it is a time-consuming process. You need several tests and constant feedback from your customer in order to build perfect automated customer service. Through covering multiple platforms, these features provide your audience with the support they need in time, help reduce your customer support agents’ workflow, and cut extra costs. A canned response is one of the easiest ways to automate a small part of your customer service. With email templates, your support team can respond faster, save time, and uphold a consistently high standard for responses. A suitable first step for automating your customer service is to create a knowledge base.

• This search for reliability and identification can be severely hampered by customer service automation.
• The last amazing benefit for agents is that automated customer service improves support team communication and encourages collaboration.
• Canned responses lend a helping hand and save time, leaving your agents more time to be personal and personable.
• To begin with, it can save time and money by enabling human agents to focus on more complex tasks, reducing the need for hiring and training staff, and decreasing operational costs.
• Even though a knowledge base can’t be referred to as automation itself, it can relieve support agents’ work.
• Overall, the platform enables faster response times and reduces manual efforts.

Take a look at the graphic below to make sure you understand the idea of automated workflows as part of a customer service automation process. Support automation can take many forms that vary in degree of sophistication. There are accessible and user-friendly solutions to help you achieve your goals, such as HelpDesk’s ticketing system. Its automated workflows are so easy to set up that you can get started in seconds. Likewise, customers expect consistency above all else across the different service channels you offer.

Social media automation

For the ones you cannot, automation tools like the ones mentioned above can help you get your data in the right places. You can create automated shipping updates for your customers by integrating your shipping provider with Zapier and using it as a trigger to send an email to your customers. Customer support teams that leverage automation between multiple applications can speed up their work exponentially. What do customers do when they first experience a problem with a product you offer? However, striking the right balance between automation and human intervention is crucial to ensure customer satisfaction.

The competitive marketplace relies heavily on excellent customer service for businesses to stand out. In this regard, businesses have been adopting automated customer service systems to elevate their service offerings. In fact, McKinsey research shows that many business operations related to customer service are the business areas where AI automation is taking place mostly (see Figure 1).

What are Chatbots? Is ChatGPT a Chatbot?

But how can you be swift and precise if you’re working alone or with a small customer support team? The choice between automated customer support and human-agent customer service isn’t black and white. In certain situations, the efficiency and convenience of automated tools are preferable. Conversely, there are times when the comfort and personal touch of human agents are desired. This complex decision-making process highlights the intricate nature of Customer Service Automation. Another aspect of customer support automation is adopting a few processes that’ll improve customer experience.

The more queries a chatbot handles, the more efficient it gets making it beneficial both the machines and staff. A comprehensive customer support software is the most efficient option to consolidate everything on a single platform. When all the customer queries are stacked on a single dashboard, you can minimize the time taken to scale your support resources. Since self-service portals minimize time and effort for both the customer and agent, it is a win-win situation that helps boost your bottom line.

What are the advantages of automated customer service?

Automating best practices for processes like tagging certain tickets or documenting solutions can relieve the burden for your team—especially if there’s a sudden influx of tickets. It’s important to maintain a human touch throughout the whole customer onboarding process; no customer should be left to learn your product with blog articles and videos alone. Nothing can replace a demo held by a knowledgeable customer support representative. Following up is one of the biggest jobs in customer support and success.

These automated solutions will leave the human support representatives more time to field the extra-difficult queries. Machine learning (ML) is at the heart of processing and analyzing large data streams and gaining actionable insights. When it comes to customer service, ML can provide predictive analytics to agents that identify common questions and responses. It can also remind an agent of missed opportunities or relevant new facts.

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