The constant evolution of new technologies is forcing companies to continually adapt to sustain growth.
Today, immediacy reigns supreme. Customers want quick answers. Customer service automation meets this demand while also saving time and significantly reducing internal costs.
Automating customer support in 2024 is key to improving customer satisfaction and increasing team productivity. Find out how in this article from YeldaAI.
What Is Customer Service Automation?
Customer service automation involves simplifying internal processes by replacing repetitive tasks with automated systems.
To do this, you need to use digital tools such as chatbots, preprogrammed answers, and automated workflows. Typically, this allows you to:
- accelerate interactions
- reduce response times
- improve customer satisfaction
Automation is essential for managing the increasing workload of human customer service agents, freeing up their time for more complex tasks that can't be handled by bots.
It also offers a more streamlined user experience by allowing every team to focus on more strategically valuable elements.
Why Automate Customer Service?
- Significantly reduce internal costs: using automated customer service tools reduces handling times and the costs associated with customer inquiries. Parts of these tasks can be delegated to an automated system rather than being handled by human agents. For example, answering a query on social media costs 1 dollar instead of 6 when handled over the phone by a human agent.
- Improve agent productivity: a study from Pegasystems revealed that automation reduced the costs of handling customer requests by 35%. This can free up time for your agents to focus more on more complex tasks or situations that require an empathetic exchange with an unhappy customer, for example.
- Handle time-consuming tasks: chatbots and voicebots can handle around 80% of routine tasks without the need for human intervention. Automated solutions are an effective way to reduce the workload of customer service agents.
- Offer more availability to customers: automating customer service is the best way to handle requests by offering 24-hour customer service with or without human agents. 23% of customers prefer to interact with a chatbot, voicebot, or callbot or use direct messages when they have quick questions. Automating customer service also helps agents to better segment customers and personalize responses.
How can you automate customer service?
There are several ways to automate customer service. Let’s see how you can automate customer relationships and which tools you can use.
What aspects of the customer relationship can you automate?
Thanks to customer relationship digitalization, you can automate:
- Call recording and monitoring: automation doesn’t just allow you to record calls for later analysis, it also allows you to actively monitor calls to ensure a constant quality of service.
- Update customer profiles: automated systems can update customer profiles in real-time, which guarantees accurate information in your databases. These updates are essential to keep up with the growing demands of customers on brands.
- Routing: thanks to an interactive voice server (IVS), calls are automatically directed to the right service. This optimizes operational efficiency.
- Organizing conference calls: planning and organizing conference calls become much simpler through automation. This allows for seamless coordination between teams and customers.
- Booking appointments and meetings: planning is simplified and no longer requires human intervention.
- Setting up automatic reminders: Automation can be used to send reminders to customers whether it’s for appointments, payments, or other commitments. You reduce the risk of no-shows and gain a significant amount of lost time.
- Synchronizing CRM: automated integration with customer relationship management (CRM) systems guarantees centralized data. This makes accessing customer information much easier.
- After-call or after-order feedback requests: automatically ask for customer feedback after every interaction (sales calls, online orders, after-sales, etc.) to facilitate data collection to continually improve your customer service.
Which tools can you use to automate customer relationships?
Automating customer relationships can be done in several ways and there are many tools to do it:
- Automated email marketing: with tools like Convertkit or Mailchimp, you can program the automatic sending of newsletters, order confirmations, or after-sales messages to better convert leads.
- Chat directly to an agent or intelligent chatbot: Bots driven by artificial intelligence can respond to recurring customer queries 24/7 while also offering the option of speaking to a human agent for more complex questions. YeldaAI offers a NoCode AI callbot creation tool that allows you to create a virtual agent in 3 clicks!
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools: automatically centralize customer data, allowing your service team to always have the information they need during conversations with customers.
- Routing with an Interactive Voice Server (IVS): Greet and guide callers through a menu to automatically transfer to an appropriate service. This alleviates the workload for agents, especially during peak hours.
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) databases: Make the most common answers to FAQs available to customers using smart FAQs. When done right, this reduces time-consuming calls. You can also present FAQs through an IVS, as seen in our previous point.
By integrating these automated tools, businesses can improve their current processes, increase customer service productivity, and offer a more fluid customer experience.
The limits of customer service automation
Automating customer service goes hand-in-hand with improving customer relationships, but you must manage this digital transformation carefully to ensure that the customer experience remains fluid. Despite the growing digitalization of companies, human interaction remains essential, especially for more complex inquiries and customer retention for customers whose trust is increasingly fragile.
A study conducted by the magazine CIO Online in 2021 revealed that 59% of French consumers expected personalized customer service. Automation can provide segmentation and other types of functionality that allow you to tailor each stage of the customer journey.
You need to remember that setting this up can require a lot of training for teams. You need to anticipate a range of different scenarios to ensure ongoing customer satisfaction.
Automation also shows its weaknesses when it comes to unhappy customers in particular. Automated responses tend to aggravate customers in delicate situations. Ensure that complex inquiries and issues are more delicately handled by a human.
We need to remember that automation can’t fully function on its own. You need to constantly monitor processes to ensure that costly errors and issues don’t arise. Furthermore, some customers prefer the human touch. Make sure you listen to your customers and adapt to their needs!