There were times where every company followed manual work regardless of how big the task was. But, the scenario has changed entirely in 2018! The advancement in technology and the introduction of digitalization revolutionized the way in which a business operates. People started relying on automated tools and processes instead of paperwork which consumed a lot of time as well as effort.
While industries have automated most of its functions, the customer service sector is still lagging in this aspect. Some companies are even now handling every customer service task manually. There are several reasons for following this old school method in this area. We mentioned some important ones below.
– The customer service agents feel machines cannot provide the personalized touch to their jobs. The customers also prefer talking to humans rather than chatbots which cannot solve their problem most of the time.
– The AI and machine learning are still new in the customer service sector. The agents are not happy to welcome this technology which may fail to provide the proper service to their customers.
– Also, the companies think adopting any automated technologies in this area may require intellectuals to handle it and requires a lot of budget concerning tools and hiring the experts.
Although the machines or automated tools are not designed to provide human experience to the customers, there are various other tasks that these tools can handle easily. Let us see why do we require automation in the customer service area.
– It offers the higher level of responsiveness which humans fail to do.
– Automation saves a lot of time of the customer service agents and thereby reduces the cost of employment since tools itself handle most of the tasks.
– It does not require any experts to manage the automated functions. Only one training is sufficient to start using the tools.
– With this approach, you can make your support page 24/7 available for your customers.
– It gives you the power to scale the customer service at the higher speed for every upcoming project.
According to some researchers, almost 85% of the customer interactions are predicted to become automated by 2020. Hence if you have never planned to introduce automated tools to this area of operation, it is the high time to do so. We listed a few customer service automation tools that will ease your job and saves a lot of time.
If you have ever worked as a customer service agent, you may have experiences of receiving ‘n’ number of queries back to back. To handle the task manually in such circumstances may annoy you as well as make your job stressful. Autoresponders acts as a savior in such state. These tools will reply to your customer’s queries without actually providing a solution. It makes the customers feel that their questions or problems have reached the company and the customer service agents will resolve it in a short time.
Once the autoresponder does it work of replying to the customer’s query in a few seconds, the agents can work on the problem they received. But try to come up with a smart autoresponder which can provide a personalized touch to the messages. For instance, you can use statements like, “Thanks for getting in touch. Don’t worry! We are on it.” This kind of lines assures the customers that they can expect a solution to their problem. In some cases, the autoresponders can also provide the link for the next step so that the customers can do it by themselves without any external support.
One must tag every query received by the customers for the future reference. It helps to identify the common trends as well as problems of their products and identify a permanent solution to it. The customer service agent is responsible for tagging all the ticket with some specific identification. For example, he can tag the query related to errors in the product as bugs or any user comments on the products as feedbacks and many more. Manually doing all such tasks is tiresome and also takes some time.
Sometimes, he may also have to invest time in deciding the tag for the received queries which takes some more time. In such cases, one can always use automation devices to do this task for you. With the help of the machine learning algorithms, the tools can quickly identify the tag for all the tickets. These algorithms analyze the customer queries and match it with the other conversations to precisely tag them. It saves both the time as well as the effort of an employee.
When you are loaded with many queries to resolve, it is difficult to decide where to start. That is, you may not know which problem to fix first or which conversation to pick out of many. While providing a solution to every customer problem is essential, it does not mean every query needs a quick solution. You may have to read every message or go through every subject line to decide the next ticket. To save yourself from such complications, you can set the priority for the query you receive. But manually doing it is a tedious task which consumes more time from your end.
Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) in such scenarios to set the priority to every task based on its importance. It is one of the reliable ways to set up the queue without any manual work. You can combine the Service Level Agreement (SLA) along with it to offer the best service to your customers. One good example of SLA is promising a fixed time for providing the solution to the customers. It will save your time and also help you in your task accordingly.
You may have some experiences where a customer requests for a solution and you provide the answer or ask them some additional information to resolve it quickly. But, you may not receive any response from them after the first interaction. The customer service agents solve these kinds of the case by keeping the ticket open and manually asking the customers for an update. It is time-consuming since they have to go through every ‘open’ status and ping the customers asking about the problem.
To solve such problem, the customer service agents can automate the follow-up task using some tools. That is, after responding to the user’s queries, the agents can mark the status as ‘pending.’ So, the automated tools will monitor such tickets and send an email to the customers after 24 hours or two days to ask about an update or further assistance. If there is no response from the customers, you can mark the status as ‘resolved.’ In case if you receive an email from them, you can reopen the ticket.
It is always recommended to let your customers know about your next step or what might go wrong with your product or services beforehand. If you are into selling any product online, you can use automated tools to notify the consumers about the delivery date, time of delivery, shipping status, or the reason for delayed shipping in advance. It will not only save you from annoyed or frustrated customers but also avoid you from spending extra time on dealing additional problems.
Apart from that, you can also use automated tools to monitor the real-time performance of your website or platform. These tools will notify or alert the customers about any errors in their user profile before they realize the problem. So, you can open the ticket and work on it immediately to resolve the issue.
If your customer service team is struggling to identify the importance of the user queries or to respond quickly, you can always rely on automation tools to help you. It will automatically bump the critical tickets to the top, keeps the customers updated about every step, and sets an expectation by providing an auto-reply to the queries. Such tools will improve not only the customer experience but also the experience of the agents.
Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder and the former CEO of GitHub has once wisely said, “You’re either the one that creates the automation or you’re getting automated.” Hence decide what you want to choose now!
