Challenges facing customer support teams at fast-growing companies are complex.

The acceleration of growth leads to an exciting uptick in customers, but it also means an inevitable overload of customer support inquiries. However, support teams can balance efficiency with offering a customer experience that meets the rising expectations of customers — all while ensuring that they don’t blow through their budget or burn out their support agents.

The key is customer service automation done with the right tools and processes in place.

Three solutions to improve your customer support with WhatsApp

We’ve identified three headaches you might be facing — and offer easy-to-implement solutions to each, using WhatsApp along with Bird’s Flow Builder and Inbox.

These solutions allow your business to establish customer service automation on WhatsApp to accelerate ticket resolution times, boost agent productivity and reduce support costs at scale.

Challenge #1: Growing call center costs

Your business might know first hand how expensive call center costs get when the volume of support calls soars. Since support agents can only address one customer issue at a time on the phone, more calls means hiring more agents is required — an unscalable solution.

Not to mention high call volumes can result in customers waiting on hold a long time.

We saw this happen to a large consumer electronics manufacturer. Its inbound call center struggled to deal with a rising number of calls, which started to impact its customer experience. Hiring more headcount to answer these calls was cost-prohibitive.

Solution: Deflect expensive voice calls to WhatsApp messaging

Call deflection allows a customer on-hold over the phone to continue a conversation on messaging apps, like WhatsApp. Conversations held over messaging apps are more cost-efficient than phone calls and provide a better experience for customers.

Research finds that agents can handle 4-5 customer conversations concurrently, and implementing chat can lead to a 6.8% decrease in average cost per customer contact.

When our large electronics manufacturer implemented call deflection with MessageBird, they were able to deflect 25% of their inbound customer support phone calls to WhatsApp.

Challenge #2: Complicated ticket routing and assignment

Your support team may have been able to rely on manual processes to sort through, prioritize and assign tickets to agents when inquiry volumes were lower.

But as your business expands geographically or offers product lines with specialized experts, agents require automated assistance to properly manage and respond quickly to an ever-increasing volume of tickets.

Mexican restaurant, Guzman y Gomez, saw their online takeout orders skyrocket during the early days of the pandemic. They needed to figure out how to route a 10x increase in customer messages.

Solution: Automatically route tickets to the right agent on WhatsApp

Automated ticket routing based on key characteristics like language, sentiment, geography, and more can help get tickets to the right agent faster. With Bird Flow Builder, you can set up rules to detect and ‘tag’ certain attributes when a message or ticket comes in. You can then use these ‘tags’ to assign the ticket to the right queue.

Detect message content, language, and more in order to send customer inquiries to the right agent.

Guzman y Gomez leveraged a support ticket routing flow to triage incoming messages on WhatsApp.

Using natural language processing (NLP) built into Flow Builder, Guzman y Gomez was able to differentiate between emergencies and run-of-the-mill complaints. High-priority messages were escalated to the general manager, the head of operations, and the manager of that specific store.

With automated routing, Guzman y Gomez’s lean workforce was able to efficiently handle the 10x increase in customer chats without missing any high-priority messages.

Challenge #3: Too many repetitive questions (and answers!)

Live agents often see incoming chats that are similar in nature.

“Where is my order?”

“What are your business hours?”

“What is the closest store location?”

“Can I return my package?”

These are only a few examples, but the point is that your live agents often have to spend too much time answering frequently asked questions.

For Aramex, a leading logistics provider in Australia and New Zealand, the majority of its customer questions were around tracking, scheduling, or rescheduling deliveries. While these were easy for agents to help with, it often involved several back and forth communications, which took up too much of agents’ time.

It’s unscalable and cost-intensive for companies to have agents consistently complete routine tasks — plus, it makes its agents’ job feel mundane.

Solution: Deploy an FAQ chatbot on WhatsApp

Easily build an AI-powered chatbot to allow your customers to answer common questions themselves. This not only keeps your customer happier by letting them get answers to their questions faster, it also enables your business to lighten the load on live support teams.

Aramex implemented a chatbot on WhatsApp to answer common support inquiries, freeing up its agents from routine tickets. The chatbot allowed Aramex to manage 2.7 chats per one phone call, increasing their productivity by almost 3x. Plus, by deflecting the frequently-asked inquiries, its agents were able to more effectively support more complex tickets and high-priority customers.

Start offering better, more efficient customer support with Bird

Bird’s Flow Builder, Inbox, and preferred partnership with WhatsApp enable your business to quickly scale and optimize customer support. These three solutions are just the tip of the iceberg!

Are you ready to supercharge your support team’s morale, impress customers and save on costs? Connect with us today! We can’t wait to help you get started.