Learn how customer support automation can transform your business with chatbots, automated workflows, and self-service tools. Discover how to reduce costs, improve response times, and boost customer satisfaction without sacrificing the human touch.
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More than 90% of customers are likely to buy from a business more than once if it offers great customer service. Superior customer support, coupled with a valuable product, is key to remaining competitive in today’s world.
That said, with customer expectations increasing, delivering instant, uninterrupted support is becoming challenging. A promising way to optimize your customer support function, without adding more headcount, is to introduce automation.
Implementing customer support automation will result in lower overhead costs, higher productivity, and above all, improved customer satisfaction.
What is customer support automation?
Customer support automation is the process of using technology to reduce the involvement of human agents in providing assistance to customers. This type of automation relies on certain tools and techniques such as chatbots, automated workflows, and predetermined responses.
Automation isn’t meant to completely replace live agents in the support process. The goal is to automatically execute mundane tasks and enable your customers to resolve most of their issues through self-service. That way, your support staff will have enough time to cater to more urgent and complex issues that require a human touch. Your customers will feel happier while your team members remain productive without burning out. Everybody wins!
Common examples of customer service automation
Businesses don’t need to only rely on live agents to communicate with their customers. Instead, they can employ chatbots.
A chatbot is a system that interacts with customers using conversational AI technology on different communication channels, such as messaging apps, SMS, and website chat widgets. They help businesses instantly communicate and resolve their customers’ issues using auto-responses.
Customers can instantly get the answers to most of their queries without ever interacting with a human. Modern chatbots are smart enough to understand customer questions and respond with an appropriate automated reply.
Connecting customers with the right agents
Chatbots aren’t always able to provide satisfactory answers. Some tickets require a more hands-on approach from customer service agents. Businesses use flows to automatically route or assign these tickets to available support personnel. That way, agents don’t have to manually assign themselves to the tickets, making the process more efficient and reducing response times.
These flows can also be configured to assign certain tickets to the agents who possess the expertise required to close them on the first attempt. Known as “skill-based” routing, it prevents businesses from connecting their customers with the wrong agents or departments, saving time. For example, if a customer needs help troubleshooting a software, skill-based routing will connect them with a support rep who has technical expertise in that specific software.
Automating tedious tasks
With little or no automation, agents have to spend countless precious hours every month on mundane, repetitive tasks. As a result, their productivity levels drop. Ultimately, it’s the customer who suffers.
This problem can be solved by using workflow automation — an execution of tasks based on certain conditions and events. For instance, a customer feedback survey could be automatically sent after closing a ticket. Or AI could be employed to scan and understand a ticket and then automatically label or tag the ticket to help provide context to the agents.
Executing actions in other platforms
Modern plugins and APIs allow you to integrate and streamline the tools in your tech stack. This connection enables agents to automatically trigger and execute tasks across different platforms right from within their workspace, or customer service managers to set up automated workflows that don’t require agent involvement at all.
For example, if a messaging platform and a ticketing software are integrated, agents could theoretically mark tickets as resolved without leaving the messaging tool. Or customers could initiate a return by simply interacting with a chatbot.
Leveraging recommended replies
Also known as “canned responses,” recommended replies are predetermined responses to frequently asked questions. Instead of having to repeatedly type out the answer to the same FAQ, an agent can simply select the recommended reply with a single click and save time. Modern customer service platforms with Large Language Models (LLMs) capabilities can analyze customer questions and suggest recommended replies to agents.
These responses can also be configured to share helpful resources — knowledge base articles, guides, tutorial videos — if a registered response isn’t available.
Benefits of customer support automation for your customers
Automation removes bottlenecks from the support process, which helps customers resolve their issues more quickly and have positive experiences with your brand. Here’s how:
Resolve issues with self-service
With automation, customers can resolve their issues on their own without speaking to a support agent. Traditionally, a customer had to either email support or jump on a phone call with an agent whenever they needed help. This process took up a lot of the customer’s valuable time as they had to wait for someone on the other end to get involved. If the customer support team was overburdened by tickets, it could take hours or even days for them to get back with a response.
As a result, most customers would much rather solve their issues by themselves. In fact, 81% of consumers prefer self-service over speaking to a representative.
For example, a business could create a knowledge base full of helpful resources. Customers could access the resources at any time via the business website or by interacting with a chatbot. That way, they can find the information they need to resolve their issue without talking to an agent.
Instantly find answers
Customers are 2.4x more likely to buy from a business that solves their issues quickly. One way to do that is to offer instant answers to their queries. A customer typically has to contact a business any time they have a query about its product or service. Without automation, they’re forced to speak to a customer support agent who may take a long time to get back to them. And once they do, there’s always the chance that they won’t be able to provide a satisfactory answer due to their limited expertise.
However, with tech like chatbots and automated replies in place, customers can instantly get answers without ever speaking to a human agent. Even if there’s no registered answer to the query, the chatbot/automated replies can, at the very least, share relevant resources from the company’s knowledge base with the customer. What’s more, customers can conveniently reach out to the business at any time of day and be assured that they’ll get a response.
Benefits of customer support automation for your business
Automated customer support will help you optimize your support function, control your costs, and deliver delightful experiences to your customers. With solid automation in place, you can:
Do more with less
Your staff has to deal with hundreds or even thousands of support tickets every day. Those tickets range from simple queries that take under a minute to answer to more serious issues or complaints that take longer to resolve. Without technology, the only way to get through the tickets more quickly is to scale your team. But simply hiring more people isn’t a sustainable solution.
The best option is to lean on automation, as it will enable your team to close more tickets at a faster pace without increasing headcount. For instance, chatbots and automated replies can deal with low-priority tickets, such as answering common customer queries. Automated flows can help execute repetitive tasks, such as collecting customer information and closing out tickets.
This frees up your support staff to deal with high-priority tickets that require live agents. That way, your first response time (FRT), which is the time it takes for an agent to respond to the first message of a customer, decreases. All in all, your resolution time — the time between when a customer interaction first happens to the time a resolution is offered — also decreases.
Provide personalized support at scale
According to Harvard Business Review and Salesforce, 88% of businesses attribute their performance to delivering high-quality personalized customer experiences. However, there’s more to personalization than just getting the customer’s name right. The key to offering a delightful personalized experience is to provide contextual support that leans on a customer’s previous purchases, questions, and concerns. However, manually offering that level of personalization at scale is almost impossible.
An automated messaging platform that integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM) system can help in this case. As an example, agents can refer to older conversations to get more context and offer better support. Or template messages can easily be populated with the customer’s personal information and purchase history. The possibilities are nearly endless!
Get started with customer support automation
Automated customer service, when done right, will do wonders for your business as a whole by optimizing your team and facilitating positive customer experiences.
An automation partner that not only provides the necessary solutions but also helps you test and implement them is key to getting started. Bird offers one of the most comprehensive customer service suites packed with all the scalable solutions you need to create a smooth support function. Get in touch with our sales team to learn more about how we can help.
