Automated Customer Service: How to Improve Your Support
Today, it is common practice for websites to offer live chat to their customers. The option to chat is often available 24/7. Imagine the relief on your customer support agents if they could offload half of their recurring tasks to automated systems and spend the rest of their time helping clients solve complex issues.
For many customers today, the key brand differentiator is customer support, not the product or the price. This means that companies that want to stay ahead of their competitors need to improve their customer support — resolving users’ pains 24/7. Customer support automation is a great way to do this without hiring many more customer support agents or overworking your existing agents.
Before you go into how customer service automation can improve your customer support, here is an introduction to what customer support automation is.
What is automated customer service?
Customer service automation refers to delegating recurring and repetitive customer support tasks to reduce human effort. Companies delegate these tasks to chatbots and other self-service methods. Since many customers want to solve their service or product issues independently without contacting customer support, automated customer support may be the key to improving your customer support.
Moreover, stats show that 90% of users have tried to resolve their issues with the website on their own. These might come in handy for both routine and frequent questions and unique issues that have to be resolved with the support reps.
Source: Groovehq
To be on the safe side and satisfy the users’ needs, you’d better provide the users of your website with an option to resolve their issues by themselves through a chatbot. Since not all chatbots are code-based, so luckily it is possible to add live chat features to your websites using services that help you build code-free widgets and add a Facebook chatbot. Use 13Chats for that purpose and also to reap the main advantages of customer service automation.
Advantages of automated customer service
In this next section, you will learn about some of the benefits of customer service and support automation. This is what the customer support automation does:
Enables a consistent workflow
Automated systems do not have concepts like tiredness, irritability, or sick days. They can serve your customers 24/7/365 regardless of holidays or time of day. By adding automated customer support to your websites, you can serve customers consistently when they need you the most. Offering consistent support can help build your company’s reputation as one that is reliable.
To say more, once you connect your chatbot with your Facebook page, the response speed option will change to “very responsive to messages” or “replies instantly.”
Reply speed on a Facebook page with a connected chatbot
Reduces mistake
A survey from Tessian shows that certain working conditions like tiredness increase people’s chances of making suboptimal decisions. While some mistakes may be inconsequential, others could be offputting to your customers and lead them to stop working with you altogether. By delegating tasks to automation system support, you lessen the burden on your support agents, which can help them to perform better.
Improves the standard of service
Let’s pose two scenarios. First, your customer calls or emails customer support and has to explain their problem to several agents before getting the proper help. The second, your customer speaks to a chatbot that directs them to a self-service portal or a specific agent to solve their problem. If you were a customer of your company, which option would you prefer? Using automated customer support systems that loop with your agents or route customers to the right agent can improve your support standard of service significantly.
Considering 37% of users would give up your product or service if your online chat is slow, you see how automated customer support can help your company in the long run.
Reasons why different generations of people give up a product or a service. Source: Forrester
Meets customers where they are
Not all customers are created equal, and your customers want you to meet them where they are. Some customers may be multitasking as they speak to your agents and want support that works with them. Other customers don’t want to use chatbots and want to talk to an agent and solve their issues asap. Automated customer support systems are flexible and allow your customers to get the support they need when and how they need it.
Saves agents’ time
Over 80% of the questions customer support agents answer are repetitive and low-level. If these questions and requests are delegated to knowledge bases, chatbots, and other self-service support systems, your agents can use that time to respond to clients with more complex problems. Additionally, by connecting your agents to cloud systems, they can spend less time retrieving customer information and more time helping them solve their problems.
Customer support agents can use the time they saved to improve their support offering. This can help them be more efficient when working, making them more valuable to you and your customers.
Empowers your clients
Earlier, you saw that customers often want to solve any problems they may be facing. Automation can help empower your clients because they will receive the information they need to solve their problems without asking for support. This empowerment consequently helps your agents by reducing their caseload.
If you use 13Chats, you can add links to useful information in your knowledge base or websites to your chatbot. Additionally, you will be able to add up to three buttons with links to let the user travel around your website.
How to automate customer service
When you tell people about customer service automation, they think about chatbots. The reality is that there’s more to it than that. In this section, we will look at how your business can automate customer service.
1. Introduce chatbots
You can introduce chatbots to your website or social media to work as de facto customer support agents. They can answer questions customers have about your products or services or route them to the agents that can help. Using services like 13Chats, organizations can build effective chatbots without hiring developers and software engineers.
2. Create knowledge bases
A knowledge base is an information repository. In the case of customer support knowledge bases, they contain answers to Frequently Asked Questions. They help your customers feel empowered as they can solve their problems themselves. For these knowledge bases to work, the company has to make them easily accessible. They can group articles and organize them in order of hierarchy so customers can easily find and use them.
Remember that these knowledge bases should serve both new customers and existing customers. Remember that these knowledge bases should serve both new customers and existing customers. You can set up a pop-up with the link to your knowledge base in your personal account to save time and connect to chats only in cases of complicated issues.
3. Make it easy for clients to search for information
Companies can make it easy for customers to find the information they need by optimizing their knowledge base both offsite and onsite. For example, add main keywords and their variants in the knowledge library that helpful information can easily be found when customers search for it. Additionally, these keywords can help chatbots point customers to the correct information in the knowledge base, consequently helping them more effective.
13Chats knowledge base
4. Enable one-click support
Not all customers want to use chatbots or sift through information to find the solution. Some customers just want an easy way to talk to an agent. You can make this possible by adding an option for one-click support. Some companies add this to the chatbot directly. After the customer has stated what problem they are trying to solve, it loops the best-equipped agent to handle the situation.
Companies should ideally send responses when their clients reach out, but not all answers are created equally. A fundamental way to evaluate if your canned message or auto-respond message is good is to ask yourself if it is useful. If it isn’t, you may need to rewrite it.
5. Make canned responses and auto-responses work.
Many companies offer communication channels on their websites that allow customers to contact them, report the problem they face, and be contacted back. While some of these customers receive bland messages from autoresponders, many do not receive any response at all.
A survey on different sized companies found the following findings on companies’ responses to customer emails.
Source: Groovehq
Companies should ideally send responses when their clients reach out, but not all answers are created equally. A fundamental way to evaluate if your canned message or auto-respond message is good is to ask yourself if it is useful. If it isn’t, you may need to rewrite it.
6. Use reporting and data to improve the offering
There is no guaranteed successful strategy in customer support automation. It is an iterative process where your company is constantly working to make your customer support better. Reports and data from the automated systems can help you know what to improve by using the metrics tracked.
Conclusion
Automation is affecting nearly every industry. The companies that are succeeding today provide value and serve their customers as quickly as possible. By adding customer support automation to your business processes, you stand to reap the many advantages of automated customer service, from lowering your labor costs to serving more customers better. Use 13Chats to create chatbots, pop-ups, and online chats that can help you started with the automation of customer service as soon as possible.
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