What Is Customer Service Automation? Full Guide

It lets you better serve your customers on their preferred channels, sure, but also creates a potential area for slippage. Almost every day, new stats and research comes out about how demanding customers are, whether it’s how quickly they want answers, how they don’t want to wait on hold (or wait at all), and so on. “More often than not, customer inquiries involve questions which we have answered before or to which answers can be found on our website. Canned replies, on the other hand, are pre-written answers—pre-populated messages—to frequently asked questions or workflows to address common scenarios. Of course, as you well know, the “who” often varies between individual agents and teams. When multiple people are involved, automation becomes even more critical.

Empowering customer service philosophy is a great way to motivate a team. As your service is now faster, it’s possible to handle more customers’ queries, which contributes to customer loyalty and word of mouth. There will be no need to hire more employees to carry out administrative repetitive tasks connected to support. However, there can be some minor payments for the initial software setup and further maintenance. Automation reduces the human element of your business, which decreases the potential for idleness, and possible mistakes when inputting data and resolving customer inquiries. You can simulate sympathy and empathy with a chatbot, but it’s hard to fake realistically.

customer service automation strategies

Below, we’ve compiled some of the smartest ways you can introduce and maximize automation to help people—you, your team, and your customers—do more, not less. Originally penned by Paul Graham in 2013, that line has become a rallying cry for start-ups and growing businesses to stay human rather than automate. Customers with lots of questions, and those who need hand-holding through difficult processes or explanations, would benefit from working with a human. Most of the time, these folks are more than willing to wait for a person to talk to if they know they’ll get the help they need. This customer service outreach reduces churn and yields valuable insights for improvement. Using a CRM platform makes it possible to centralize all your customer information, including contact information, transaction history, self-service interactions, viewed content, and more.

Speedy and efficient responses lead to a noticeable uptick in customer loyalty. Happy customers aren’t just return customers; they’re also brand ambassadors. Their loyalty can be quantified through higher sales, repeat business, and positive word-of-mouth marketing. When consumers perceive a brand as responsive, their long-term association leads to consistent revenue streams, thus positively impacting the ROI. The modern customer doesn’t want generic interactions; they crave personalization. Automation tools can amass and analyze data about a customer’s preferences, past interactions, and purchase history.

AI chatbots for immediate assistance

Gorgias includes a live chat widget that can be easily added to your online store. Simply go to Settings and click Chat, found under Channels on the left menu. Click the Add Chat button, located at the top right-hand corner, and set up your first chat widget. You can customize the widget to match your brand image with custom colors, support agent avatars, and more.

As people get older, they tend to prefer human service, while younger clients prefer automated customer service. There are several potential explanations, including the fact that older people may be less familiar with technology and more accustomed to human interactions for resolving issues. It remains what is customer service automation to be seen whether this is truly a reflection of age or more of a byproduct of contrasting generations and personal philosophies. An AI virtual assistant relies on NLP & NLU to easily handle customer support queries in a proactive manner and help scale your enterprise support needs more efficiently.

However, it’s worth noting that providing customers with options for communicating with your business when they have a concern will improve their overall satisfaction with your brand. Automated customer service can drastically reduce customer service costs because it requires less human-to-human interaction. The right AI tools are out there and are ready to provide support teams with the support they need to do better and help customers even more. Solve incoming queries before they become tickets by using an AI-powered chat widget that deflects repetitive customer questions and enables self-service. Voice bots are AI-powered virtual assistants that communicate with customers via speech through digital voice and telephony channels. The questions are interpreted through NLP (Natural Language Processing) and responded to via text-to-speed technology or pre-recorded audio files.