5 Best Practices of Automation in Customer Support

When it comes to Customer support automation, some challenging situations can be anticipated from customers repeating their requests a thousand times, chatbots just providing repeated answers, and customers struggling for basic information. All these issues make Automation look like an irrelevant and complex addition to your customer support. Even though it seems like Automation isn’t of much value for businesses when it comes to customer support, when implemented in the right manner, it can help your business so much by improving the customer experience while reducing the stress on support teams. So, with Apptivo, let’s see how automation can help customer support to grow with the best practices.

Importance of Automation in Customer Support

Very often there are instances when customers come looking for customer support and wait in queues for just a piece of basic knowledge. Due to these situations, automation comes into the picture where it doesn’t mean to replace human agents with robots. But, automation means creating a gateway to deal with situations that would’ve taken much longer if a human agent only would be involved in solving them. Therefore, the clear objective of implementing automated customer services is to create a system that can perform repetitive tasks using an automated mechanism rather than a human representative dealing with it. It makes it easier for customers to get what they want in an instant without waiting in queues.

Automation Best Practices

Automation for businesses should start with them looking for repetitive actions in their customer support operations. Different customer requests that require the agents to go through the same process, again and again, have the potential to reap the most benefits of automation. Hence, automation can help your business grow by ensuring the following best practices:

• Featuring Automated Replies

  When a customer sends out an email to you seeking help, then his request should be acknowledged properly. In this case, automation helps by automatically sending acknowledgment emails to the customers while generating their tickets. Apptivo Cases app features an automated ticket intake method so that customer requests aren’t left unchecked.

• Organizing the support queue

  When new customer requests are added into the support system, they are piled up and that causes the priority SLA requests to get stuck in the queue thereby resulting in a resolution delay. Apptivo’s automated ticket management controls the flow of tickets into the system by filtering the prioritized agreements and ensuring that important cases are redirected to the agents properly.

• Conducting Customer Surveys

  As soon as agents finish up solving the customer requests, a survey should be conducted that focuses on taking the feedback from the customers about their experience with your customer support. This can easily be managed with automated activities and Apptivo does so by providing you with the Triggers function that controls the happening of activity as soon as an event is triggered. So, you don’t have to worry about taking customer feedback, Apptivo has got it covered.

• Redirecting Customers to Contact Center & HelpDesk

  Automated chatbots should include the function of providing the customers with appropriate data such as articles and blogs. Apptivo Triggers does that by redirecting customers through event-based-triggers. But in the situation of a customer needing the help of agents, automation helps by redirecting them to the agents of the concerned department. It results in the customers being able to contact the right people but also saving a lot of time by preventing the calls to get stuck with agents of other departments. Apptivo’s automated Contact Center helps them deal with such issues automatically.

• Automated Customer Communication

  After completion of cases and resolving customer issues, automation helps you increase your business with your customers by communicating with them regarding relevant topics of their interest. It is done based on the issues they face with current products and services. With Apptivo Cases, you can respond to customer emails automatically, and using Apptivo’s automated Contact Center, you can easily communicate with them for future purposes.

Benefits of Automation

Automation helps your business in integrating the measures that allow your customers to get access to relevant information regarding their issues in an instant. It does so without having to add any human interference in the process. Conclusively, it helps the streamlined working of your customer support system by letting the customers pass through certain insignificant steps to find a solution. So, the main benefits that automation offers to customer service are:

• Improving Productivity of Agents

  When automated mechanisms continue to deal with smaller issues and tackle simple customer queries with preset answers, it would be easier for agents to deal with the bigger issue and hence would improve their productivity.

• Empower Customers for Self-Service

  Automated customer support is primarily about handling basic customer support. And it brings the possibility of self-service to the customers by providing them with quick prompts and shortcuts to pre-defined solutions to frequent issues.

• Reduce Overhead costs

  Having dedicated agents for dealing with customer issues result in extra costs for businesses. It introduces extra costs such as agent training and additional hiring in the condition of upscaled ticket volumes. Automation helps in both situations by providing support irrespective of the issues in the tickets.

So, these were the main benefits that businesses enjoy while implementing automation in their customer service.

Conclusion

Automated customer service is an important step in improving the experience of your customers while helping them to address minor issues. Conclusively, it helps in reducing the efforts of customers along with saving your teams their valuable time. Hence, Automation results in improved customer service by easily addressing complex customer issues and providing them with the right solution in the most effective way.