Customer Service
How can customer support automation help you scale your business efficiently?
“Customer is always right” is the age-old adage that businesses still honour today, with modern companies focusing on delivering a highly engaging customer experience throughout every stage of the customer journey. Did you know about 92% of customers will abandon a company just after two or three negative interactions? That is why customer experience is one of the top three differentiators for businesses today.
Customer service is an integral part of this experience, with customer service automation playing a pivotal role in improving efficiency and delivering outstanding customer experience. But how does automating customer service help businesses and what are some of the most popular automation trends contemporary companies are following?
Understanding customer support automation
At its core, customer support automation is the integration of advanced software tools and AI-powered solutions to help manage customer requests and resolve customer inquiries with little to no human intervention. These tools allow businesses to optimise resources, reduce errors, enhance efficiency, and offer 24/7 support for a seamless support experience.
Automated customer service solutions usually operate in five stages:
- Data collection
- Data processing and analysis
- Automated actions
- Continuous learning and improvement
- Human oversight
Each of these stages helps businesses ensure they are addressing every query promptly and effectively by automating routine tasks and allowing human support agents to focus on complex and nuanced issues. As a result, they can boost customer service efficiency and effectively scale support operations as the business grows.
Popular customer service automation trends
As the world has gone digital, businesses have moved away from manual customer support and embraced customer support automation for enhanced efficiency, scalability, and growth. Some of the most popular customer service automation trends businesses are using today include:
- Workflow automation tools eliminate manual tasks from a ticket’s lifecycle, helping improve the support team’s efficiency. Additionally, AI-powered workflow management tools can also triage the bugs, determine priority, and assign them to the relevant team members.
- Chatbots (rule-based or conversational) allow businesses to include live chat and self-service options on their website to help customers get quick resolutions for minor issues. These chatbots can help customers find relevant information to resolve their queries or connect them to support agents for complex issues.
- An extension of the point above, help desk applications make a knowledge base and resources available to the customers for navigating simpler issues or even how-to instructions for complex products.
- For companies with a global customer base, automated customer service solutions allow them to leverage natural language processing capabilities to offer real-time translation services to customers for prompt support without having to hire additional agents.
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR) advancements are not new, as virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa have become part of our everyday lives. Businesses are using them to navigate phone tree menus seamlessly, allowing customers to speak when they need help and directing them to the right response.
- Customer support teams are also using automation tools to collect customer feedback, which AI-powered tools can analyse and summarise to gauge customer sentiments.
These trends are helping businesses get the most out of their customer support operations and boost overall business efficiency.
Challenges of automating customer service
It is clear that customer support automation is changing the support and contact centre landscape. However, embracing automation is not without its challenges. The key challenges businesses must overcome when automating customer services include:
- Lack of human interaction and connection may be a barrier to some customers, where the lack of emotional intelligence may be off-putting.
- It is not a complete solution; it can streamline processes, automate repetitive, rule-based tasks, and offer data-driven insights. However, it cannot solve complex issues that need human intervention to understand nuances.
- Automation tools can be susceptible to technical issues and glitches, which can take your customer support offline.
- Resistance to change from your support team can hamper AI and automation integration with existing systems.
Working with reputed customer support outsourcing services can help you overcome these challenges, define your customer service automation goals and strategies, understand your customers’ needs, and implement automation tools to stay ahead of the competition.
How can Infosys BPM help facilitate customer support automation?
As modern businesses are turning towards customer service automation, customer support outsourcing services have become a key source of strategic advantage for companies trying to optimise their support operations. Infosys BPM support services can help you achieve contact centre excellence by supporting you through hiring, training, and workforce and performance management.
