How Automated Customer Service can enhance Customer Experience?

While one minute doesn’t seem like a lot, when it comes to solving problems – conversations with support executives can feel long and drawn out. This can be particularly frustrating when the issues are trivial in nature. There are many situations where customers spend 5-10 minutes on the phone just to do a basic requirement, like registering a service complaint.

What if you could save them the time and effort of having to go through the customer service center, while also drastically improving their customer experience?

Automated customer service is the answer to this very problem.

What is Automated Customer Service?

Automating customer service simply means reducing human effort in common, repetitive tasks and offering alternate solutions, thereby saving time and effort – both for executives as well as customers.

This means incorporating provisions and processes that allow customers to retrieve information or answers at real-time speed without requiring the intervention of a customer support executive or any contact with an organization’s support team.

The reason customer service automation works so well is because of the many steps the customer can effectively skip in search of a solution. With automated customer service, customers can also eliminate needless context-setting interactions with support teams and go right to finding a solution.

Why Is Automated Customer Service So Important?

Automation is not a replacement for human agents. It simply creates a gateway that deals with queries that would have taken longer to solve with an executive and would also be a waste of time for both the customer and the support team.

The objective is to create a system that effectively replaces certain repetitive parts of customer service with an automated mechanism. With automated customer service, you are making strides to help customers get what they want almost instantly. The benefits are immense:

Empower Customers with DIY Repairs

Automated customer service is all about handing the reins of preliminary support to the customer. By triggering the right prompts on a service portal, they will be able to get quick answers. This saves a tremendous amount of time and allows visitors to use that information faster to complete the tasks that required it.

They can also get the service at a time of their choosing because unlike humans, automation tools don’t need sleep. So, any form of self-support is available 24×7.

Furthermore , automated customer service means reduced human interaction. While great conversations can garner higher customer satisfaction, being forced to contact customer care for every little piece of information is tedious no matter how helpful or friendly the support executive is.

Improve Tech Support Productivity

Repetition has always been the enemy of support. Boring, mundane tasks can be a big let down for executives in their quest to attain job satisfaction. Imagine having to pick up the phone 30 times a day giving the same answer to every single customer. This is not what customer support executives were hired for.

By automating, you are essentially reducing ticket volume since the customer won’t need to register it as a ticket in your helpdesk. With the repetitive questions no longer on the agent’s agenda, their inboxes become less cluttered and it frees up valuable time for them.

Of course, reducing agent workload is only the first step. With more time on their hands, support executives can focus on performing tasks that add more value to both the customer and the organization. It also means more important and complex issues can be given the attention they deserve. Significantly, agents can now focus on having impactful conversations with customers.

Reduce Costs and Overheads

Now that you’ve covered two most important bases with automation, let’s talk about cost management. Having dedicated resources to answer repetitive calls can create overhead in two ways:

1. The first is when your ticket volume is on the rise and you have to hire more seats to take on the extra work.

2. The second is agent attrition because of job dissatisfaction, resulting in new hires and added training costs.

By setting up automated customer service, you save time and money you would have had to spend on recruitment and training. More importantly, there is usually only a one-time fee for implementing your automation systems and you can always upgrade your automation tools on a pay-as-you-grow model.

Aforeserve has built an AI-enabled automated service resolution engine that analyses, categorises and auto-resolves IT Support tickets to create a superior customer experience. In a changing world, we expect our support to make customer experience agile and responsive and match the complexity and expansiveness of a remote workforce.