4 Tips to Automate Your Customer Service Without Harming the Customer Experience

In the modern global economy, the businesses that succeed all have one thing in common. It’s that they find ways to get more work done while expending fewer resources — and without compromising their customer experience. Right now, Amazon is the most well known gold standard example of this idea in action.

But most businesses in the UK won’t ever grow to operate on Amazon’s scale. That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t steal some pages from the global eCommerce giant’s playbook to improve their bottom-line performance. And the best place for them to start is by exploring the latest in customer service automation technology. It offers a way for businesses to offer the best possible customer experience in the UK without spending too great a share of their profits doing it.

To help those businesses wishing to do that, here are four tips on how to automate major customer service functions without harming your customer experience.

Begin With a Comprehensive Knowledge Base

The first step every business should take to enhance their customer self-service options is to create a comprehensive knowledge base to provide customers with a useful self-service option. It’s a tactic that can simultaneously decrease the business’s customer service workload while leading to better customer experience outcomes. And it’s not hard to see why. Recent research demonstrates that 38% of customers in the UK expect businesses to provide them with self-service options. So, it’s merely a matter of giving your customers what they want.

The best way for a business to start building a knowledge base is by surveying its customer service representatives and going over customer interaction data to find common customer pain points. With that information in hand, set about creating a well-organised knowledge base system with discoverability as its central goal. The more useful data added at the outset, the more valuable it will be. But remember — a knowledge base is always a work-in-progress that will grow and become more useful with time and consistent additions.

Important:

Businesses need to treat their knowledge base as an ongoing project. Otherwise, the information within it will rapidly fall out of date and lead to customer frustration rather than satisfaction. For that reason, it’s a good idea to make knowledge base updates a recurring task for customer service workers. That way, there will always be a constant stream of new, current knowledge available to customers.

Deploy an AI-powered Chatbot for Front-line Triage

Although a high-quality knowledge base is important, there are some ways to maximise its effect. And one of them is to deploy an AI-powered customer service chatbot on your business’s digital channels. Doing so can help to route incoming customer service queries to relevant knowledge base entries. It can save customers time and allow customer service representatives to spend their time on more complex customer interactions.

But there’s another major benefit to deploying chatbot technology. It’s that chatbot interactions can provide a valuable source of customer data. And that data is invaluable for businesses wishing to fine-tune the rest of their customer service operations. By applying sentiment analysis, for example, it’s possible to gauge customer satisfaction levels and detect emerging support trends. That, in turn, can inform where and how the business directs its other customer service resources for maximum positive effect.

Automate Customer Service Agent Workflows

After creating a high-quality self-service option and linking it to your chatbot, the next thing to do is to integrate some automation into the workflows of your customer service agents. One of the best ways to do this is to create a comprehensive list of canned responses for them to draw on while interacting with customers. That will allow them to effectively handle multiple customer queries on certain channels at once without any of the customers feeling like they’re being left on hold or ignored.

Note:

It’s important to limit the use of canned responses to interactions where they make sense. For example, you might automate things like greetings, customer information queries, and agent transfers. Those aren’t customer-specific enough to require a unique response. But you wouldn’t want to try and automate anything that’s situation-specific workflows like product refunds and billing inquiries.

And on top of canned responses, it’s also a good idea to automate issue escalation. For example, if a customer contacts customer service with an issue that a front-line agent isn’t authorised to deal with, an automatic transfer to an authorised representative will save everyone time. The idea is to get the customer to someone that can help them in the shortest possible time — and automation offers the fastest way to accomplish that.

Monitor and Iterate

Last but not least, it’s critical for any business that’s integrating automation into its customer service operations to recognise that things can — and will — go wrong. For that reason, it’s a good idea to create a customer satisfaction feedback mechanism. This provides customers a forum to share their feelings about their experience and for the business to keep tabs on how well it’s meeting customer needs.

But it’s not enough to simply monitor customer feedback. It’s also necessary to create a process to evolve your use of customer service automation over time. For example, if your customer feedback indicates that your automated escalation procedure isn’t resulting in fast enough issue resolutions, you’ll need to find out why and make changes to it. And even when everything’s working well, it’s important to look for signs of changing customer expectations and demands. That way you can always stay one step ahead and ensure the perfect customer experience.

Know When and Where to Automate

At the end of the day, automation for automation’s sake is never a good idea. And knowing when and where to apply automation within your customer service functions isn’t easy. Although the tips listed above should make it possible to introduce automation without harming your customer experience — there’s no such thing as a foolproof methodology. So, the best approach is to take your time as you introduce automation into the equation, collecting customer feedback as you go. Your customers themselves will be the ultimate arbiters of your success or failure — and listening to what they’re telling you will invariably lead you down the right path.