Customer Service Automation Simplified and Explained

Customer Service Automation: Simplified and Explained

Running a business without a well-planned customer support system is next to impossible in today’s world. Given that customers have already become tech-savvier and more demanding than ever, it is crucial to cater to their needs in the best possible way.

However, customer support is a challenging task that brings a lot of pressure and workload, ultimately leading to job dissatisfaction. 

That’s when customer service automation gets into the game.

Small and large businesses alike are deploying CRM systems to automate their customer service for different support activities. This allows them to improve customer interactions and acquire a more satisfied customer base.

So, let’s discuss how you can optimize your business operations with a customer service automation CRM.

What is Customer Service Automation?

Customer service automation refers to the process of customer support with reduced human involvement in resolving customer queries. The major objective of customer service automation is to put an end to human errors, save agents’ time, and increase customer satisfaction.

If your business offers a sub-optimal customer experience, your competitors could easily overtake your business by hailing customer service as the biggest USP of their product line. 

On the other hand, if you focus on building a base of satisfied customers, you can easily retain and build on your existing customer base.

Customer Service Automation Simplified and Explained

CRM Functionality for Customer Service Automation

 

Why Do You Need To Automate Your Customer Service?

Automated customer service enhances the efficiency of customer service processes and ensures that you are able to engage and retain your customers. Technological advancements have continued to transform customer service interactions.

Currently, 85% of all customer interactions are handled without human assistance as per Gartner Customer 360 Summit

This has been possible because of the service automation CRM which helps agents to resolve tickets faster and answer customer queries with accurate information, all while reducing operational costs.

You can increase your customer loyalty and brand reputation by building a virtual assistant that answers your customer’s questions directly on the front end, and provides your agents with the right information and resources that they need on the back end. 

 

Benefits of Automated Customer Service

According to McKinsey, businesses using automation technology to optimize their customer experience results in saving up to 40% on service costs.

Customer service automation brings you a lot of advantages. Besides lower cost, let’s dive in to learn why you should automate your customer service processes.

  • Attends service requests quickly and routes to the right agent for immediate resolution of the ticket.
  • Encourages support team collaboration by eliminating confusion about who owns a specific support ticket.
  • Allows 24/7 customer support without any interruption, thereby increasing your customer satisfaction.
  • Empowers your agents with an extensive knowledge base to increase their work efficiency and reduce the average handling time.
  • Collects all your customer information at a central point to provide a holistic view of customers, so that agents can access real-time customer data while resolving a complex query.

 

Customer Service Automation Strategies

As eager customers are looking for faster solutions, they resort to avail the expertise of the customer service team. This means that the service team should be rather well-equipped with managing a large and diverse type of customer enquiries.

A customer service automation CRM allows you to set up automation rules that assign the most appropriate action for each customer enquiry. Customer service automation helps you to make your organization future-proof by delivering accurate and specific resolutions within minutes. 

Here are a few automation rules that allow you to streamline and manage your customer enquiries in the most optimal fashion.

1. Self-Service

Most of the time, customers skip the self-service methods to resolve common queries by themselves. It happens because they do not trust your support articles that are outdated and lack proper information. 

Implementing customer service automation software will help you in setting up a self-serve portal that will include accurate, readable, and engaging support content for your customers.

Self-service facilitates the information flow at your customers’ fingertips anytime and anywhere. You can set up a variety of functions and show all kinds of information concerning the customer from the service automation CRM, for example, the contact information or invoicing history. 

2. Live Chat and Chatbots

Live chat has a much higher engagement rate than you might expect. It helps in delivering top-notch customer service and navigating visitors through a website in real-time. 

According to a report by Forrester, around 30% of customers expect live chat on your business website. 

Live chat helps you in monitoring all the customer interactions which can be later used to create a better communication experience for your customers. Another benefit of live chat is that it can be easily integrated with an AI-enabled chatbot to handle inquiries outside of business hours. 

The chatbot can function as a standalone virtual assistant on your website once you set the right responses in its system. 

3. Knowledge Management System

Knowledge Management System or KMS is a lifesaver for businesses across the globe. It is an excellent tool to cater to the needs of customers as well as customer support agents. 

Knowledge management is the process of distributing, organizing, creating, and understanding knowledge about business processes, products, and services. And KMS is a feature that helps businesses organize and transfer up-to-date information that is a part of the organization. 

Support automation platforms like Kapture provide knowledge management system and allow businesses to create a forum for your teams so they can learn about the feature/product/service updates, how to resolve complex queries, share articles, FAQs, and helpful videos, and much more. 

KMS helps you to create an information repository that is easy to access and aids customer support agents to provide enhanced customer service with the help of accurate information. 

4. Single Sign-On

Switching platforms while resolving a customer query can be both hectic and time-taking for your agents. You can eliminate this window toggling scenario and increase your agents’ efficiency by using Single-Sign On (SSO) feature.

The SSO feature unifies several applications’ login windows into a single one. It is an authentic solution that allows your agents to safely use numerous platforms using a single set of credentials. 

Employees are increasingly using applications at work to complete their tasks, and each third-party service such as cloud telephony or social media platforms requires a unique username and password. This throws a significant load on your agents and can be irritating. They might also forget a few of the passwords as agents are humans, not robots.

SSO allows your agents to use a single login credential for multiple platforms which saves your agents time and helps them in reducing unsuccessful login attempts, allowing them to complete the work faster. 

5. Information Access

Real-time conversation demands real-time answers. To address this challenge you must make sure that your agents have quick access to relevant customer data so that they can provide appropriate solutions.

A holistic view of customers consists of every interaction, from a website inquiry to a product purchase to a support ticket all in a unified dashboard.

In a recent survey, 45% of respondents expect a unified view of their customers from the CRM investments. 

It ensures that every team of your organization has access to the same version of customer details. The vital information extracted from any customer interaction can help customer support agents in framing a proper plan of action for customers.

6. Routing & Prioritization

Your service automation CRM with a ticketing system filters the generated tickets based on certain parameters like keywords, subject lines, or customer profiles. After that, it automatically assigns the tickets to the agents based on their skills and expertise.

When a ticket is manually picked and assigned to agents, it can create a lot of confusion. Whereas an automated ticket routing system helps you to avoid such blunders. 

By setting up this rule, you can streamline customer queries and effectively prioritize them as per individual or team expertise. It saves your agents time, decreases their average handling time, and increases your first call resolution rate. 

7. Canned Responses

Your customer support agents handle numerous tickets each day. So, maintaining a quick response time is crucial for them. 

Canned responses allow you to prepackage numerous responses to commonly asked questions and route them out in an instant when a common question comes in. 

A service automation CRM enables you to create canned responses for any situation imaginable. You can keep a cache of responses for things such as sharing instructions around a specific process, requesting additional time to respond, or providing a commonly requested document. 

It reduces the response time and allows your support agents to move through more tickets per day. 

 

Get Ready For Automation

At present, the customers expect their businesses to go above and beyond their expectations. This simply means that businesses can’t let a single bad experience sour an entire customer relationship.

Kapture is a support automation platform that offers custom automation rules to significantly improve the way you manage your customers. 

Our contact center solution automatically routes the calls to the right agent and the Knowledge Management System feature allows them to deliver a seamless customer experience by providing accurate information at the right time.

Engage with your customers in real-time and optimize your customer experience by implementing our live chat system.

Choose a service automation CRM that best fits your business needs with easy configuration capabilities for workflow automation and that integrates with existing systems.

Get in touch with our product squad to fuel your business’s long-term success by making your customers feel like you have their back!

 

About the Author

Shivika
Shivika
Shivika is a Content Writer at Kapture CRM, who enjoys using her creative skills to contribute to the exciting technological advances. She is passionate about cultural artifacts and culinary art.

2 thoughts on “Customer Service Automation: Simplified and Explained”
  1. Your post is useful. Comprehensive software solution. You have covered almost everything in your article. Cheers!

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