A Guide to Automated Customer Service
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The purpose of automating customer service tasks is to elevate experiences for customers while giving employees time to focus on higher-level projects and goals. Some repetitive customer service tasks begging for automation and digital processes include:
With reliable automation tools and software, customer service teams upgrade their processes to digital ones. It’s a necessity in this era, in which teams need faster processes that deliver high levels of quality every time. By ensuring processes are handled without constant vigilance, service agents can go ahead and focus their efforts on taking on more complex tasks. We can clearly see how automation benefits employees, but what about elevating customer experiences?
They deliver on this front, too. Automated customer services support business responses instantly so customers no longer need to wait for human service agents to get back to them. For example, customers can communicate with a business online via a website or app to get instant feedback to frequently asked questions no matter the time of night or day.
Do you want to learn how automation can give your customers higher satisfaction levels while empowering employees to work smarter? Join us in the article below. We explore the realm of automation for customer services.
Let’s get started!
What is Customer Service Automation?
It is software designed to make repetitive customer service processes run on their own. For example, automation in customer service teams can look like deploying chatbots to manage customer queries on websites instead of human agents responding to high volumes of incoming texts.
The best part about automation of customer service tasks is that once it is correctly configured it does not need human involvement to run smoothly.
Therefore, when businesses decide to automate customer services, they can respond to queries quickly at any time of the day or night. This is super helpful for companies that operate on a global scale, as the automation can support customer services during non-working business hours or whenever employees are unavailable.
Additionally, automation can free up time for customer service agents by handling all repetitive tasks so they can work on complicated business processes instead.
Together, human professionals and automation tools can create the quickest and best customer experiences.
Benefits of Automation in Customer Service
Customers are the ones who keep businesses alive. If we make customers happy and satisfied, we can also get the luxury of growing a business to new heights. So, let’s take a look at two benefits from automation tools and see how they provide customer service teams extra support in fostering business relationships:
Lightning-Fast Responses
Automation tools can keep customers satisfied with products, services, and brand by answering their questions instantly. Customers no longer have to wait for a service agent to get back to them in 2024 via chat, call, or a queue at a store. By using automation tools to interact with customers, businesses ensure their audience is never waiting for an answer to fix a product or service.
Service at Every Hour
Thanks to automation tools, customer service teams can configure chatbots to interact with customers 24/7. Chatbots answer customer queries and provide information on how to fix or troubleshoot common problems with products and services at any time of the day.
But these are not the only around-the-clock tools customer service teams use. They can build a self-service portal which is essential for publishing blogs, presenting video tutorials, and providing features to update account information and personal details without the help of a customer service agent. A checkout and payment process can also be added to a self-service portal, so that customers can shop online independently and conveniently.
Both chatbots and self-service portals give customers a way to interact with a business unaided and at the best, most convenient time that suits them.
Upgrade Customer Service Tasks with Automation
We explored just two advantages of automation that improve customer experiences. However, automation performs double duty, as it reduces manual work for customer service agents, who can then use their time to focus on creative business projects.
Ways You Can Provide Automated Service for Customers
Why wouldn’t we want to be faster and more helpful to our customers? The only way to gain a competitive edge and streamline our processes accurately is to employ reliable automation tools.
Here are three ways to service customers with automation on your side.
Automated Responders
The first tool that can support service agents is automated responders. They are configured to respond to customer questions via email or chat systems. Automated responders are able to handle large amounts of customer queries and provide support because they are given appropriate responses or have artificial intelligence technology assistance.
Other than improving customer experiences with responses, automated responders free up time for service agents to pivot their efforts to higher-level tasks.
Chatbots
If you need to engage with customers with more than just text, choose chatbots. These tools are powered by artificial intelligence technologies and engage with customers in the following ways:
Businesses install chatbots into their systems because they can quickly respond to customers 24/7.
Automated Feedback or Survey Requests
Automated responders and chatbots are the answer to unexpected engagement from customers. But what are some tools to actively reach out to customers?
Automated feedback and survey request tools are the ones used to interact with customers. Usually, they create and send surveys or feedback forms to customers with a request to provide answers to the questions within.
Customer service teams send these forms and surveys to customers after they have made a purchase to gauge their satisfaction levels on products and services. These versatile tools can also be used to collect feedback from customers regarding the help they receive from a service agent.
Businesses can leverage the automation power of these tools to regularly collect customer feedback to always improve products and services.
Customer Service Automation Software
There are loads of customer service automation software in the marketplace. However, they all offer different features and benefits. You need to find the one that matches your custom business requirements and Salesforce setup. To start your research, we have provided five top customer service automation tools for Salesforce in 2024.
Oneflow: Provides tools to speed up processes in contract management in Salesforce, such as document signing and access to templates for creating contracts quickly.
Freshdesk: Gives businesses the ability to connect emails, chats, social media platforms, and telephonic conversations via a single support tool. Customer service teams use the tool to ensure they are faster at their jobs.
Zendesk: Software that gives service teams chatbots, self-service portals, and a knowledge base to support customers.
HubSpot Service Hub: Supports customer service agents with a help desk that can handle an automated ticketing system. It also collects customer feedback and has chatbot capabilities.
Titan’s Suite of Apps for Salesforce: A range of tools for any customer service process requiring no coding skills to wield. Forms and surveys to collect customer feedback, document generation for receipts of training sessions, e-signatures for approvals, and self-service portals for building knowledge bases and tracking queries.
TITAN’s Workflow Automation for Better Processes
Since we mentioned that Titan has all the apps you need to enhance customer service and automate your workflows, let’s dive a bit deeper into the features:
Customer Service Automation Tools and Software
And that covers our recommended tools and software for automating customer service processes. Thanks for reading our article concerning customer service automation, we hope we showed you how these advancements can speed up workflows in the customer support space.
If you want to greatly improve your customer satisfaction levels, we suggest you check out our Titan platform. No coding experience or skills are required to automate any customer service process across your organization so that everyone can work faster and more efficiently.
With 4.96 stars out of 5 on the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace, we are confident we can support your workflows for any business use case you can dream of. For more information, contact us through one of our social media channels below.
See you soon!
Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which technology is commonly used for customer service automation?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a popular technology for automating customer service processes. You can find AI-powering chatbots and natural language processing software commonly used in this space.
What are the four types of automation?
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- Fixed Automation
- Programmable Automation
- Flexible or Soft Automation
- Robotic Process Automation
What are the disadvantages of automated customer service?
Although there are a few, one is that customer interactions can feel impersonal. When this type of interaction occurs, it is not a positive one, and can leave the customer feeling frustrated with your company. If your company provides complex solutions, the automation might not be able to handle customer queries.
Alternatively, if your company supports customers with sensitive issues, an automated system might not fully understand a customer’s emotions during the interaction. In these cases, it’s better to have a human agent interact with the customer so they feel heard.
What are the benefits of automation?
There are many, but one of them is the ability to scale services to support even more customers. Since automation manages to work with a vast number of customer questions at the same time 24/7, it has become valuable software for business growth while alleviating workloads for customer service teams.
Additionally, since automation can be programmed, all customer service processes will have the same level of quality that a business can trust while it focuses on other tasks that are required with the new expansion.
For more benefits, refer to our article above.
What is the main goal of automation?
To elevate customer experiences and eliminate repetitive tasks in business processes.
