How To Automate Customer Support…In A Way That Actually Increases CSAT
It should surprise absolutely no one that customer support automation can help you drive efficiency by taking mind-numbing manual tasks away from busy support teams.
But when it comes to using it to actually increase your overall customer satisfaction scores, spark growth, or outpace the competition – things get a little more complicated.
For example: many businesses invest in customer support automation without sufficient consideration for how it will integrate with their wider system stack. Others don’t understand the full extent of the benefits that are possible so their automation efforts remain stuck in second gear.
The lesson here is, if you want anything that even remotely resembles ROI, you need to get clued up on the most impactful ways to deploy customer support automation before you reach for your wallet…
In this article we’re going to give you a chance to do just that.
We explore the key definitions you need to know about, unpack the key benefits on offer, and the best practices for automating customer support.
We’ll also get into seven ways you can use automated customer support as a tool to improve metrics such as Customer Support (CSAT).
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What is customer support automation?
Key definition: Customer support automation is the use of technology to create more cost effective workflows, and support businesses to deliver better customer support services. Examples include: Interactive voice response (IVR) or systems, automated email responders, workflow optimisation (e.g. ticketing tools), the use of chatbots, Machine Learning, or AI.
The cornerstone of well applied automation in customer support is freeing human workers from tedious customer support tasks where automation technology can provide parallel, equivalent or enhanced assistance.
But to be crystal clear, this isn’t about eliminating the need for any human agents. It’s about simplifying and streamlining their workflows, so they can deliver their best – more often.
As we’ve all experienced in our working lives – mundane, repetitive, or low-level tasks can make us disengaged. By automating such tasks, not only does your customer support program become more cost effective, it also reduces boredom-related human errors, and frees up human representatives to focus attention on customers that are in most need of human support.
Don’t forget: Customer support automation can be deployed on all channels (social media, email, chat, phone, etc.) and when used effectively, can link those channels together. We explore this in the example below.
An example of customer support automation in the wild:
Let’s say two customers are experiencing a problem with the software product they’ve purchased from your business. Their first move? Head to your website and find the ‘customer support’ section.
Customer A has a simple issue, they need a password reset for their account. On the customer support page, they’re met by a chatbot that offers them assistance. It handles the enquiry and directs them to the automated password reset feature on the ‘my account’ section of the website. The result: Inquiry handled with minimal wait, the customer didn’t clog up the calling queue, and they wasted precisely zero seconds of your agents’ time.
Customer B has a more gnarly issue. They’re experiencing problems with your software that could be either a defect or a misconfiguration. Here, the chatbot uses Machine Learning algorithms, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to identify key phrases that indicate the severity of the problem.
It identifies the technical support help desk as the best channel for the issue. It then gives the customer two options: join the calling queue, or request a call back from the technical support team once they become available. They opt for the latter.
The result: The customer doesn’t have to wait on hold, your business knows exactly the right kind of support agent to deal with the issue (no call forwarding chains that chew up valuable time), and your business’ first call resolution rate and CSAT get a nice little lift.
This is how customer support automation can maximize the impact of human intervention.
What are the benefits of automated customer support?
Some of the benefits of automated customer support for customers (and the companies that deploy it) are clear.
But without a full appreciation of the benefits that are possible, it can limit your impact. Simply put, if you don’t know it’s possible, how are you going to make it a goal of your program?
To help you avoid this pitfall, let’s take a closer look the benefits of customer support automation:
Faster responses and resolutions: For customers, response time is important, but resolution time is critical because nobody likes bouncing around between agents and departments to find a solution.
If customers regularly experience this when they call your customer support team, it will open the door to churn. But when used correctly automated customer support can reduce wait times, and increase the speed to resolution by helping route customers to the right departments.
Meeting customers where they want on any channel:
Customers often want to be able to interact and communicate with companies via the channels of their choosing – whether that be social media, email, chat, or phone. This means that automated customer support systems need to be deployed across omnichannel journeys – and even integrated into your company’s CRM. This ensures every one of your support team has a complete view over every interaction a customer has had with your company.
And as we’ve mentioned, customer support automation can be used to link those channels (for example, through smart routing via chatbots).
Empowering customers with self-service:
Give customers the tools they need to solve issues they’re having themselves and it can save you a bucketload of time and stress. And even better? It’ll do the same for your customers. In fact, they expect you to give them a way to cut out the middleman and troubleshoot their own problems. According to a report by Microsoft, an eye-watering 90% of customers globally expect brands or organizations to have an online self-service customer support portal.
The key to making this effective is to use customer support automation to guide them to the best resources to solve their problem. They want autonomy, not to fend for themselves entirely.
Enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty:
All of the above add up to the kind of outcomes that your customers want and expect from your business. By providing accurate and fast assistance where and how customers want it, automated customer support makes customers happier, makes them want to be a customer of your business longer, and even makes them more likely to recommend you to their peers. The result? Increased brand loyalty and customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) you can be proud of.
Better agent productivity and satisfaction:
Automated customer support tools like chatbots can take care of high-volume, low-value queries, and alleviate pressure on overloaded agents. This allows them to focus on more fulfilling and meaningful tasks – the kind that actually make use of their expertise – and use their time more effectively to drive other key performance indicators (KPIs).
Lower operational costs:
By eliminating the repetitive tasks from the workflows of your customer service agents, you ultimately reduce your agent workload time and cut overhead costs. Without compromising the quality, speed or accuracy of your customer support services.
For all these reasons (and more besides), companies everywhere have already embraced customer service and support automation. In fact, Salesforce reports that 83% of decision makers planning to increase investments in automation over the next year with over 90% of organizations using AI and automation in their customer support workflows reporting both time and cost savings.
But perhaps you’ve already started using automation in your customer service and support and it isn’t delivering the impact? We have you covered.
In the next section, we unpack key considerations for sharpening your customer support with automation.
7 ways to automate your customer support
If you’re ready to start introducing automation into your customer support chances are you’ll be thinking about (or obsessing about) AI-driven chatbots.
Word of warning: Chatbots have a big role to play in customer support automation BUT simply deploying a chatbot won’t get you very far on the journey to better customer experiences.
In fact, if it’s done wrong, automated customer support can have a negative impact on your customers. That’s why we’ve outlined some important things you should do when automating your customer support.
1. Review existing workflows and your customer support strategy
Start with a full review of your existing processes and workflows. This isn’t just due diligence (as important as that is), it’s also the key to understanding which tasks are hoovering up your agents’ time – the prime candidates for automation.
Look for tedious, repetitive, cost-inefficient tasks – or bottlenecks that are leading to customer complaints. Ask yourself which tasks take the most time to complete and which processes have the most roadblocks?
And while you’re at it, review your customer support strategy and see how automation fits within it. If you don’t have a customer support strategy – or yours needs refreshing – then you can learn more about how to create a great one here.
2. Balancing automation and humans
Automation isn’t a silver bullet. It simply cannot cover the entire breadth of your customer support – so don’t try and force it to. Certain support tasks can only be solved via contact with a human agent. This might be due to the complexity of the query, the sensitivity of the topic or information involved, or simply because the customer is demanding to speak to a real person.
Identify the human-only zones
You need to identify which human-touch-critical tasks are. From there, you can create a truly integrated customer support service where automation technology is working in perfect harmony with human agents across channels. And it’s important to always offer an ‘escape hatch’ in your automation system – through which a customer can access a human agent if they want and need.
The more you can involve your human agents in the strategy for deploying automation in customer support, the better that deployment will be. Because more than just curating a frontline blend of automation and people – your priority should be trying to use people to set up the automation for success in the first place.
3. Overhaul your ticket management system
The helpdesk is one of the first areas where you are likely to want to apply automation of technology. Most help desk software have evolved beyond the cumbersome manual task days and now offer all kinds of automation and AI enhancements – whether as part of their core offering or as plugins and add-ons.
For example, automated customer support technology uses natural language processing (NLP) to detect customer emotions and analyze their sentiment, then auto-prioritizes the tickets and auto-assigns them to specific areas of your support team to address. This allows you to create a more personalized customer experience.
4. Ensure integration with other platforms
You should strive to create an integrated model that connects your existing applications with your customer support automation system.
By connecting applications like your CRM, email and calendar systems and messenger channels like Slack and Teams, you make the management and monitoring of customer experience more seamless. This ease and increased visibility reduces the risk of errors and inconsistencies across channels – and ultimately empowers you to create greater customer satisfaction.
5. Listen to your frontline workers
The people with the most knowledge of how to deploy customer support automation in a way that actually makes the biggest difference to customers are the people that deal with your customers day in day out.
Listen to your frontline help – they probably have a metric ton of ideas of how to shave time with automation. Make the most of their insight.
Don’t forget that any customer support automation solution also needs to be actually adopted in order to be effective. So make sure people have full orientation, and access to the materials they need, to get comfortable and proficient in the new system.
6. Build out your resources and knowledge base
Your goal should be to allow customers to resolve issues themselves when they want to. To make that a reality, you need to have resources they can access easily. All of which makes building a robust knowledge base – including FAQs, blogs, tutorials, videos and other helpful content – an essential ingredient for successful customer support automation.
Get it right and you’ll reduce the number of customer low-level inquiries that your agents have to handle manually – which makes for happier agents. And if the knowledge base is well-structured enough, it’ll even save agents time when they need to access information to provide to customers.
A top tip for success here is to put all of your customer support information in one centralized location and make sure you keep the content in the knowledge base up to date. If customers are self-serving based on obsolete info, they’ll probably let you know by way of some poor CSAT scores next time they have the chance to.
7. Outsource to an expert partner
Obviously, we aren’t impartial here but a good outsourcing partner can be the difference between good customer support automation, and great customer support automation.
That’s because they can provide you with the advice you need to deploy automation in an effective and successful way.
An outsourcing partner with customer support automation chops will be able to quickly assess your needs, recommend the best tools, and even help you implement your automated support systems in the least disruptive way.
It can also be more cost-effective to use an outsourcing partner, as you avoid the significant upfront costs associated with hiring, training, and maintaining an internal team dedicated to automation.
The trick then, is finding a good outsourcing partner. One that starts with the outcomes you want to achieve with automation and works back from there. An outsourcer that believes that saving money by cutting costs doesn’t have to mean lowering quality.
Well, look no further. Visit our site to learn more about our customer support outsourcing services and how ModSquad can help you to bring your automation A-game to customer support.