What Is Automated Customer Service?
Automated customer service is a process that reduces or eliminates human involvement when responding to customer requests. Customer service automation is enabled by FAQ pages, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), email automation, chatbots, and automated workflows. Customer service automation platforms driven by artificial intelligence have immense potential and help you raise your customer service performance.
Why is Automating Customer Service Important?
Reduce customer service cost
According to a recent survey, the average cost of a live service interaction on the phone, email, or web chat is approximately $7 for a B2C company, while the live support cost for a B2B company increases to $13. Companies’ investments in self-service or automation technologies have effectively removed simple, routine, repetitive tasks from live service queues. This has resulted in significant cost savings for the companies even as the overall customer experience improves.
Improve omnichannel customer experience
Omni-channel customer experience is the foundation of good customer service. The customer interactions across all touchpoints should be consistent and excellent to enhance engagement and loyalty. Research has found that 90% of the customers want omnichannel service with seamless communication across channels. Researchers have also discovered that companies with strong omnichannel engagement have experienced a 9.5% annual increase in revenue compared to a 3.4% yearly increase by companies with a weak omnichannel experience. Customer service automation helps improve the omnichannel experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction.
Increase brand loyalty and referrals
Customer service automation enables you to build a one-to-one relationship with customers through seamless support across channels, devices, and platforms. This helps you create brand loyalty and increase referrals. A good customer service experience allows companies to get references and drive customer acquisitions. On experiencing good customer service, customers are 38% more likely to recommend the company, while 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases.
Data-driven personalized services
A customer service automation platform collects consumer data across touchpoints, analyzed to provide personalized support. The platform uses sentiment analysis to understand customer intent and emotions to drive the flow of conversation.
What are the Benefits of Using Automated Tools for Customer Service?
The automation of customer support requests simplifies tasks by optimizing processes and reducing the time to complete the tasks. Using automated tools has many advantages like cost reduction, fast issue resolution, short customer wait times, and personalized customer experience.
Cost reduction
Automating routine and repetitive customer support activities helps the enterprise save costs. According to McKinsey, companies can save 20% to 40% in customer service costs and increase customer satisfaction by 20% by investing in customer experience technologies.
Quick query responses
Automated customer service helps to shorten the response time to customer requests. According to research, 90% of customers rate an immediate response as essential or very important when they have customer service questions. 33% of the customers have mentioned waiting for on-hold as the most frustrating aspect of getting customer service help. Rule-based chatbots help with simple customer queries and frequently asked questions. AI chatbots help to resolve customer queries through a voice or text interface. Both these types of bots enable customers to get a quick response meeting their expectation of a quick answer (37%) in an emergency and resolving a complaint (35%) for using chatbots.
Reducing customer wait time
Automated customer services reduce wait times for customers as bots handle routine queries while the complex queries get transferred to agents. Automated customer service enables customers to use self-service options for common questions and instant responses. It also helps customers with complex queries get connected to agents faster. This is beneficial for customers, especially during peak times when call volumes are high.
Personalized customer experience 24/7
Automated customer service with the help of chatbots enables customers to get personalized service all through the year.
Chatbots can be configured in multiple languages, enabling customers to get support in their native language. The multilingual capabilities of chatbots help businesses create personalized experiences for their customers and enhance brand appeal to a broader customer base.
Chatbots serve customers round the clock throughout the year, leading to higher engagement and brand loyalty. 64% of customers have mentioned 24/7 service availability as the best feature of chatbots.
The inbuilt systems in the chatbots help route the complex customer request to the human agent for resolution. The human agent picks up on the conversation in real-time and gets a view of the bot’s interaction with customers, so they don’t have to repeat the requests. A unified customer experience across communication channels helps brands build a long-lasting relationship with customers.
Process optimization
Chatbots store data that helps assess the bots’ performance and business benefits using automated customer service software. The customer conversation data can help improve the knowledge base and conversational agents’ performance.
What are the Top 5 Customer Service Automation Tools?
With the availability of a wide variety of customer service automation platforms, it can be overwhelming to select the best platform for your business. Even as a no-code platform helps automate customer service with relative ease, many factors need to be considered to pick the right product. We have curated the list of the top 5 customer service automation tools best suited for mid-sized enterprise businesses.
1. WotNot
WotNot’s customer support automation platform helps you automate customer services to improve customer engagement through conversational marketing. There are many factors for you to consider WotNot’s no-code bot builder to build chatbots for your customer services and demand generation.
Firstly, WotNot no-code platforms help even a non-technical person build a personalized chatbot that can be used across all online channels, including the website, mobile application, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and SMS.
Secondly, you can leverage a library of pre-designed templates to build bots according to business function and industry vertical. Thirdly, the platform can be integrated with internal systems like ticketing tools and feedback mechanisms. The chatbot analytics helps you assess the performance of the service chatbot with relevant metrics, such as hours and cost saved, and CSAT (Customer satisfaction scores).
Some critical functionalities of the WotNot automation platform are:
- FAQ Builder — The builder helps create a knowledge base of common queries, enabling customers to receive instant responses, eliminating wait time. The bot offers 24/7 service throughout the year.
- Seamless Transition to Agents — The bot transfers complex queries to human agents, now tasked to handle more value-added work. This leads to optimal utilization of agents leading to high productivity.
- Multilingual Support — WotNot helps you create a multilingual bot to offer a personalized experience to customers in their native language.
- Supports Ticket Management — WotNot bots will also help your customers raise tickets and check the status in real-time.
More than 3,000 customers have trusted the WotNot customer service automation platform across industry verticals. WotNot offers economically priced service packages suited for mid-sized enterprises. If you need assistance with the platform, opt for a done-for-you service, where a company-experienced team will help you develop your bot.
2. Ada
Ada ACX platforms feature an AI engine-powered chatbot that enables you to deliver personalized customer service. The platform allows companies from different industry verticals to customize their customers’ experience using vertical and business segment-specific language and jargon.
Ada offers a compelling customer service value proposition through automation, personalization, and speedy implementation. Ada can accurately process customer queries and deliver strong customer satisfaction scores. Ada chatbot equipped with advanced analytics helps analyze the bot’s performance in terms of average handling time, abandon rate, and customer satisfaction metrics.
Some critical functionalities of the Ada automation platform are:
- Omnichannel Support — Ada offers services across all channels 24/7. Customers can access services throughout the year without extending customer support hours or adding new agents.
- Agents Productivity — Ada customer service chatbots attend to routine and repetitive queries and free up agents to attend to high-value queries as and when the chatbots transfer the queries.
- Personalized Customer Experience — Ada’s chatbots offer support in more than 100 languages tailored to each customer’s preferences.
Even as the Ada platform offers rich features, its prices are high.
3. Intercom
Intercom is a customer service automation tool and messaging platform that enables businesses to communicate with their customers through websites, social media, and emails. Intercom helps you provide customer support and provide service delivery and digital experiences. The platform helps scale customer support to many users efficiently.
Some critical functionalities of the Intercom automation platform are:
- Self-service Support — The platform enables businesses to offer self-service support through chatbots and help articles resolve repetitive queries. A help article is an online document that provides answers to frequently asked questions and provides solutions to common problems faced by customers. This helps customers receive a quick response and reduces questions for the support team. The platform publishing tool enables you to publish helpful content quickly, and the personalization feature provides the correct information to the customers. It helps you program the support channel offered to customers based on query types.
- Personalized Experience — Intercom integrates data from the entire technology stack to present an updated and unified view of the customers. This helps you find the proper context for engaging with customers. Personalization also enables you to prioritize your high-value customers so that they don’t have long wait times.
- Team Productivity Analysis — Intercom offers a collaborative inbox that provides consolidated information in one dashboard. The rules and automated workflows help improve team efficiency by reducing manual tasks. The reporting tool evaluates the team and business performance with metrics like median response time, conversation rating, etc.
Intercom offers a starter package for small businesses, priced at $67 per month. The package includes unlimited inbound conversations, and 1,000 people reach through outbound messaging every month. They provide a 14-day free trial for the starter package.
4. Freshdesk Freddy
Freshdesk support desk is an online cloud-based customer service software that offers comprehensive customer service automation solutions. The self-service module includes their chatbot Freddy, initially called answer bot.
Freddy is an intelligent chatbot that helps answer customer queries from your knowledge base. Freshdesk’s knowledge base supports 42 languages, enabling you to configure Freddy in those languages. The bot builder helps you build chatbots using the no-code GUI builder to create distinct automated customer responses unique to every use case in your business.
Some critical functionalities of the Freshdesk Freddy are:
- Intent detection — You can train the bot to gauge customer intent and provide follow-up answers accordingly.
- API connectors — You can integrate bots with other applications and tools to fetch or push information.
- Reporting and Analytics — You can create customized reports using visualization features unique to your business.
Freshdesk Freddy solutions are available in three different packages.
- Freddy Self-service — The plan offers customer-facing AI capabilities with a chatbot builder with an easy-to-use, no-code GUI. This helps you implement bots- the first strategy for your customer service.
- Freddy Starter — The plan provides basic agent and customer-facing AI capabilities and enables you to experiment with AI-powered automation in your customer service.
- Freddy Ultimate — The plan offers advanced agent and customer-facing AI capabilities. This will help you move past the experimentation stage and automate your customer service at scale.
5. Atlassian Halp
Halp is a modern, lightweight help desk from Atlassian that enables businesses to create and manage support requests directly in messaging applications Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Some critical functionalities of the Halp are:
- Track — You can convert customer messages into tickets and streamline requests. This enables you to avoid context switching and organize cluttered channels. You can use simple emoji to convert any message in Slack into a trackable ticket.
- Automate — Automate responses by creating routing recipes and recommended answers. This helps you empower customers to self-resolve repetitive questions.
- Reporting — Asses the number of tickets created and resolved; measure CSAT and resolution times to highlight your team’s work.
Halp offers three monthly packages classified as standard, premium, and enterprise based on the provided functionalities. The pricing is on a per-agent basis, with volume discounts offered when agents are added.
You will need to do a detailed assessment of your requirements and automation platforms to select the best-fit tool based on functionality, price, and support. Our automation experts can help you get started on your customer service automation journey. Click here to schedule a consultation call with our experts.
To enhance your business through automated conversations, browse and discover more about the WotNot chatbots here.
Originally published at https://wotnot.io.
