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Customer service automation frequently asked questions

Table of contents

  • What is customer service automation?
  • What is automated customer service?
  • What are the benefits of customer service automation?
  • Why is customer service automation important?
  • How does automation improve business productivity?
  • What are the main steps of customer service automation?
  • What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel?
  • What does omni stand for?
  • What are common customer service metrics?
  • What are the tools for customer service automation?
  • What are the common automation mistakes?

Questions and answers

What is customer service automation?

The term “customer service automation” refers to the practice of using software to analyse, optimise, and streamline customer service processes in order to reduce inefficiencies and increase productivity. Among the software used to accomplish that are sophisticated chatbot solutions, AI-based queue routing algorithms and analytics engines powered by machine learning.

What is automated customer service?

A customer service process that has been automated looks, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from a “standard” one – at least from the customers’ point of view! From the business’ side, automation brings a lot of benefits that make customer service more effective.

What are the benefits of customer service automation?

A properly automated customer service process provides many benefits over a “traditional” counterpart. By eliminating inefficiencies in the process, it becomes more effective – more work gets done in the same amount of time at a lower cost. Since the practice depends on continuous analysis and improvements, the effects keep improving with time.

Why is customer service automation important?

Customer service automation is important, as it allows small businesses to scale up to serving more customers easily, without an increase in resources spent. Allowing automation to optimise a customer service department can prove invaluable to both large businesses, who need to handle thousands of inquiries across dozens of markets and communication channels, as well as small brands – for whom budgetary concerns are often a priority.

How does automation improve business productivity?

Automation focuses on finding and eliminating inefficiencies in service processes. By reducing time that would otherwise be spent performing repetitive, menial tasks, you free your agents to do work that actually matters. One of the core principles – and a good example of automation as a whole – is integrating every communication channel into one tool. Although the time spent every day by your agents on switching between different applications and platforms might seem miniscule, it adds up – what’s more, studies show that constant context switching is a guaranteed way to kill productivity. By eliminating this inefficiency, your productivity metrics will shoot up.

What are the main steps of customer service automation?

As described in our Customer Service Automation guide, the nine steps to automating your customer service are:

  1. Observe your customer process and gather as much data as possible
  2. Identify patterns and segment requests into separate categories
  3. Using data from step 1 improve your product or service to reduce the number of incoming inquiries
  4. Establish teams each dedicated to a specific type of inquiry
  5. Integrate all of your communications channel into a single tool to save time that would otherwise be spent on switching apps and platforms
  6. Set up automated routing to ensure that messages never “fall through the cracks” and that they are always directed to available agents
  7. Prepare response templates to speed up agents’ response times – why should they have to type out the same response a dozen times every hour?
  8. Implement an AI suggestion algorithm to assist your agents further
  9. Deploy a chatbot that’ll take care of the most commonly asked questions

What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel?

Multichannel and omnichannel refer to the practice of providing customer service and marketing across multiple communication channels, from traditional ones (phone calls and email) to various social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp…). The two approaches differ slightly – in a multichannel strategy, the brand selects several channels and focuses on them exclusively. In contrast, an omnichannel strategy involves the brand going wherever their customers are. If this means using a dozen services and platforms at once, so be it.

What does omni stand for?

The “omni” in “omnichannel” doesn’t stand for anything – it’s a Latin word meaning “every” or “all”.

What are common customer service metrics?

Two kinds of customer service metrics exist: operational and experience metrics. Operational metrics describe the actual work performed by your team, while experience metrics are based on customer opinions gathered from surveys.
Examples of operational metrics:

  • Average ticket count per day
  • Average time to first response
  • Average ticket resolution time
  • Preferred communication channel

Examples of experience metrics include:

  • Customer satisfaction
  • Net promoter score

You can read about these and more in our Customer Service Automation guide.

What are the tools for customer service automation?

A lot of different tools can be used to perform customer service automation:

  • Analytics and statistics gathering tools
  • Chatbots
  • Routing tools
  • Social media and email management tools
  • Ticket systems
  • CRM solutions
  • Social media monitoring tools
  • Sentiment detection and analysis algorithms

However, modern customer service automation solutions are rapidly advancing towards a holistic all-in-one approach. After all, one of the main principles of automation is centralisation – in other words, not wasting time on constantly switching between different applications. As such, the tools listed above will become nothing more than features in larger, monolithic automation packages.

What are the common automation mistakes?

Since a properly automated customer service department provides managers with a continuous stream of statistics about performance and customer satisfaction. This data is invaluable – it can be used to improve products, services, or the service process itself to suit shifting customer expectations and preferences. Despite that, many managers choose to ignore this data, treating automation as a “one-and-done” process when in fact it is a continuous cycle.
Another common mistake is using automation to replace human agents with computer systems; the truth, however is, that even the most advanced chatbots aren’t able to replace humans – and they probably never will be. Automation is intended to augment your workforce, not replace it. Just because something can be automated doesn’t mean it should be!
Finally, automation is like any other algorithm – you get out what you put in. Take utmost care to ensure your training sets and data is good quality. If you train your algorithm using poor quality data, don’t be surprised when your results become less than ideal.
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