We all know that customer experience is becoming more important than price and product when it comes to loyalty. And the businesses who prioritize customer experience are the ones that are succeeding. The question becomes, when that awesome customer experience begins to pay off, how can you continue to execute on a high level of service without hiring an army of people, or sacrificing the human touch? AI and automation can help you scale.
How Exactly Does Automation In Customer Service Help?
Automation in customer service reduces menial work for agents and can prevent human error from happening. This reduction in friction also gives your agents much more room to provide personalized service to your customers.
AI can help solve a core problem when your organization experiences hyper growth and your customers need answers to their problems quickly. It is possible to grow your business without losing the human touch. In fact, it’s essential not to lose this. Businesses that prioritize a personalized customer experience are the ones that are succeeding in this fast-paced environment. Although it might sound counter-intuitive, by introducing automation into some of your core systems and processes, you can actually provide an even more personalized touch within your customer service department.
Automation Helps Reduce Repetitive Tasks for Your Agents
Many folks still think of AI as a threat to their jobs….as robots taking over the world! Despite the doomsday rhetoric, the fact is that current day AI can actually make customer service professionals’ jobs less time consuming and simultaneously more fulfilling.
Oftentimes the most tedious tasks on an agent’s plate are manual and repetitive, and may not require human intervention. Luckily AI can automate much of this work. For example, when an agent needs to initiate a return, they may be talking to a customer in one system, looking up a customer’s order history in another, and using a third system to create a return management authorization (RMA). A fourth system may send a message to the person who handles those returns asking to expedite for an important customer. With AI and automation, a single button click could start the RMA process, create the shipping label and notify a team to expedite.
Automate Common Customer Questions With the Help of AI
Businesses have the opportunity to provide more self-help opportunities with the help of AI. Chatbots are growing in popularity with both businesses and consumers because they can quickly answer common questions without the need for a live representative to be on the chat. While there is always fear of losing personalization when using AI and automation, with the right data, businesses can actually do the opposite.
For instance, if a business leverages customer data properly, chatbots could ask personalized questions based on an individual’s purchase or browsing history. These interventions save time for both the customer and agent, and increase the time spent on the actual issue rather than information gathering and low-level support. When you have AI in customer service, you provide a more relevant customer experience and buyer experience to your clients.
Superpower Your Agents
Beyond freeing up agent time, AI can also be used to arm support agents with all the information they need to quickly and accurately service their customers. AI support technology can suggest messages to send to customers based off of historical conversations and customer attributes, which can become more accurate and personalized over time in conjunction with a machine learning model.
You can also power sentiment analysis with AI technology, which means you can analyze the tone in the customer’s messages, and determine whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied. If you have a dissatisfied customer, you can escalate the issue quickly and give a more hands-on approach to save the customer relationship.
How We Can Help
Customer service is increasingly being thought of as a revenue driver and not a cost center, and customer service insights are being leveraged to inform larger business decisions. Keeping a consistently high level of support as you scale your business could be the difference between rocketship growth vs. staying stagnant. Automation in customer service gives you the exact tools you need to keep your customers happy without sacrificing quality as you grow rapidly.
Finding the perfect customer service software solution is imperative. If you’re interested in delivering a superior customer experience at scale, whether that means personalized and proactive support or true omnichannel experiences, consider Kustomer to be your right-hand man. With Kustomer’s unique customer service CRM platform, businesses are easily able to have a single view of the customer journey, seamless omnichannel communications, and the ability to automate complex business processes and knowledge management.
Download our Scalability Guide to learn more, or reach out and get to know us through a free demo.
