Many things have transformed since last year! Automation has definitely helped in these unprecedented circumstances to  meet the changing user expectations, especially for teams who use conversational support.

Being the head of the frontline Support team, I work day in and day out with my colleagues to formulate automation processes to empower the customer.

Vested with the task of catering to 4.2 million users with a 10- member support team for a Scale-at-Nation project, we had to ensure that every automation is personalized and the customer feels empowered and not irate.

The ever increasing automated customer service Support requests were extremely overwhelming initially and adapting automation in processes was the only way forward.

Here’s a gist of how we implemented some of the automation processes for customer support services-

What exactly is Customer Support Automation?

A customer support provided by automated technologies like AI powered chatbots etc and not humans. It is mostly used to answer straight forward and repetitive questions posed by the users, for status updates and also help the user find specific resources.

We at our end, integrated AI solutions that could interpret Customer Feedback, enhance voice recognition, and chatbots that could answer the questions they receive and not just pass it off to a human.

We implemented Machine learning for our bot to help users with existing resources like Knowledge base, FAQs and other articles. The bot was also able to transfer the queries to the appropriate team who were able to handle complex queries. 

This apart, we integrated our Social media handles to our CRM tool to be able to communicate from one single portal and have a single view dashboard of the Product performance.

Some of the results of automation that we found impactful for our Support services:

1. Improved efficiency – If executed well, Automated Customer Service allows Organisations to help their user base on a large scale without actually having to increase the headcount. The speed and savings can be a real game changer for an organization when planned and implemented thoughtfully.
2. Reduced human error – Automation rules allow transfer of issues to the right person or team which reduces the error or confusion on who would be handling the issues.
3. Omni-Channel Service – When you’re offering Multi-channel support, users expect you to be equally responsive on all of them, so merging all channels into one system is a sensible way to have collaborative automated services. A complete CRM tool is a great way to integrate all channels and to have a single response channel for all customer queries. This also eliminates the necessity of repeating things to the users.
   
4. Automated follow-ups – Manually following up on a task or a lead is a tedious task, and it takes more than having a good functional website to convert a potential customer to a paying one. Hence excelling follow-up skills are required to make a compelling sales pitch. It’s not humanly possible to follow up on all leads in a timely manner and convince them to make a deal. An automated follow-up in customer support service system efficiently handles this issue.

Caveats in automating customer support services

While automation can scale up your Support services to great heights, overdoing it can have adverse effects. As they say – too much of anything is too bad. One has to be careful on what aspects need to be automated so that the human touch is not lost. A human connection should not be dismissed in any scenario.

It is also equally important to audit the system every now and then even when everything is up and running smoothly. An important point to be noted is that while resolving customer issues ensures customer satisfaction, having a continuous evaluation and feedback loop builds customer loyalty and trust… which is the ultimate goal of any organization in general!