Can automation improve customer service? Here are 6 ways it can.

Wondering how to automate customer service tasks? (Or even if you should) We’ve identified six areas where automation can improve your customer experience - without making it impersonal

Of all areas of business, customer service may seem like the last thing you want to automate - at least if you want to keep customers happy. But demands on businesses to provide quality customer care have never been heavier.  

Automation and personal, quality care aren’t mutually exclusive. While we’d never recommend you replace your entire customer support team with an automation system, we do see tremendous benefits in automating some aspects of customer service. Service automation tools can ensure customer issues don’t slip through the cracks, allow you to analyze your customer issues at scale, and measure how effectively your team responds to problems. 

1. Automate QA of your customer service calls

Conducting quality assurance checks on your customer support calls and chats can be time consuming and only cover a small percentage of your total call volume. There’s an easier way than manual testing. 

Conversation analytics platforms allow you to conduct QA on every single call, without the need to manually listen to each one. Here’s how it works: All your calls (or chats) get automatically ingested by Tethr. They’re transcribed, analyzed, and checked for the QA metrics that matter to you.

You can create a custom dashboard for your QA analysis so that you can see metrics by team, customer segment, or view everything. 

You can still spot-check calls when needed, and listen to any call or read a transcript.  But you won’t have to conduct QA the old way - you’ll have a comprehensive view of your calls, without the need to hire dozens more QA analysts. 

2. Automate help desk ticket creation

If you aren’t using a system to track support tickets, you need one. Systems such as Zendesk, Hubspot, and Freshdesk create systems that automate your customer support requests, plan for upcoming issues, and monitor outstanding cases. 

These tools allow your agents to organize and track customer cases, and route issues to specific departments. You can often integrate these tickets with feedback requests and measure the amount of cases resolved.

Without these, your customers can fall through the cracks.

3. Automate personalization

Research proves that customers expect personalized experiences when they reach out to a company they do business with. You can achieve that personalization in a few ways, with the help of automation.

Personalization means more than making sure their name shows up in their emails. It can mean sending them offers related to items they recently purchased, information related to their purchasing patterns or demographics, and loyalty programs when they maintain their business with you.

4. Use a chatbot to automate issue diagnosis and basic customer support

When your customers contact you, automatic routing to the correct department or direction to a self-service channel significantly reduces the burden on your customer service team.

You can do this by adding a chatbot to your website, which can expeditie service for the common, simple reasons your customers contact you. Chatbots direct customers to helpful articles or how-to pages on your site. 

When customers need help solving a bigger issue, your chatbot can seamlessly transfer to live chat support instead, so that a real person can help address their issues.

5. Automate customer service analysis

Crunching numbers takes time. To get an accurate understanding of your comprehensive customer experience, you need to track the metrics that really matter.

Here’s another area conversation analytics helps. When your customer support calls and chats get automatically analyzed, you see an accurate and updated measure of your customer experience.

You won’t have to rely on guesswork or rely on anecdotal evidence of problems. Instead, you’ll see what issues customers struggle with, common friction points, and analysis of how your team members responded. 

6. Automate follow-up

What happens when a customer has a bad experience dealing with your team? Identifying which customers may be at risk of churning and intervening before they make that decision is essential - and that activity can be automated, too.

You’ll need to combine your platforms to do this. For example, if you use Tethr’s conversation analytics platform, it can integrate with Salesforce to automatically send at-risk accounts to your retention department.

Interested in giving conversation analytics automation a try? See what Tethr can do when you sign up for a free trial.