Customer Service Automation - 5 Steps to Making it Work

Customer service automation is on the rise, and many companies are leveraging automated solutions like UserGuiding to improve their support teams' performance and productivity.

The longer users wait for your support team to respond, the more likely they will switch to another business. And what better way to improve your churn rate than customer service automation?!

Customer support automation aims to reduce the number of live interactions with customers. Above all, it shields businesses from high call volumes, helps speed up customer service processes, and reduces support agent errors.

“Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.” – Bill Gates.

In this article, we've compiled some of the best full-automated customer service solutions and excellent tips on automating your customer support. Let's dive in!

What Is Customer Service Automation?

Customer service automation is a type of customer support that uses tools to automate workflows and tasks, consequently reducing the human touch in solving customer inquiries. Customers who need information about their account, answers to frequent questions, or help finding a particular resource benefit most from this process. The automated customer service process eliminates human touchpoints in case of inefficiency or redundancy.

Replacing manual tasks with powerful automation technology and virtual assistant, such as a keyword or AI chatbot, is a popular form of customer service automation. 

It uses standardized rules and artificial intelligence (AI) to help customers and resolve their issues like changing orders, reporting bugs, finding opening hours, or account information.

Here are some examples of automated customer service features you can use:

• Chatbots
• Email Automation
• Automated Workflows
• Self-Service Help Desk
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Through covering multiple platforms, these features provide your audience with the support they need in time, help reduce your customer support agents' workflow, and cut extra costs.

As a plus, you will be able to deploy them across your customers’ preferred channels, responding to them,
in the same manner, they used to reach out to you first. This will ultimately lead to, a positive impact on your customer satisfaction scores.

Why Should You Automate Customer Service?

You need months to acquire a new customer and only seconds to lose one.

Pandemic basically forced everyone online and consequently skyrocketed the online purchases. However, with the rise of online shopping comes a huge volume of customers who may quickly switch to another service if they don't receive the support they expect.

That is precisely where customer service automation will come to the rescue. From reducing human errors to boosting team productivity, automation offers a lot. Here are some of the reasons why you must consider automated customer services for your business:

1. Eliminating Human Error

No matter how skilled or experienced your support agents are, mistakes are inevitable for human beings, and they can happen at any time. Automating your customer service process can reduce your team members' overwhelming workload, eliminate common errors and improve your customer satisfaction rate overall.

2. Improve Team Productivity

The automation of customer service can save your team a lot of time by automatically assigning them the most relevant tickets to their skills and knowledge.

This helps speed up the workload of your support team, allowing them to automate their manual tasks and get things done way sooner than before. In addition, with fewer routine tasks on their plates, they will have more time to focus on the issues that truly matter to your business.

3. Improve Process Speed

There is nothing worse than slow service, especially when it comes to an online purchase! Automation tools such as a self-service knowledge base and AI chatbots can handle customers from different time zones,  reduce ticket volumes and resolve a portion of their queries.

As a result of the automation, your customer service agents can handle more requests and improve your customer service system. 

5 Fully-Automated Customer Service Solutions to Set an Example

Below you will find some of the best software options for automating your customer service.

1. UserGuiding

UserGuiding's easy-to-use software focuses on helping solve recurring problems in the easiest way.

You can build a resource center for your product, interactive guides, and even cultivate user communities to encourage collaboration among your customers.

Key Features:

• Resource Centers.
• User Segmentation.
• Interactive Product Walkthroughs/Guides.
• New Feature Announcement.
• Multiple Channel Integration.

Pricing:

UserGuiding's pricing is based on the number of active users you have, offering a scalable experience. When billed yearly:

• Basic Plan: Starting from $69/month.
• Professional Plan: Starting from $199/month.
• Corporate Plan: Custom quote.

Here is how UserGuiding solved a big problem for Autorola's Indicata.

Autorola, a big online remarketing and automotive IT solutions leader was looking for an onboarding solution for their used vehicle inventory management tool for car dealers, Indicata.

Being a big company with users in 13 different markets around the globe, obviously, they couldn’t call customers one by one. User manuals and emailing were off the table.

They were also suspicious that some users on the platform weren’t using it to the fullest, and some new features weren’t even properly announced.

Thankfully all that could be resolved with UserGuiding.

Here you see Indicata’s new feature announcement hotspot and how they embedded a video within the onboarding flow. 

Getting results didn’t take long.

Right after implementing the onboarding, the staff feedback was positive.

Then, after 7 days of implementation, the metrics arrived. 47% of users that week had interacted with the new feature tour and 34% of them had interacted with the hotspot.

Here’s the rest of Indicata's story.

And if you'd like to replicate these results for your business, the link you need to sign up for UserGuiding is here.

2. Hubspot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is a service management software with continuously-flowing new features that enables you to deliver seamless onboarding, provide flexible customer support, and build stronger customer relationships.

Service Hub provides efficient end-to-end service, such as automation and self-service, which helps improve your support services and delights your customers.

Pricing:

• Free Plan.
• Starter plan: $50 per month.
• Professional plan: $400 per month.
• Enterprise plan: $1,200 per month.

Key Features:

• Knowledge Base Integration
• Self Service Portal
• Workflow Capability
• Reporting & Analytics Metrics
• Customer Data Management

3. Zoho Desk

With Zoho Desk, your team can automate the task of sorting tickets based on their due dates, status, and need for attention. In order to avoid wasting time searching for information about a customer, reps can easily access previous customer conversations and solve their inquiries faster.

Pricing:

• Standard plan: $14/agent/month.
• Professional plan: $23/agent/month.
• Enterprise plan: $40/agent/month.

Key Features:

• Multiple Channel Integration.
• Customized Ticket Management.
• Automated Response.
• Ticket Collaboration.

4. Zendesk

The Zendesk Customer Service Automation platform displays all customer interactions live in a single, dynamic interface, with a variety of features such as web widgets, canned responses, and customer histories.

Pricing:

• Support-only plan: $19 per agent/month.
• Suite plan: $49 per agent/month.

Key Features:

• Automated Chat Support.
• Activity Dashboard & Tracking.
• Automatic Ticket Responses.
• Knowledge Base Chatbots.
• Self-Service Experience.

5. Crisp

The Crisp software offers a multi-channel automated customer support system to connect your team with customers and leads in need of support immediately.
You can automate customers interactions and start assisting customers or leads in just a few clicks with Crisp’s multiple automation features like its chatbot and ticketing system.

Pricing: 

• Free plan: 2 agents included.
• Pro plan: €25/month, per team.
• Unlimited plan: €95/month, per team.

Key Features:

• Automated Audience Targeting. 
• Canned Respons.
• Live Chat software. 
• Chatbots software. 
• Knowledge base software.

5 Steps to Successfully Automate Customer Service  

Automating customer service can be incredibly helpful for your business. It helps you save time and money while supporting your service team as your business grows. But how can you automate your services without getting caught in the mechanical response trap?

So, here we provided five steps to automate your customer service process without triggering robotic responses successfully.

1- Don't Lose Sight of the Human Touch
The human-to-human experience is one of the most valuable aspects of any successful support service, and you should never sacrifice it for automation.
Customer service automation is used to assist your team, not to replace it. Your customers still need empathy, flexibility, and respect they experience while interacting with human agents. 

Remember, the goal is not to replace the support agents but rather to reduce the amount of work they have to do to satisfy your clients and provide them with the respect and support they deserve. Therefore, use automation only where it serves the customer journey.

2- Create & Update Your Knowledge Base Content
Creating knowledge base content is one of the most important steps you must take while automating your customer service. By creating and updating it regularly, you can resolve the basic issues and answer your customers' frequently asked questions without any human intervention.

To prevent your visitors from navigating away and looking elsewhere for their answers, share easily accessible and visually pleasing content like FAQs, tutorials, infographics, product screenshots, or step-by-step guides and update them frequently.

3- Use Chatbots to Reach Out to Customers
AI chatbots can hold on to meaningful conversations and help your customers to resolve their basic questions with canned responses. Chatbots can reach out 24/7 to your users, asking them about their issues and routing them to the relevant team and agent. 

You can use them to catch customers who contact you after hours, create tickets and later follow up with them.

While nobody likes a robotic answer, chatbots can save you more than that. They can give you a holistic view of the problem by asking about the issue first and getting people's history and past purchases so that the agent has enough information to address the problem.

4- Personalize Your Automated Customer Service
There is nothing wrong with using automated canned responses as long as they don’t sound robotic. Automated responses don't need to be disguised as real people, but they must be customized and personalized according to relevant issues.
Pre-write responses and create different templates for your different channels, and let your agents personalize each one later by adding the name of the customer, their purchase history,  and details. Personalizing responses can add that little extra touch of friendliness to your business that your customers will appreciate.

5- Gather Feedback & Take Action

While automation is a great way to improve customer service, it is a time-consuming process. You need several tests and constant feedback from your customer in order to build perfect automated customer service.

After all, all of these efforts are to make their experience smoother with your brand, so why not ask them first?

Ask your customers about their experience with you after their problem has been resolved. After your customers' issues are resolved, create a survey for them to rate your services on a scale of 1-10 or ask them to write about problems they encountered.

Capturing feedback and taking actions based on them makes your customers feel valued and persuade them to engage more with your brands. Additionally, it will impact your automation improvements and help you create a better service for your customers.

It is hard, but not impossible, to provide good customer service all the time. The key to retaining your customers is to provide them with good customer service - and that will earn you a reputation for being helpful and pleasant to work with.

Wrapping up

Hopefully you can see by this point that it's so much easier to automate customer service than it is to do everything manually.

Automation:

• Saves your agents time
• Saves you money on hiring agents
• Empowers your users to find answers to their own problem
• Is often faster for users than talking to an agent

If you're looking for a way to build automated customer service into your product, one common barrier is that coding a help center and a knowledge base often takes a lot of time.

Well, UserGuiding can remove that barrier for you. Our software is entirely code-free – so even your non-technical product people can use it.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free trial today and see what all the hype is about!