The customer service function has come a long way since its inception. What started as nothing more than a necessity, became a real cornerstone for building a successful business. The majority of organizations viewed customer support as an additional cost, something that they had to deal with to ensure the business keeps running.
That’s how the business started thinking of ways to cut expenses and increase efficiency. Fast forward to today, and we have a completely different picture. Customer support and experience are among the essential aspects of doing business today.
Modern consumers of today demand effective and straightforward customer support and experience. They value businesses with the most efficient customer service.
When we add the fact that there are more contact channels than ever before, businesses have faced a new challenge – how to cope with the ever-increasing customer support demand and still manage to provide a personalized customer experience with each interaction.
It’s quite hard to offer consistency across all touchpoints and channels, train customer support personnel in the proper skills, and staff the call center at the same time. That’s how automation became the most useful tool of them all. Here’s how it helped change customer support for the better.
1. Meet the ever-increasing customer demands
Businesses that incorporate automation into all customer service processes and operations have an excellent opportunity to beat their competition and meet the ever-increasing customer demands with success.
The rise of self-service adoption led to the expansion of conversational AI automation. Modern customers value their time, and they appreciate only those businesses that manage to do the same.
That is the main reason why so many online businesses use conversational AI automation to offer self-service for the majority of repetitive tasks. Instead of wasting manpower, resources, effort, and time to handle these tasks, organizations can use these resources in a much better way.
The fact that modern consumers are very comfortable with interacting with conversational AI like chatbots, whether through digital media or voice, led companies to believe that they need AI automation to keep their consumers satisfied and competitors outpaced.
On top of all that, automation greatly helps offer a seamless and effortless experience that consumers want and demand.
2. RPA and chatbots
Robot process automation helps organizations in many different ways. Many modern businesses are focused on driving toward digital transformation, which includes:
- Improving customer service, support, and experience
- Moving services to the cloud solutions
- Improving access to analytics and data
- Improving delivery times
RPA can streamline any form-based operation while ensuring maximum regulatory compliance. The combination of RPA and chatbots is a perfect tool for any activity that includes visitor or customer data.
Chatbots can take over any task related to customer support and service, help desk support, HR, and service management. RPA and chatbots are mostly used to deliver higher value to consumers. They help speed up response to the most critical issues.
Chatbots handle everything customer-related while RPA handles taking orders, technical support, onboarding, and other repetitive tasks. Intelligent automation benefits businesses by providing faster turnaround and problem resolution time, as well as more flexible service.
The most innovative bot-building platform like SnatchBot allows users to build their industry-specific chatbots according to their exact business needs. These chatbots with the best AI are a fantastic way to keep your customer support at maximum capacity as they:
- Provide 24/7 customer service
- Help HR and customer service teams share the load
- Improve self-service for consumers
- Reduce cost for vendors
- Provide an inexpensive, repeatable and innovative method of communication
RPA and chatbots are cutting edge technologies that help businesses provide more exceptional customer experience at more affordable costs. More importantly, they help remove repetition from the daily operations, allowing customer service agents to handle their tasks more efficiently.
3. Make customer support agents more effective
Businesses mostly use automation to accomplish increased ROI. Customer support involves many challenges, including headcount. Since social media platforms have become a must in e-commerce and business in general, it has become quite difficult to staff the customer support department accurately.
Managing customer support by using only live agents isn’t profitable, as more consumer demands and inquiries require hiring more people. Instead, businesses can rely on AI automation to make their agents more effective.
The best AI with a chatbot can be used to:
- Automate repetitive texts, chats, and calls to allow agents to focus on core consumer conversations
- Gather essential consumer data to make the consumer experience and interaction more seamless and effortless
- Automate outbound SMS texts and calls for all alerts, delivery reminders, and appointment confirmation to save time and reduce cost
Conclusion
Automation can be used to automate any engagement. Organizations are now focused on optimizing their customer support in the most innovative ways to increase and maintain customer satisfaction scores. The truth is, automation opens ways to new possibilities and capabilities.
Customer support agents and HR departments can harness this potential to make each interaction with the customers more pleasant, productive, and satisfying. Automation hasn’t only made customer support better; it changed the entire customer service operation.
It helps provide real value to the consumers by solving their problems and helping accomplish a meaningful relationship between businesses and consumers.