What is customer service automation? Sounds like something from “The Jetsons”, or “Back to the Future”. Will it cost us our jobs in customer service? No, in fact it will make our jobs simpler, and the results of the job – better.
All the boring, repetitive tasks where we could make mistakes, and use that time to do something smarter and more creative – that is where (hyper)automation comes in – to revive customer service automation, and breathe in new life.
As the EmailTree CEO Casius Morea says:” Everyone who is looking to save time, classify, and improve the quality of their responses can use this solution. To name just a few advantages, there are cost savings, increased productivity, customer satisfaction, easy team management, and a sales increase.”
So, what exactly are the (work) aches in customer service that can be healed with some automation?
Communication about basic, predictable problems
According to MIT Technology Review, AI-powered chatbots have helped improve complaint resolution in 90% of the businesses surveyed – no one really needs to talk to a live person if 90 percent of the problems can be handled by chatbots, and extremely effective chatbots, whose job it is to be answering frequently asked questions.
We are not where we used to be five years ago when chatbots were another name for hell and frustration. I was booking a holiday recently and until I hadn’t reached a serious and complicated booking problem and was transferred to chat to a human, I didn’t even realize I was chatting online with a – bot.
And if there is a problem humans need to solve, sometimes the issue is – you get different people, who don’t know the nature of your history with another CS agent. The answer is – again – in front of you. A knowledge base accessible in one simple click and automatically updated according to previous answers and modifications of products or services.
Chatbots can respond 24/7 to customer requests, improving the response time that customers receive, and AI-powered chatbots can also help improve problem resolution. It’s a win-win situation.
Why would you spend your time on answering frequently asked questions “FAQ” when you can be doing something truly productive.
In fact, having multiple conversations with multiple stakeholders and actors I have come to realize that most, now, find chatting to a human tiresome and unnecessarily complicated. Also, let’s face it, there are many types of customers out there – this also solves the problem of intense, aggressive, or too chatty customers.
Saving time because time is life and money
You need to send a newsletter, a repetitive email, then perhaps slightly change the content, then identify who didn’t get the email… Does this seem equal part boring and difficult at the same time? Are there so many other things you could be spending your professional hours on?
Again, steps in (hyper)automation, and EmailTree as the leading provider of automated “mega-mail”. To make things even better, it is so simple you don’t need to be an IT expert or deep tech wizard – you basically just need to know how to send an email.
“In July 2018, we delivered the first Hyperautomation scenario to one of our clients. Then, we were unaware of what we were doing was „hyperautomation“. The Gartner Top Strategic Technology trend for 2020 was announced towards the end of 2019. It’s official that the term „hyperautomation“ was launched. It was our first confirmation that we are heading in the right direction by building a product and platform that are relevant to both the market and customers”, said mr Morea for an interview in Silicon Luxembourg.
It's also important to emphasize that the EmailTree AI platform is currently developing and working on new features and integrations for the most used CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and email applications, making the process even more modern and customer friendly.
How else do you save precious time – by being unable to prioritize and not by putting low-priority tasks first just because they come in earlier than high-priority ones – solving the issue of, for example, missing service level agreements.
Hyperautomation can solve this problem for you as well.
Making you think less about unnecessary things
In one of the textbooks on automation it says that “The purpose of (hyper)automation is to improve your business processes and consequently speed up and better your operations. To do this, you need to identify automation opportunities in your business that could benefit from (hyper)automation.” It means that you, finally, get to take shortcuts in your work (a big no-no up until now) that will not affect or downgrade the quality of your business, in fact the exact opposite – it will make your day-to-day work and business in general, much better.
If you use a little bit of time to identify what exactly is “eligible” to be automated in your company, it means long-term benefits, and the ability for you to focus on things that are a real challenge, problem or constantly “fluid”.
As it says in Silicon Luxembourg “we sought ways to get Customer Service to respond faster to end users, as well as our employees in customer service departments. The idea of EmailTree AI was developed because of an internal need, at a time when its members were presenting to customers. The software handled the entire task after a user requested an extension of an antivirus license through a bank check. It not only responded to the customer, but also generated an invoice for the transaction and extended the license.
In recognizing the potential in this service, and at the same time feeling the certainty of having the problem solved without their involvement, the EmailTree AI team decided to invest in it and bring it to everyone.”
Also, this system allows all the unified customer history to be connected and intertwined along different software’s, by connecting all CRM’s.
Getting lost in the threads, and lost in translation
You just got an important email, but it is even more important you send it to another address. You are busy, tired, mistakes happen – you either forget, forward wrong, add the wrong people. Why wouldn’t you let this job be done by a system that will not make a mistake, and you won’t lose an ounce of energy, and on the “other side” machine learning and automatic ticket classification help you identify the right department for each issue, and route it accordingly.
Also, people verbalize in a million different ways their needs, wants and desires. They can also be unpleasant, crude, complicated or stubborn – sometimes it is just hard to understand and decipher what it is that they really want.
Intent detection and sentiment detection can help you understand your customer's needs easily and be emphatic in your replies. Sentiment detection is exactly as smart and intuitive as it sounds.
Avoiding burnout, keeping everyone happy and at ease
Sometimes agents become so busy and so incredibly overwhelmed trying to figure out how to complete certain tasks that they forget what they're primarily there for — which is helping customers.
In those cases, Smart Reply tool helps your agent to get the most appropriate response instantly.
Hyperautomation tools also make onboarding of new agents easier than ever before.
Plethora of things can be automated, some of the examples being: Sending invoices and packing slips via email, responding to most recurring questions, putting customer data in your crm, refunding a customer…
It also helps with outdated software which can simply drive you crazy, instead of letting you do your job.
If that doesn’t save some nerves, I don’t know what does.
Your business and your life will thank you if you add a touch of (hyper)automation to your work, and what is most important – so will your customers!