4 Things to Automate In 2020 for Better Customer Relationships

They’ve lost trust in your support articles that are outdated and unreliable. It’s a huge opportunity to surprise them with engaging support articles. Once you get your feet wet, then you can look toward a scripted approach to responding to chat queries.

By learning the many ways people behave and interact, the system’s response becomes more accurate. Going well beyond simple text recognition, natural language understanding is where AI is truly bringing its strengths to bear. By facilitating deeper, more nuanced conversation, it increases the efficacy of human-AI interactions.

AI is changing everything. Here’s how automation can improve service for both your customers and employees.

Automating data does much more than make it easier for your sales team to keep track of leads. It enables them to deliver higher quality service that increases sales and loyal customers. Webinars can also serve as a powerful form of automated customer empowerment content. Webinars can be used to host VIP meetups, present tips by industry influencers, educate your audience, and more.

With so many activities taking place (and so many potential clients to work with), it’s all too easy for even the most skilled sales teams to have leads slip through the cracks. And, the problem can be easily compounded when a prospective client engages with multiple sales agents. While social media may get a lot of attention these days, there are several other automation-friendly formats that deliver content. While automation may sometimes bring to mind stories of robots taking over, in reality, most software exists to streamline and simplify your day-to-day responsibilities. Customer relations should always be a top priority for any business. And, with 2020 arriving, now is a good time to find new solutions that meet the needs of your target audience.

Choose the right automated customer service tool for your business

For example, offer support chatbots and self-service automation, but also allow your shoppers to chat to your human reps via live chat and email. Automated customer service allows your shoppers to resolve their issues without interacting with your support representatives. It automates customer support tasks, such as solving queries through self-service resources, simulated chat conversations, and proactive messaging.

Whether you’re in the office or on holiday, these messages give your customers the reassurance that their queries will be handled. By automating your internal workflow, you can set quick reply responses and define the scenarios or keywords in which your reply would be automatically triggered. Finding the right person to handle the customer inquiry takes time, yet customers are impatient. Making them wait only causes more frustration and negative associations with your brand.

Not every customer is going to speak your language, literally and figuratively. The vocabulary you use for your products and services might not line up exactly with how customers would talk about them. You can also create a help desk by adding routing and automation to your tickets. Every second a customer has to wait for your support team is another second closer to that customer switching to a faster competitor.

This post asks a simple set of questions to help you move forward with confidence as you start designing for AI. Without those resources backing it up, your bots will do little more than annoy customers who are desperately trying to seek solutions to their problems. Even when Resolution Bot can answer a customer’s automated services customer relationship question, it’ll always check if they got what they needed. Customers can ask your chatbot a question and read the answer between meetings, or get a link to a helpful article and read it when they have time. Furthermore, these automation tools cannot recognize when the information they have is inaccurate.

Are you ready to try automated customer service?

Stumptown Coffee had an overly complicated phone system that was easy to send off the rails with an error on the back end. But now they use RingCentral, whose easy-to-navigate interface has made everyone’s lives easier. A move like this is good for team morale, and customers get the answers they need more quickly. If you plan to do proactive customer service outreach, this one’s for you. Regulations for outbound interactions are always changing, so it can be challenging to stay ahead and make sure you’re in compliance. The ability to automate support, especially as a small business, can free up serious time, resources, and money for business growth while still giving your customers a first-rate service experience.

An AI chatbot can even act as a personalized shopping assistant, seamlessly asking about a customer’s preferences and sharing product information to enrich the shopping experience. This functionality brings each customer a personalized conversational experience, keeping a human-like touch despite being AI-driven. This is important when we consider that respect for people’s time is considered one of the most important factors in providing a positive customer experience. Crucially, you can deploy them across your customers’ preferred communication channels, meeting your users where they’re already spending time. Leverage AI in customer service to improve your customer and employee experiences.

Collect customer feedback

Automated customer service is a form of customer support enhanced by automation technology, which businesses can use to resolve customer issues—with or without agent involvement. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 71 percent of business leaders plan to revamp the customer journey to increase satisfaction. If you’re one of those leaders, you may consider automated customer service as a solution to providing the high-quality, seamless experiences that consumers expect.

This well-timed delivery lowers anxiety and increases confidence in the agent. Two-thirds of millennials expect real-time customer service, for example, and three-quarters of all customers expect consistent cross-channel service experience. And with cost pressures rising at least as quickly as service expectations, the obvious response—adding more well-trained employees to deliver great customer service—isn’t a viable option. But remember to train your customer service agents to understand a customer’s inquiry before they reach for a scripted response. This will ensure the clients always feel that the communication is personalized and helpful. Canned responses enable more efficient human work instead of automating the whole process.