The world of customer service management is transitioning to automation. AI now automatically does almost everything for you — from rating or analyzing tickets to pinpointing critical issues in conversations and more.
However, AI can be difficult to implement if you don’t have the right processes and frameworks to begin with.
We’ll take you through the meaning of automation in customer service, what benefits it will bring (for managers, agents, and customers), and how it will change things for everyone involved.
Why does automated customer service matter?
Don’t you just sometimes want to cover 100% of your agents’ replies but you simply don’t have the time to go through them all?
That’s where automation in customer service management comes in to give you more feedback about every agent’s tickets and help you reach agent performance and support operations excellence.
Automated customer service is generally done for the benefit of all members of your support team.
One reason is that it lets you spot opportunity points for QA raters. Let’s say you spot a big discrepancy in manual results compared to the automated ones. In this case, your QA rater might not clearly understand some of the criteria they review or they might not be following the guidelines you’ve set.
On top of that, whenever you need to know how your team’s performing or whom you should prioritize for your next one-on-one session, customer service automation solutions will display this data (and focus points) in real-time. This prompts you to make data-backed decisions faster so you can focus on the tasks that require your full attention like meeting up with your agents.
But how do you get started with customer service automation?
How to automate customer service and increase customer satisfaction?
Let’s just say there’s no single solution to help you automate it all.
That’s because customer service is always broken down into the customer and the agent side. So you’ll need tools to cater to each of these profiles.
Here are a couple of use cases that you must try:
Customer sentiment measurement for the whole customer journey
Kaizo’s Customer Sentiment metric makes it easy to rate tickets better and quicker.
By analyzing tickets, it can give you a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience. This helps you identify the areas that need improvement and allows you to take the necessary steps to address issues.
Kaizo’s customer service automation software gives you a more precise picture of the customer sentiment behind interactions compared to traditional customer satisfaction ratings.
This system allows for early detection of negative sentiment, providing a ramp to act quickly and improve customer satisfaction. Additionally, it detects training needs as well as areas where support agents are doing well, allowing you to set up personalized coaching to enhance performance.
Consistent evaluations and objective empathy measurements
For objectively evaluating customer support agents’ empathy levels, you’ll need to first decide on a goal. Then, set the quality criteria that will help you decide whether agent productivity is on the right track or not. Kaizo’s Samurai Empathy Score can be used to automatically assess the level of empathy displayed by customer support agents during interactions.
Your QA team can use this to analyze language patterns, sentiment, and tone to gain data-driven intel that can help them recognize their strengths and identify areas that need improvement.
By giving customer support agents feedback on their empathy scores, they can use these insights to further their professional growth. Additionally, a professional, empathetic, and positive attitude during interactions can go a long way in providing customers with the best service possible.
Ticket filtering to avoid missing out on strong opportunity points
Are you regularly rating random tickets, only to find that the most potential points of opportunity were in tickets you overlooked? Using the automation of customer service can enhance agent quality assurance and help ensure that no critical information is missed.
Kaizo’s Ticket Filtering feature allows you to customize the types of tickets you would like to prioritize when assessing how your agents are doing. You can specify these preferences through three different parameters: tags, channels, and metrics. Kaizo will then filter out any tickets that don’t meet your criteria, leaving you with only the cases that fit your criteria.
Workforce engagement that relies on meaningful objectives
Start by defining your workforce engagement objectives. You can set up meaningful goals for agents with AI Missions.
Kaizo’s AI technology provides personalized and challenging goals based on each agent’s performance. These objectives go beyond basic tasks, encouraging motivation and engagement with purposeful objectives.
You can further use these Missions to ensure alignment with organizational objectives and communicate company KPIs or individual focus points. These will help agents understand their role in the achievement of the bigger picture so they’ll have a clear roadmap of what’s next for them.
Tip: You can monitor individual or team accomplishments without having to switch applications directly from Zendesk. This allows agents to keep track of their own achievements in real-time, which encourages accountability, helping to cultivate a data-driven culture.
Knowledge bases to speed up support
Knowledge bases can help automate customer service by providing customers with self-help resources. Using this type of customer self-service automation can also reduce the amount of time support staff spend on answering common queries.
👉 Read our complete guide to building the perfect customer service knowledge base to set yours up in five steps.
Chatbots for real-time replies
You can turn to chatbots to help customers with simple queries and provide them with instant answers. Chatbots provide faster and more efficient customer service compared to traditional customer service methods. They can quickly answer customer service inquiries, process orders, and provide personalized customer service.
Not to mention they provide around-the-clock customer service, reducing wait times and increasing customer satisfaction. This means you’ll need fewer human agents to reply to basic or common queries and free up their time so they can focus on more complex issues.
Trigger-based events to stay proactive
Despite not reaching out to customer support, many customers who have had a negative experience will either stop using the company’s services or continue with a less favorable opinion. You can avoid this if you proactively contact your customers whenever they experience an issue with your product or service.
Darren Chait, ex-Co-Founder of Hugo and current Head of Growth at Calendly, used proactive support to improve their net promoter score (NPS) and make their customer interactions as positive as possible.
If the customer encountered a problem they were already aware of, they were immediately given a Loom video to show them how to resolve or avoid the issue. If no helpful material was available, they were offered assistance through a phone call.
Whenever a customer bumped into an error at Hugo, an ‘analytics event’ was emitted from Hugo’s analytics stack. This event connected to Hugo’s email service provider to trigger the sending of an email with information regarding the customer’s specific issue, which is derived from the analytics event.
The Hugo team also uses Fullstory as a heat mapping tool to track user activity in their product. This tool detects when someone is ‘rage-clicking’, which prompts the team to reach out to customers proactively and offer assistance.
These proactive messages, such as “It looks like Hugo is being a bit frustrating right now. What can we do to help?”, have been incredibly successful, receiving higher reply rates and generating more positive sentiment than typical reactive support conversations.
Pros and cons of automated customer service
We’ve already talked about why automation for customer service matters, so here’s a couple of the extra pros to keep in mind:
- Is available 24/7, meaning you can offer help to customers at any time
- Provides fast and efficient responses to customer inquiries, allowing customers to get answers to their questions quickly, without having to wait for a representative
- Can provide personalized responses to customers based on their specific needs and preferences
- Helps reduce customer wait times and increase customer satisfaction
- Reduces costs associated with managing agents and providing the actual customer service
- Speeds up customer service processes like ticket filtering, making them more efficient and effective
But finding the perfect customer service automation platform can be a challenge. Knowing the tool is often a testing process, so you’ll need to get your whole team to try it out. This is especially important for small or new teams, as the experience of manual labor may be more valued and can lead to unnecessary spending.
We recommend testing out any customer service automation solution together with your team. This will ensure the app is both easy to use and can cater to the diverse needs of your agents, QA raters, and manager.
Kaizo — your automated customer service software
We built Kaizo as an advanced solution to help you run all of your support operations in less time. The all-in-one platform lets you evaluate and improve your team’s performance with real-time insights, QA, coaching, gamification, and more.
Our AI extension, Samurai, helps customer support managers automate mundane and outdated manual tasks. With Samurai, you can take advantage of a range of customer service automation AI capabilities to make your work easier.
Here are some of the things you can look forward to with this customer support automation solution:
🚀Leverage Auto QA: Rate 100% of tickets in real time and quickly identify the source of negative results.
💬 Effortlessly analyze Sentiment & Empathy and allow critical tickets to be automatically reviewed.
🎯 Organize tickets quickly and efficiently according to their sentiment and level of empathy, and customize the ticket filtering process to match your needs.
📞 Gain a better understanding of calls, call transcriptions, and conversations using GPT Summaries for thorough insights.
🎯 Maximize motivation by setting personalized objectives using AI-generated Missions.
Ready to try Samurai for customer service automation?
