How To Enhance 24X7 Customer Support Automation?

You want your business to run at scale. But, you have not invested to set up a well-planned customer service. Forget it. You can’t run your business. Get automated 24/7 support for your business. We will tell you how to automate 24/7 customer support in this blog.

Well-planned customer support is the most crucial part of any successful business. But the human aspect limits the scope of the best customer support in many ways. Too much pressure and a heavy workload can make call agents frustrated. And repeated tasks lead to depression and job dissatisfaction. So, what can you do to deal with this? Automate your customer support 24/7.

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Automated customer support means less dependency on human resources. It involves resolving customers’ queries automatically through a variety of artificial intelligence-based tools. These tasks may be to provide answers to any product-related inquiries, help customers to pay the bills, etc. In short, automated customer support allows its customers to solve their problems without interacting with human agents. Such tools route the queries to customer support teams to get respond to various issues. The various tools to automate 24/7 customer support include IVRs, voice bots chatbots, visual IVRs, self-service portals, etc.

Customers want an immediate solution to their queries. Your call agents can’t be available to them 24/7. Also, hiring more call agents can be expensive for your business. Also, you have to spend on their training. And, even then, you can’t be sure that your call agents will bring a high level of customer satisfaction. Introducing automation toolsas a part of your contact center software is the answer to all your problems. 29% of customer service agent duties have the potential to be automated with technology.

Some other benefits of automated 24/7 customer support that can compel you to adopt the system:

• Automated customer support is more cost-effective than human resources.
• Automated AI-based tools handle simple and repetitive tasks. Thus, assist the customer support team in your contact center by freeing up their time.
• Customer support representatives get enough time to focus on needy customers. So, customers who need genuine human support don't get ignored.
• Automation in customer support allows customers to communicate on their preferred channels
• Also, they can switch between different communication methods. Customers don’t need to repeat what they have said on other communication channels.
• Today’s customers have become very fast. They want a quick response to their queries. It creates a negative impression if you don't reply to customers' queries immediately.
• Automated tools provide customers with self-service options. Customers can use self-help options to solve their issues themselves. So, they don’t need to rely on another human to get their issues solved.
• Finally, your customer service agents spend more time resolving complex issues of customers. This can make the work more interesting and reduce monotony.

Automated customer supportas a part of your contact center software helps your business deliver fast service. Since your contact center can solve queries of more customers, it contributes to word of mouth. Hence, it will increase sales and revenue. Gen-Z and millennials are familiar with the latest communication channels and automation. For instance, they know about bots and self-service portals. They have a preference for social media messaging and chatbots built within the messaging apps will provide the automation that they are looking for.

One needs to understand where the agents are spending most of their time to complete a simple task.  Here are a few tasks that might be automated:-

• Greeting Customers and acknowledging them that their message has been received. Verifying accounts can be done by voice biometrics or even by sending out OTP.
• Assist customers in the password reset
• Assign the tickets to the right representative
• Help in the basic level of troubleshooting 

Contact center agents wade through enormous data during working hours. It includes dealing with information associated with customers, sales, and products. They need proper guidance to use these data. Automation tools like RPA can help your call agents in switching between various applications & inputting data. This will make the interactions smooth and fast covering many channels. A range of AI-based tools is available in the market. These can bring automation to your contact center. Hence, you can enhance customer experience and customer satisfaction (CSAT).

Depending upon the size of your business and industry, you could set up any of the following

AI-based Telephony Solutions:

Telephony solutions include automatic call distributors, IVRs, loggers, and dialers.

Automated Call Distributors - It receives inbound calls and then routes calls to the right call agents, team, or even back to the IVR menu.

Automated IVR - The automated IVR listens and identifies keywords from the voice, then either provide the solution or route the call to the most skilled agents in the contact center

Canned Responses - Canned messages are predefined messages to common inquiries. These messages link to a specific keyword to pledge the customers that your support team is working on it. 

AI Chatbot - AI chatbot that can answer basic questions, redirect the customer to any knowledge base or route the call to the human agent when it is not able to answer the basic question. 

Dialer - Dialers are classified into predictive, progressive, and preview. The automation in the predictive dialer and progressive dialers enhance agent productivity and efficiently cruise through the calls without any concern of dialing out the phone number.

Call Blast - Call Blast allows its users to place a large number of calls concurrently. It can broadcast your message to tens of thousands of people and request them to provide their input in case they are interested in specific products/services or provide customer feedback.

Self-Service Solutions:

Self-service solutions reduce the burden on contact center agents. So, you must incorporate self-service options like IVR, bot, and knowledge base. While IVR is covered already in the previous section, let me mention Visual IVR, bot, and knowledge base.

Visual IVR - This is a self-service tool that can be triggered as a call deflection from the mobile app. It requires a browser interface that offers self-service menus and can lead to higher IVR containment of 70% and above, which means 70 out of 100 calls are served completely by the Visual IVR.

Bots & Knowledge Chatbots - AI-based chatbots assist both employees and customers. These bots can be smart enough to handle 50% to 60% of customer queries. With proper training data, the bot can become smarter. This frees up a lot of agent time. With integration with CRM or Order Management System, it can instantly retrieve required data to help the customer. It can also transfer chats to live call agents. The agents jump into the conversation as they have a snapshot of the customer’s interaction. Likewise, voice bots can do inbound and outbound calls and can transfer the call to a live agent if the lead is warm or the caller has a more complex query that the bot cannot handle. Knowledge chatbots are a very efficient self-service solution. It provides FAQs or knowledge articles with text and video for the user to solve the issue without any human intervention.

Automation as a part of contact center software helps you serve your customer 24/7. It has massive benefits to your business. It is the perfect way to improve the customer experience while bringing down costs. Achieve customer satisfaction, increase sales, and profits by automating 24/7 customer support.