In today’s digital world, ‘Automation’ is the name of the game. Until a few years ago, automation was a term that was generally used by big businesses. However, the advent of latest technology has made automation a possibility for even small and medium businesses. We can clearly see that business owners have understood the value of automation. After all, it is an undeniable fact that automation brings several benefits to a business. With the whole world moving towards automation, more and more businesses are looking to automate their all their teams, including customer support.

Why automate your customer support team? Offering the best customer support has become a difficult task in the current digital world. With a high level of accessibility, businesses have started to face a drastic increase in online customer service requests. Today’s digital-savvy customers can use numerous avenues to contact a business, and they demand instant customer support on all these avenues. To satisfy the customers, businesses need to find ways to give superior customer support with higher efficiency. And that is one of the main reasons for customer service automation.

If you are small or medium business owner who is new to the digital space, you will mostly be wondering, ‘Should I automate?’ The short answer to the question is ‘Yes.’ This is because customer service automation will

• Increase your customer satisfaction rates by providing self-help options.

• Bring down costs as you do not need to recruit more people.

• Increase efficiency with the help of predetermined responses.

• Increase conversions by providing instant support.

• Reduces human errors.

How should I start to automate? Now that we have seen the benefits of customer service automation, you might be eager to automate your customer service team as soon as possible. While we encourage the attitude, we would ask you to create a proper plan before you start. While automation does bring superior benefits to your business, it should be done properly to ensure the best result. In this section, we will try to offer some advice that might help you plan your automation process.

Start Small

If you are a small business wondering whether you have to overhaul your entire customer support team to automate. We assure you that you don’t need to do it. In fact, most small businesses need to start small and gradually build automation into their framework. One of the first steps you could take is setting quick replies to your WhatsApp Business. By adding options in the ‘Quick Reply’ section of your WhatsApp Business app, you can instantly answer common queries by selecting the necessary reply. ‘Quick Reply’ would also be the best option to give your customer support team a taste of automation. The business can also take an effort to automate their live chat tool to provide instant support to site visitors. These are two small steps that can help immensely.

Complement Automation

Automation is not just a process, but a mindset. Businesses need to understand that customer service automation needs to be complemented by other factors to ensure the best results. For example, businesses should understand that some customers do not like to chat. In fact, around 70% of people prefer to solve their problems themselves. Therefore, their live chat support needs to complemented by self-help options. A simple step is to create an FAQ page with the most basic business information. This will satisfy customers who prefer self-help options.

Centralization

As mentioned earlier, businesses need to engage with customers on different digital avenues. While most of them, like WhatsApp, Live Chat, Mail, etc., support automation, they also need oversight. If automation is not centralized, you run the risk of losing a competitive edge on a particular digital avenue. Imagine this, you had recently collated common queries and sent them for automation but found out that your live chat team missed to update the same. Having a centralized hub for customer support automation would help increase consistency and reduce unforeseen errors.

Track & Adapt

Much like any other process, Automation data also needs to be tracked. The ultimate goal is to check whether your automatic replies yielded in increased conversions or increased customer satisfaction. If not, the same should be tweaked based on the insights to get better results. As a small or medium business, you need to understand that automation is a continuous process.

Provide a human touch

Automation without supervision is a recipe for disaster. While automation supports instant replies, they cannot beat a personalized service. With the help of supervision, you would be inducing a human element to the automation process. The supervisor can understand the customer’s psyche and interject to provide personalized customer service whenever necessary. This would increase the brand’s reputation as well as customer loyalty.

There we go, these are five tips that are aimed at helping you automate your customer support team. We hope that you find immense success in your field.