There are so many customer service tasks that need to get done, and even fully staffed teams can find themselves overwhelmed by everything on their plates. When pairing customer experience with automation technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), you are able to efficiently meet the needs of customers while maintaining and even improving their overall experience with your brand. 

 With the increased usage of AI, the world of customer experience is on the verge of a transformation as we think beyond a chat bot and find new meaningful ways of engaging with and managing our customer experiences.  

Supercharging Agents With Automation and AI 

At Awesome CX, we believe that there will always be a need for human touch to support customer experience; however, when leveraged properly, AI and technology tools can be used to minimize and in some cases eliminate certain customer support related tasks. 

At Awesome CX, we see three primary use cases for AI as it relates to customer experience: 

Autopilot: Many tasks can be automated when AI is fully enabled to provide the answer a customer is looking for. This significantly reduces agent time spent by navigating the customers' concern and quickly delivering the answers that they are looking for. As an added bonus, by decreasing the resolution time you are also improving your customer satisfaction scores. 

Co-Pilot: Co-Pilot is an AI tool that helps customer experience agents by providing real-time insights and personalized suggestions during interactions. When AI takes over repetitive tasks, agents are supercharged, making their support more efficient and improving customer satisfaction.

Insights: Insights is a robust business intelligence tool that assesses data to offer practical guidance to executive teams. Through data visualization and advanced algorithms, it facilitates rapid and well-informed decision-making, helping businesses maintain a competitive edge and enhance their performance.

Is AI in Customer Service a Good Idea?

At first glance, customer experience is a sphere totally dominated by human interaction. So, you might wonder whether customer experience automation integrations are wise ideas at all. It definitely is!

With the advent of new technologies and tools, customer experience automation is an extremely helpful expansion of CS processes. Customer experience, in this light, is any effort your business makes to:

• Provide support or experiences to your customers
• Help customers find the ideal solutions or products for their needs
• Show customers that you prioritize their care and attention

By automating aspects of your customer support, you can provide your human support team with the tools they need to do their job effectively and efficiently — benefitting your customers in the process.

What Are the Big Benefits of Customer Service Automation?

If you start to use customer experience automation tools and processes, your brand will see significant improvements in its bottom line across several major metrics. Here are some examples.

Faster Responses

Customer experience automation often leads to faster responses to customer queries, complaints, and concerns. That’s a universally good thing: all customers want to be responded to as quickly as possible, after all.

So, customer experience automation provides your customers with greater satisfaction. However, it also lets your customer experience department clear out backlogged cases more quickly. Rather than letting basic questions pile up over time and cause a headache for your CS agents, automated customer experience tools can take care of all that help desk grunt work and free up valuable time for other troubleshooting efforts.

Plus, if you respond quickly to customer requests and complaints, you could ask customer questions and get more customer feedback in real-time. Faster response times almost always lead to more data that you can use for better customer experience improvements!

Higher Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

In addition, customer experience automation oftentimes leads to much higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. When your customers are taken care of faster and more consistently than ever, they’ll also be much more likely to return to your site again and again, plus recommend your brand to others who might be on the fence.

According to the Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers want to take care of issues themselves before they reach out to a live representative. Automating customer experience processes could give your customers exactly what they want while simultaneously easing the workload for your CS agents!

Don’t discount the long-term benefits of greater customer loyalty. If you provide a stellar customer experience for your target audience members, they’ll be more likely to make purchases now and into the future. This is an example of a direct way in which automated customer experience can contribute to your business’s bottom line and long-term health.

Improved Workflow for Human CS Agents

As touched on above, the automation of many customer experience tools and AI technologies can free up valuable time for your human support agents. In turn, this will improve their workflow and their response times.

Human customer experience reps will be able to:

• Tackle the complex issues and support tickets that inevitably appear over time. Since humans are best equipped to respond to challenging customer concerns, this is a net benefit for your brand
• Focus more on scheduling themselves to maintain a good work/life balance, which has the ancillary benefit of boosting your workers’ satisfaction with their jobs
• Maintain a steady workflow as they tackle customer cases and improve the customer experience department. In the long run, this could lead to widespread advantages or improvements for your overall business

A better workflow results in better processes and better business operations. What's not to like?

What Are the Potential Ancillary Benefits of AI Tools?

In addition to all of the above advantages, automated systems may provide ancillary boosts to your brand and your customer service team, including:

• Data analysis support. Lots of AI tools and automated customer experience platforms can collect a wealth of data on your target audience members. Over time, you can continue to collect, organize, and analyze that data so you better understand your customer needs
• Faster ticket completion. As noted above, many self-service AI tools can help your CS team tackle routine customer interactions much more quickly, so they can move on to more challenging tasks ASAP instead of having to deal with repetitive tasks
• Cost-effectiveness. When you have AI tools, you may only need to employ a much smaller human customer service experience team in order to get the same job done. If your brand is struggling to stay in the black or if you are a new small business with a tight budget, AI tools can take up the slack if you don't have enough money on the payroll to pay for a large-scale customer experience department. Automated email and other automation software can do the same thing across all your communication channels and omnichannel marketing

Should All Customer Service Processes Be Automated?

Customer support automation solutions provide a vast amount of benefits, but support agents are ultimately still necessary to provide a human touch. We encourage leveraging customer experience automation tools to give human customer service agents a boost for a more seamless and efficient customer experience.

Your human customer support team can:

• Oversee the use of automated customer service tools, ensuring that they run smoothly and handling any quirks or problems that inevitably pop up over time
• Tackle more challenging or complex customer issues or requests. For example, if a customer has a question that an AI chatbot doesn’t recognize, a human customer experience agent can step in and deal with the problem
• Analyze the results of customer experience automated processes and systems. Once they gain additional information, they can use it to improve the CS department overall

Above all else, you should include human agents in your customer experience team so that there's a real human face attached to your brand. That's especially important for online or e-commerce businesses.

Consider the fact that the only human interaction a customer might have throughout the customer journey is with a customer experience agent. Denying customers this interaction could make your brand feel cold, distant, or otherwise unsatisfying to buy from and damage customer relationships.

Contact Awesome CX Today

In the end, the right automated customer experience processes can yield major benefits for your brand, like reduced wait times and fewer human errors. Your team members will have more time to tackle difficult customer inquiries and create personalized experiences for your customers, and your customers will feel more taken care of than ever.

There’s no one better to partner with than Awesome CX by Transcom. Our dedicated AI tools can help you by:

• Automating customer experience-related tasks
• Streamlining CS workflows
• Providing key data analyses and insights to improve your CS team

There’s no reason not to improve your customer service strategy through AI today, so contact Awesome CX to get started!

Sources:

8 Reasons Why Customer Service Is Important and a Priority | Indeed.com

Kick-Ass Customer Service | Harvard Business Review

What is Customer Experience (CX) and Why is It Important? | TechTarget