Digital transformation is all about automated customer service. How to do it?

Until recently, digital transformation was perceived as something that should happen somewhere in the future. However, because of the pandemic, things have changed. Today it is a necessity for many companies.

To make it as effective as possible, you need to take advantage of all the opportunities it creates. The automation of customer service may be one of the most profitable. What’s interesting, according to data collected by McKinsey, by 2030 as many as 70% of companies will be benefiting from implementing artificial intelligence solutions.

What can you achieve with automation?

Let’s start by presenting the benefits of automation. There are many of them, but let’s focus on the most relevant ones:

  • More efficient management of the customer service process.
  • Handling more inquiries – at a lower cost.
  • Customer support 24 hours a day.
  • Increase in the consultants’ productivity.

It is possible thanks to the use of artificial intelligence in the following areas:

  • online correspondence management, 
  • complaint processing, 
  • debt collection processes management, 
  • automation of internal communication.

What to do before automating customer service?

Analysis

Analyze the current state of customer service and customer experience in your company. Gather all the data that might be useful. Identify which questions are most common among customers and what problems they face on the shopping path.

What and who?

Consider which customer service channels you want to automate. All of them? Or maybe at the beginning only e-mails? The decision is yours – however, ultimately, you should implement automation in all channels.

You should also consider introducing organizational changes at this stage. Create a customer service department structure – each consultant should be assigned to a specific type of inquires.

Use automation to manage your correspondence

Most companies in the online world contact their customers through three channels: e-mails, chats, and web forms. Artificial intelligence can take over all of them.

Automation enables:

  • automatic redirection of messages to proper departments based on a category recognized earlier,
  • assigning messages to the proper department and client,
  • recognizing various formats of attachments and verifying their presence,
  • generating reports enabling the analysis of qualitative data and messages processed from various perspectives.

Replying to messages – a task for artificial intelligence

Thanks to automation, your customers can get answers to their inquiries exactly when they need it, i.e. immediately. 

However, you may wish that only your employees would respond to certain threads. And it is a good thing. Thanks to automation, they can do it much faster. AI can support consultants by suggesting personalized answers based on customer questions.

It is worth knowing that modern tools powered by artificial intelligence are also great at analyzing client’s sentiment.

Collecting stories about customers

Artificial Intelligence can solve customer problems efficiently and quickly because it knows the history of their interactions with your brand. All information is collected in the system, which allows the algorithms to draw conclusions from it on an ongoing basis.

What to remember when implementing automation?

Do you want to get the best possible results when implementing automation? That’s the spirit! There are a few things you need to keep in mind:

  • Put your customers first. Remember that automation is a response to the growing expectations of modern consumers. Always consider their needs and problems, and you will surely develop an automation strategy that will increase the efficiency of customer service in your company.
  • Experiment and test. Thanks to automation, you can test different conversation scenarios and the efficiency of customer support channels more effectively than ever. Bear in mind that AI is always objective.
  • Don’t replace your employees with algorithms. The goal of automation is to relieve consultants from repetitive tasks and allow them to focus on really creative areas. This is how their productivity is increased. The opinion that the goal of using artificial intelligence in customer service is to replace consultants is a harmful stereotype.
  • Let automation grow. Machine learning engines learn with every message sent and received. This means that with each subsequent interaction, they provide a higher level of customer service.

At AI Busters, we collect data on the improvement of customer service indicators for companies using our solution. So far, we have observed the following effects:

  • 5-fold increase in employee productivity,
  • response time reduced 10 times,
  • analysis of one message up to a few seconds.

All this makes our engine effective in handling more than 70-90% of all inquiries.