Five Customer Service Automations You Need

In her book, Understanding Customers, Ruby Newell-Legner says it takes at least 12 positive customer experiences for everyone unresolved negative customer experience. It is crucial to provide the best customer experience possible. Twenty-four hour manual customer service is a complex task, and the chances of missing one or more customer queries is very real. This is one of the many reasons why businesses opt for automated customer service.

According to a report by Harris Interactive and Rightnow, one of the main reasons for customer loss is reps’ failure to solve a query in a timely manner. We understand that not every customer can be reached out to at a specific time. That’s why automating some customer services processes such as sending first replies or following up on a query is so important.

Let’s discuss five customer service automations you need.

1. First Reply Automation

In the Harvard Business Review, it was found that 33 percent of customers feel positive about a brand who provides quick first replies to their queries. Sending first replies reassures the customer by letting them know a rep will be in touch soon.

An automated quick reply offers instant communication with your customer, even if they aren’t around, and buys additional time for your service reps. That said, reps should tackle the second reply, like resolving the issue, within 24 hours.

2. Priority Ticket Automation

Resolving issues within 24 hours is a target goal and quick resolution on priority tickets should be compulsory. To accomplish this, you have to set parameters with regular alerts to make sure priority tickets are targeted first.

This is where priority ticket automation comes in. Your automated customer service tool should allow you to send alerts when priority tickets are raised. You can add various keywords to your parameters such as “need quick resolution,” “software stuck,” “password loss,” or others and add them as tags to your alerts. These will help you get real-time notifications whenever a priority ticket comes up.

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3. Follow-up Automation

Resolved and unresolved tickets both require prompt follow-ups from reps, though your reps might not have time to follow-up on all tickets. The answer is to automate follow-up replies. Whenever a rep closes a ticket saying “resolved,” the tool can send an automated reply to the customer.

The same process can be followed for unresolved tickets. Let the customer know that the problem is being worked on. Automating this part of customer service makes customers feel as though their issues are given priority and helps reps build a good relationship.

4. Feedback Automation

In his research, Esteban Kolsky, a famous customer strategist, found that 70 percent of companies that deliver the best customer service are the ones who ask for regular customer feedback. Feedback is important for any business to understand how the customer perceives their product/brand.

The feedback process can be easily automated. Canned feedback surveys are sent to customers as soon as a ticket is closed. Agile CRM sends canned customer feedback surveys and, with the help of this survey, we have deduced that our CSAT rate is 88 percent.

5. Tag Automation

Much of a representative’s time goes into filtering tickets based on their criteria and importance. Customer service automation for better ticket filtering is handy for reps and saves them time. It should allow automatic tags on various tickets and then filter them based on those tags.

With the Agile CRM Helpdesk, users can create SLAs based on keywords like “password,” “technical issue,” or “404 error.” Based on these keywords, tickets are filtered automatically under various tags.

Automated customer service is a practical, time-saving approach. Of course, this does not mean your business should lose its personal touch. Customizing messages when possible is beneficial. Try to find a balance between the automation and manual customer service provided to the customers.