- Is your customer service automation/AI solution able to handle over 80% of the calls, live chat session and email automatically without anyone getting involved from your organisation?
- Is your customer service automation/AI software able to do most of the work your agents do? Can it do more than respond to FAQs?
- Does it save you 50-60% or more in costs, without any upfront costs?
Answers to all of these questions should be an emphatic yes!. To help you get there, here are some tips that’ll help you achieve just that.
First of all, let’s have a look at how human agents work, and how this work can be automated using state of the art AI and automation software, and then we’ll look into the cost of such a solution .
When one of your customers contact you, your agents help your customers in two steps
- The agent communicates with the customer to understand the issue.
- The agent takes a set of actions to help the customer (once she understands the customer issue)
We must automate both of these parts to help our customers end to end, automatically.
1. Understand the Customer (Across Multiple Channels)
Your customer service automation software should be able to communicate (back and forth) with the customers. It should be able to understand what the customer wants. At the same time, it should be able to ask relevant questions depending on the context and nature of the customer request.
The system should be able to understand the response and change the direction of conversation based on what the customers say.
The system should be able to communicate with the customer over multiple channels, i.e. over the phone, chat and email. It must understand customers with over 90% accuracy. You need to make sure that your system is able to handle communication effectively to achieve a high level of automation. So it’s crucial to have a system that understands customers accurately across multiple channels.
You need a system with over 90% accuracy to get to a high level of automation.
You need to understand how your customers communicate currently, i.e. what are the typical issues, how do they describe these issues, what phrases and words they use mostly, and especially what are some industry/product specific terms that your customers use when contacting you customer support. You need this data to train your customer service AI. Most of these systems would use some form of AI to understand and interpret customer requests. You’ll need your context specific data to start training the system.
2. Do What Human Agents Can Do
Once the customer service automation/AI system understands the customer request, it must be able to take some action automatically to help the customer.
It shouldn’t need any help from your agents to help the customers completely.
The customer service automation/AI system should be able to perform a set of actions which are similar to what human agents would have performed, i.e. find the customer (on relevant system), get specific information about the request and use that information to take further action (change the customer order, let the customer know about the status of the order, change customer details, cancel an order etc., dispatch an order). All of these actions should be performed automatically by the customer automation system.
Human agents use certain systems to help your customers, they may use a crm, or an order tracking system or a provisioning system or a help desk application.
Your customer service automation system must be able to work with these existing systems, and carry out exactly similar actions as your human agents to help your customers end to end.
The system would need integration with relevant applications and systems to complete the end to end automation.
The integration must not be expensive and resource intensive for you.
If the integration is expensive, it’ll eat into any saving you’re planning to achieve with your automation.
Your existing infrastructure should keep working as is, and the customer service automation shouldn’t impede it’s performance, rather it should enhance it with simple and fast integration and deployment.
3. Save 50%-60% or More – With No Upfront Cost
Now that you’ve chosen a solution that works across multiple channels e.g. phone, chat and email, and one that would help you automate over 80% of the customer service, if you like.
Most automation systems (except one or two) would require an IT project to carry out custom integration work to make sure that the system works with your applications and systems. You would need to get this integration code built, tested and deployed. It’ll increase your implementation and lifecycle costs. On top of this, whenever the underlying system you are integrating with changes in the future, you’ll need a mini project to cater for this change. This has the potential to become a very expensive and resource intensive exercise.
You should consider a solution that helps you avoid the running an IT project, and avoid integration, solution and implementation costs
You should consider a solution which provides following benefits
- It must provide you with substantial savings in costs, 50-60% or more.
- It shouldn’t require you to invest a lot of money upfront to implement it in terms of solution costs, integration costs, and implementation costs.