Revolutionizing Customer Support: The Power and Limitations of Automation
Exceptional customer support is the lifeblood of any successful business. It not only fosters customer loyalty but also sets the tone for your brand’s image. However, if we’re being honest, most of us have experienced moments of frustration dealing with customer support. The empathy is there, but efficiency often lags behind. Long wait times, transfers from one agent to another, and delayed responses to urgent issues can be infuriating.
To address these challenges and ensure 24/7 support, many businesses have turned to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate their customer service processes. These automated systems promise round-the-clock availability and instant responses to customer inquiries. They leverage cutting-edge AI and ML models to understand customer queries and generate appropriate responses. However, this automation comes at the cost of a personal touch, as it lacks the ability to provide a tailored solution to each customer.
In this article, we’ll explore the advantages and drawbacks of automated customer support compared to traditional methods. We’ll delve into the world of automated support systems, providing examples and highlighting the technological advancements in this field.
Examples of Automated Support Services
With the advancement of technology, many businesses have started moving towards automated support services using a variety of different tools and techniques. Some of these methods through which businesses are implementing automated support services are listed below:
- Chatbots
These can be considered one of the most renowned forms of automated support. A chatbot basically functions using a trained Machine Learning model that is trained based on the customer’s queries and their workflow patterns on a specific website. They’re designed to learn the user’s intentions and requested issues by learning specific intended words. Using this data, they’re able to generate the perfect timely response to a customer’s query.
For example, if we’re to enter I want to travel to Istanbul, so based on these words it would dissect your query one by one, and it would understand your intention by looking at the word travel and then Istanbul. The chatbot would then provide you with information on the location or give you the travel routes for the destination depending upon the website’s main business.
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
IVR system is basically the computer-generated voice note that you must have heard plenty of times when you call your bank support and then it guides you on which keys to press on your dial pad to perform a specific function. These systems are programmed in such a way that they can complete the whole operation by themselves or can guide you to a human agent, who then listens to your query.
Some of the widely known examples of Interactive Voice Response systems are check my account balance, change my atm pin, check my order status, and so on.
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Another way of automating your current services or simplifying them is by documenting all the frequently asked user questions and then posting them on your site or on any platform that you use for your business. These questions can be generated by analyzing the query patterns of your customers. By doing this, you will be able to answer most of your customer’s basic queries without the need for a customer support agent.
Pros and Cons of Automated Customer Service
As discussed earlier both automated customer service and human-based support systems have their pros and cons, but in the end, it comes down to your business requirement. Let’s look into the benefits and disadvantages of automated customer service to give you a better perspective of these systems:
Pros of Automated Customer Service
- Efficient and Faster: Automated services provide an immediate and accurate response to the customer’s queries depending on the data it utilizes. Unlike customer support agents, these systems don’t make you wait or go through the same loops to get your answers.
- 24/7 availability: By using a chatbot or by setting custom messages and email responses, you develop an automated 24/7 response to your customer’s queries. This will help your customers any time they need an answer to their problems.
- Reduces cost: Automating the support service reduces the number of support agents you need to tackle customer’s queries. So, by utilizing an automated process you would only need to hire support persons for the mandatory tasks.
Cons of Automated Customer Service
- Not a human: Automated system support can’t relate to the human sympathy level, and the responses generated or the way of handling a query can’t be personal.
- Can’t solve complex problems: AI has come a long way and automated services such as Chatbots are now way smarter than before but still, they can’t diagnose a problem the way we humans solve it.
- Not the solution: I think we can all agree up till this point that an automated system coupled with human assistance works as the best solution. So, in short, automated services will make it easier for you but you need to use them at the right time with the right requirements.
Conclusion:
We can keep comparing both solutions but in the end, we can agree on one thing, technology such as automation tools work best with the humans supervising them. Integrating such systems would make your business more efficient and customer friendly. Utilizing the automated systems effectively will allow your customer agents to fully use their time on issues that actually need them, while the automated services would tackle repetitive annoying tasks.
So, if you want to automate your business and use your customer agents for more important tasks, now would be the best time to start. I hope today’s article had all the information you needed to understand what is automated customer service and how it can help you. If you have any queries or if you want to get back to us you can contact us through our Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Stay tuned for more tech blogs.