How to Automate Aspects of Your Customer Service

Customer service is undoubtedly one of the most important components of modern business. Your reputation travels and, with word of mouth still being a primary force driving sales, the experience you provide can mean the difference between success and failure.

Customers demand timely, transparent, and helpful support if they are to remain loyal to your organisation. And if you aren’t able to create an efficient and effective process, you’re going to struggle to deliver this at scale.

Luckily, there are ways of automating repetitive aspects of your customer service that retain the quality of that experience. By freeing up resources, though, your teams are able to redeploy their attention towards other aspects of the experience that can improve the customer experience as a whole.

Here are a few of the potential solutions that you should be considering:

Live Chat Function

You want to capture customers at the exact moment they’re considering your services.

A live chat service, visible as your customers browse your website, gives them a way to engage with you directly and ask questions in real-time.

You can automate a lot of this by setting up a sophisticated FAQ wiki or a chatbot that deals with common questions.

Many modern live chat solutions incorporate AI to learn answers to common questions, freeing up staff resources to deal with more urgent enquiries.

CRM Integrations

Great customer service begins and ends with the customer support team. Investing in tools that enable your team to excel is a necessary step, but can be as simple as providing them with deeper context for each call that comes through.

Automating data collection when it comes to your customers, their level of satisfaction, their position in your sales funnel and recordings of their calls can provide such context.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software collects and analyses all the information that stems from client interactions. By integrating a CRM with your business phone system, you’ll get call statistics and recordings right alongside each customer entry.

Self-Service Information

By creating high-quality resources for customers to answer their own questions, you empower your support team to deal with common queries more quickly - and for fewer of them to be posed in the first place.

With a combination of articles, FAQs and guides, customers can answer their own questions at any time - without impacting staff resources.

Out of Hours Time Diaries

There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than phoning into a business and not getting through to anyone. So, it’s important that you set up your call routes carefully to avoid this happening.

If you set up out of hours time diaries, you can pre-program specific call routes that trigger based on the day and time that a call comes in.

For example, if a salesperson happens to work flexitime and is out of the office from 3 pm, you might want their calls after that time to be re-routed to another person.

By creating these contextual call routes, you will never miss calls unnecessarily and you can still offer work-life balance to your staff.

Queue Notices

In most cases, customer complaints come from mismatched expectations, rather than outright mistakes. So, when a client calls your organisation, use queue notices to manage those expectations.

Queue notices are simple audio alerts that keep your customers informed as to, for example, their position in the call queue and their expected wait time.

These messages can be customised, making it easier for you to provide an automated on-brand experience.

Conclusion

Each of these strategies can automate part of the customer service process without negatively impacting the quality of the customer experience.

This allows you to spend your time and resources efficiently as you seek to craft a wonderful client experience.

To implement out-of-hours time diaries, queue notices and other efficiency-boosting automation processes to your business phone system, you’ll need to move to a VoIP provider that offers such features.

With Yay.com's fully customisable VoIP phone service, you can effortlessly craft an efficient, pleasing caller experience for your customers.

Get in touch today and let’s see how we can help you take your customer service to the next level.