The concept of automated customer service isn’t always well received, and perhaps there’s a reason for this. The majority of people would rather speak to a human being when they call someone for support, and they cringe when they get fobbed off with an automated email that tries to include some personalization.
There’s no denying that artificial intelligence and automation can’t replace a real person who’s behind a live chat, phone call or help desk. No matter how much technology has progressed, we are still a long way from creating automated bots that match a human’s capacity to react, judge, and perceive complex issues, dealing with them in the most helpful and caring way.
However, in order to provide exceptional customer service – automation is sometimes necessary. In a lot of cases, it’s impossible to give a customer one-on-one attention, which is why automation comes in useful, providing a helpful solution to the customer.
Nevertheless, it’s important automation is used properly. Most people wrongly assume that automating customer service means minimizing or replacing human interaction, but that’s not the case at all.
Instead, we’ll explore how you can automate your helpdesk to provide stellar customer service:
Assign Tickets Automatically
Do you remember the old days when there was a “gatekeeper” who made sure the right customer support issues were sent to the right person? Well, these days are long gone.
Today, with ticket automation and customer support software, triggers enable the system to send a ticket that’s come through a customer portal or email to a specific group of agents or an individual representative.
For example, the training group may receive all of the tickets that include “how” in the title, because it’s clear the customer needs help carrying out a task.
Send Reminders to Customers
It isn’t just your support team who’s busy because your customers are too. Therefore, you can use automation in your customer service software to create a trigger for your customers. This will tell a client you’re waiting for their response by sending an automatic email after a certain amount of time. This will remind them what they need to do, and will also demonstrate that you haven’t forgotten about them.
You never know, the customer may have forgotten that they need to respond, or they may have missed the last email you sent. Just be sure to write a friendly, encouraging message that will get your customer to respond.
Close Tickets Automatically
Even after you’ve sent out this reminder, the customer might not respond. So, instead of leaving their ticket open, it’s easy and more effective to create a trigger that will close these types of tickets after a certain period of time.
For example, if a ticket hasn’t been modified for 20 working days, a company may automatically close the ticket as it’s clear nothing is happening with the customer’s case. This helps to minimize the queues of tickets you have in your system, providing you with an accurate figure as to how many tickets you have left to deal with.
Having accurate data when it comes to ticket volume is crucial because if it starts to rise, you know you need to get staff in to cover the additional workload.
Create Alerts for Urgent Tickets
A lot of the tickets you receive won’t require a response straight away. However, it’s vital you’re responding to urgent tickets as quickly as possible because this could make or break your business deal.
Using ticket automation, you can forward the request to individual staff members in an email, especially if the request has been labeled as “urgent”.
Some tickets can’t be left until your business opens, so always make sure these types of tickets are looked at immediately, so you’re keeping these customers happy.
Use Automation Out of Hours
If your business isn’t open 24/7, you might not be able to support tickets at all times of the day. Therefore, you can use your help desk software to create automated responses for the different types of tickets you’re likely to get through.
For example, if the ticket is of a non-urgent nature, you could send an automated email that reminds the customer of your opening hours, before telling them that they’ll receive a response from you within the next day or two. This gives the customer an approximate timeframe, so they know when to expect their issue to be resolved.
To conclude, these are just a few of the ways you can automate your help desk to save your business time and money while keeping your customers satisfied in the process!
