Customer Service Automation
Summary
Customer Service automation is a combination of analytics, business applications development, and AI. Customer service automation is commonly achieved via the customization of complex Saas products rather than building from scratch. The end goal is typically to:
01. Palatably direct a majority of customers to self-help resources for trivial or common issues
02. Lower the effort/cost of Customer Service agents solving more complex issues
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Process
Overview
Firstly, the frequency of different types of customer service requests must be known, the quality of resolutions, as well as a measure of the effort currently required to solve them. If this is not known, some tooling and process adjustments can be implemented to begin logging this information accurately.
Assessment
Next, for each major category of customer service request, it should be identified whether a self-help method exists for solving this issue, if easy it is to use, and what proportion of customers should be required to use this method. This assessment should also include potential impact on customer satisfaction.
Options emerging from each assessment could include:
a. Asking the engineering/product team for more powerful self-help tooling
b. Providing tooling (possibly requiring AI) to the customer service agents to reduce resolution effort required
Ex: automatically generate a customer-specific letter for the agent to review, rather than have each document written from scratch
c. Introducing AI, often via chatbot, to direct customers to self-help tools
d. Asking the product/engineering team to adjust user interfaces to allow for easier discovery of self-help tools
Critical Final Step
The critical final step is comprehensive reporting to continuously assess where customers are satisfied, where they are frustrated, and ultimately the effect of the Customer Service Department’s practices on customer churn.