A good business requires happy customers, which in turn needs you to provide flawless customer service. The principle of any business depends upon customer’s feedback. According to a study, 89 percent of small and big companies struggle to contest based on good customer service. Nowadays, a company not only competes on product and price but also on good customer service. After all, satisfied customers directly impact to the growth and goodwill of the business. This is where the need for automating customer service becomes essential.
Importance of automation for small business
In the modern day digital world, small businesses have already understood the demand and benefits of customer service automation. Nevertheless, due to the lack of knowledge on customer service management (CMS), businesses often have to face a real-time challenge.
Indeed, automation tools are just not for large enterprises. Instead, they are mandatory for small businesses as well to make the processes and products simple and affordable. Owing to the continuously evolving innovations in the technological domain, even small businesses can easily automate their tedious work and concentrate on strategic initiatives that will help them develop their business. A combination of staff capability and automation tools will save a lot of time, thereby amplifying growth. This will also affect their productivity in a positive sense.
Why is automating customer service necessary?
Let us understand the practice of automating customer service, its working, and the manner in which it is beneficial to small businesses. In simple words, automated customer service refers to using Artificial Technology AI instead of a human to answer the standard queries of customers. Let us understand it in this way-
- You call a customer help desk of a mobile phone company to check the balance and, instead of talking to a customer representative; you hear a voice call to type a number to check the balance.
- You want to buy a washing machine but need more clarification on its specification. Therefore, instead of calling somebody you directly check the FAQ’s page of the company’s site.
- You have an issue with an electronic product you bought. You go to the company site to shoot a complaint on its help desk. As you click on customer support, a chat box appears on the corner of your screen asking to provide you immediate help.
AI and customer service reps team up to provide 365 days 24 * 7 services to the customers. The representative checks the system and finds all the basic troubleshooting queries. Without making any further delay, the representative approaches the solution to the customer.
Benefits of Automating customer service for Small Businesses
Automation of customer services can ensure numerous benefits for business. While many of these benefits are up for grab by all types of business, several advantages are unique for small businesses only. Here is an insight to prominent of these plus points:
1. Productive
Automation helps to speed up work and prevents repetition in work. This in turn increases productivity.
2. Enhanced Data Analysis
It enables you to discover more insights of the business and analyze data in a quick span of time. As obvious, tracking your business performance manually is a cumbersome task.
3. Visibility
Information needs to be accessible in all the departments to have that transparency in business. The automation tools make it simple to identify the source of issues and refine process accordingly.
4. Communication
Automation tools can simply track sales or current status of the project. After that, they can update the team on the progress and performance. This makes it easier for the business to grow.
Which automation tools are the best to provide customer service?
Many tools available in the market help you appreciably in automating customer service. Here is a quick look at some of them:
Live Chat Box
Live chats through communication apps help customers to interact with companies in real-time. These chat boxes are a great substitute for phones and emails. They work according to the data taken from past interactions, queries, problems of customers and offer solutions to similar types of questions.
Social Media
Not surprisingly, social media apps are among the most common and approachable tools to automating customer service nowadays. Apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Whatsapp help small businesses to monitor the reviews and feedback of their brand, which helps them to manage and resolve any sort of issue at the earliest.
Knowledge Management Tools
These tools enable the customers the access to know the company’s history, parent companies, and their field expertise. This enables the customer to build trust and choose the product accordingly. If you have ever logged in to the company’s FAQs or tutorial, you have used the knowledge management tools.
Customer Relationship Management CRM
This integrated data-driven tool helps to manage and maintain customer relationships, track marketing, and sales leads of the business, thus automating customer service appreciably.
Canned Resources
This refers to a pre-set message to reply on every ticket that affirms to customers. The service team works to resolve and to get back soon.
These automation tools have been around now for a long time and are immensely popular among the customers and businesses alike. It is imperative for small businesses to benefit from these tools as they coordinate marketing messages and deliver across several channels on a given schedule.
Automation solutions are nowadays an integrated part of the CRM systems. While the automation platform pulls adequate data from CRM, the CRM tool possesses e-mail marketing capabilities that help the companies to target existing customers.
Takeaway
Automated technologies can deliver fast and advanced service over conventional customer service. Digitization of customer service speeds up the resolution of issues, thereby improving service customer satisfaction. Automating customer service can reduce the extra workload of reps, resources and money, thus allowing small businesses to focus more on business growth. They can build and serve A-class customer services with ease. Last but not the least; it is easy to customize the automated customer service tools from simple to complex, depending upon the business and its work profile.