In today’s economic landscape, it’s become increasingly vital for businesses to find an advantage that will make them stand out from the competition. These unique selling points will make customers choose your products and services over your competitors.
This idea is especially important for small business owners. Since the pandemic changed how businesses do their work, it’s become crystal clear that being approachable online is just as, if not more, important as your physical location. Properly addressing your customers’ needs ensures that their patronage stays with you.
One of the ways you can achieve this is by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into your business. AI in customer service is one of the most common applications of this technology, and there are several ways you can transform how you interact with your clients. This piece will provide concrete ways in which these applications can bolster your customer service efforts.
Defining Automated Customer Service
Anyone who sees “automated customer service” may immediately know what it does: it’s a specific type of customer support operated by machines, more specifically AI. This type of support allows a company to respond to a client’s inquiries at any time of the day.
One of the most popular faces of automated customer service is chatbots. Plenty of websites and pages across social media channels utilize a chatbot that interacts with customers and prospects for them.
While the technology is less than a decade old, it’s quickly become an essential asset for a customer service department’s retention strategy. At least 35% of the leading industry voices believe that companies should seriously invest in some form of customer service automation.
5 Benefits Small Businesses Get from Customer Support Automation
- Responds to more customers with fewer resources
One of the biggest obstacles many customer service teams face is the limitation of the human body. People can only work at full efficiency for eight to ten hours, but a customer can have a specific question about your product or service at unpredictable times.
While hiring people to handle your customer service needs round-the-clock can solve the matter, the expenses you can incur may not make it worthwhile.
Integrating automation into your customer service efforts will save you more than a couple of hundred dollars since you don’t have to maintain a huge team for support. Moreover, you get excellent returns since these efforts help push customers towards your desired outcome.
- Offers your customers the opportunity to multitask
Customer service handled by a human being is usually ideal since your customer will get a direct and concise solution to their issues from a knowledgeable team member. However, such requires the caller’s full attention, which is increasingly becoming a luxury to ask for in the modern context.
Automated customer service efforts allow your clients to do other tasks while bringing up their concerns to you. They can focus on their remote work or run their errands without worry since they can check the answer to their problems.
- Less room for human error
One of the pitfalls of human customer service is that a communication breakdown can easily lead to misunderstandings that can ruin the customer’s perception of your company. Nowadays, a single negative online review can adversely impact your company in multiple ways.
Since you will be programming how the conversation goes, you will be able to address almost everything. The only time an actual human being would take over the conversation is when all options have been exhausted and the AI couldn’t address the concern.
- Learn about your customers through the metrics
Automated customer service solutions won’t only provide value to the customers; they would also provide your business with much-needed information that could help improve your services.
The best automated customer support software can identify the strong points of your automated and manual customer service tactics, which can help improve how your business is run. Customer feedback that can be made after interacting with the software will also give you a clue about its performance.
- Lessen the load on your customer service team
Customer support is an important but tiring job that will test the limits of people. If your small business only has one or two people interacting with customers, leaving them to their own devices will only result in burnout and poor performance.
Automating your customer service ensures that your personnel won’t be swamped consistently with chat requests from customers who want to learn more about your products and services. Their mental health will be better, which translates to better performance at work.
Improve Your Customer Interactions with Automation
Customer service is critical to a company’s success when marketing efforts fail to relay important and relevant information about your brand. Integrating automation into your customer support workflow ensures that your efforts are as successful as possible. Quality customer service equates to happy customers, and these happy customers can become avid ambassadors for your brand.
Get automated customer service programs for your company and feel the difference inefficiency.