However, the bad news is overdone automation will eliminate your brand personality. Human interaction and emotion are always necessary for any eCommerce business to stay in the back of customer’s mind.
So the question is, how much “automation” or “personalization” will be too much? Let’s find out the answer to this question as well as find a balance for both.
How to deliver a human-friendly AND automated customer support?
1. Be customer centric at any automated process
Of course customer service is not a predictable standardized set of rules. It’s still more about the interactions between individuals and individuals. But how about adding more advantages to your superhero customer service team? That’s when automation sets in.
The principle of customer service is being customer centric. That means putting customers on top is always the first priority. Being customer centric in an automated customer service is to save the human effort as well as have more free time for your team and at the same time, with the free time you have, you can invest into delivering better customer experience. So how do you borrow the strength of automation to foster the quality of customer service?
The solution is to personalize each automated process in customer service.
For live chat, a thoughtful customized chat window or a proactive chat invitation appeared for people who are visiting your website, or, how your agents save the chat scripts for the next time customers visit the website… is one of the most effective methods to engage customers and shorten the time they find answers on your site.
Smart live chat software like Subiz can totally nail both the “automation” and “humanization” aspects for your live chat support.
For email or ticket support, for example, auto-filling the customer’s name in the response with the detailed information about customer’s questions saves time for both customers and support agents to keep track of the questions. Plus, it adds more personal experience and makes it feel like you know each other well.
Similarly, phone support can be better customer-centric with both automated response and live conversation. After an automated welcome with the brief and focused guidelines, a live person on the line should be available if customers want more explanation.
If your customer service is dedicated, then finding the fastest and most customer-friendly solutions for customers will help them escape an experience with automated customer support hell yet get what they want quickly.
2. Utilize data for your website’s personalization
Subiz saves chat transcripts with customer’s data for your later use
Collecting data is a part of customer service and often done with the help of softwares or Customer Relation Management tools. eCommerce businesses collect data for one solid purpose: to understand their buyers and build relationship with them to make them loyal advocates. That’s the best way to maximize one business’s return of investments.
However let’s skip the ROI part this time. We’re looking for a way to infuse the data – result from automated processes into your customer service on your website.
This is how it works:
Based on the analytics of how many time people visit your websites or which products get their attention the most, you can display a timely message to invite them to a chat to learn more about the product. Or, by understanding which deals attract more people to signup, you can display a newsletter signup form to invite people to stay updated for the next ones. The follow-up emails will be your weapon to nurture customers who have got hooked up to you.
You can use collected data from live chat softwares, email or helpdesk support as well to polish your customer service with the most popular problems customer encounter, how to solve these problems and qualify the performance of support agents via customer’s review. This task will be done effortlessly via powerful customer support tools – like Subiz live chat service (did I mention that there’s a free trial?) or MailChimp or GetResponse email service.
As you can see, utilizing data from automated tools will enhance customer’s personal experience on your site – it’s when you can harmonize customer engagement in a meaningful and timely-way.
3. Make everything consistent, complete and contextual
Face it! No matter how expensive or powerful tools or softwares you use to equip customer service, these tools and softwares alone can’t make a consistent, complete and contextual customer service for customers.
By make things consistent, I mean that all support channels you listed on your site must deliver the same experience for site’s users. It’s like sticking your live chat support closely to the FAQs and email support. For example, from live chat’s saved questions, your most asked question library can be updated regularly and through email you send customers the follow-up email for their support query.
A complete automated and personalized customer service means that no matter what channel customers use to ask for help, you will have them served seamlessly. You have to make sure that customers won’t be kicked from one department to another to get the answer for a simple question.
And lastly for being contextual, it means that the solution and support your customers get is measured and customized for them uniquely. Use your customer’s data wisely. Use it.
4. Don’t just rely solely on automated or personalized service!
After all, behind any automated system is a human being – the operator of that system. The mantra for customer service to be successful is the balance use of machine and human to deliver a better user experience. With automated service, you won’t have to pay too much on human staff or scream at your support agents for being overloaded with support queries. And with a personalized customer service, you hold the key, which opens the door to you customer’s heart.
Automate the process and be human – that’s all.
Do you agree? Speak your thoughts here and let’s discuss further.
