Customer needs and interactions with businesses have changed significantly with the world's digitalization. Today, customers expect everything fast-paced, whether it's paying for products, getting them delivered, or receiving responses from customer service.
Besides that, growing businesses are also facing more requests, which are not manageable with limited customer support representatives. However, there is one solution that can tackle customer expectations with businesses and support fast customer service, i.e., customer service automation. In this guide, we will uncover all about customer service automation and also present a few of the best software solutions to use in 2024. So, let's get started!
- What is Customer Service Automation?
- How to Automate Customer Service?
- Importance of Customer Service Automation
- Best Customer Service Automation Software in 2024
- Wrapping Up – It's Time to Automate Customer Service
What is Customer Service Automation?
Customer service automation refers to the use of automation software that can help resolve customer queries with no or limited involvement of human agents. For example, if a customer wants to know the status of their order or wants to file a return, the automation software can assist in this process without human involvement.
Besides automating support queries, the customer service automation software also provides self-service options for customers, such as a knowledge base, chatbots, etc. Moreover, some software solutions even support ticket routing and prioritization, customer feedback collections, reports/analytics, and more.
Today, there are many businesses that have integrated automated customer service into their workflows. This helps customer service teams save significant time and resources and work on more complex tasks.
How to Automate Customer Service?
To automate customer service, you need a dedicated software solution that can automate your existing workflows and minimize human activities. There are many tools that can serve the purpose. Later in this guide, we will uncover a few best choices.
Once you have picked the customer service automation software, the next step is to train the tool with your company data. This will empower the tool to answer the queries on its own based on the pre-trained data. Once trained, you have to integrate it into your existing system and processes. Lastly, you have to train the team on how to use it.
Once the tool becomes accessible to customers, you now have to monitor its performance, gather customer feedback, and improve its efficiency.
Importance of Customer Service Automation
Customer service automation is no longer considered a choice but a necessity in today's competitive business era. Why it is important to automate customer service is evident from the below points:
- 24/7 Availability: Your customer support and service becomes 24/7 available to customers.
- Fast Responses: Customers start getting instant responses to queries within seconds.
- Reduced Human Involvement: Many frequently asked queries are resolved autonomously, which reduces the workload on human agents.
- Reduced Cost: Automation saves significant operational costs due to reduced labor and faster resolution. Moreover, it increases customer satisfaction, which increases sales.
- Scalability: It is capable of handling more queries as customer requests grow.
- Personalized Responses: Customer service automation software with AI chatbot capabilities is capable of offering personalized responses to customers based on their preferences.
- Reports & Analytics: It provides insightful reports and analytics about interactions with customers for effective decision-making.
Besides the above advantages of customer service automation, it also provides a competitive advantage due to superior services and a high satisfaction rate. Therefore, all the above attributes and similar others make customer service automation a valuable investment for businesses in 2024.
Best Customer Service Automation Software in 2024
Since customer service automation is getting popular, the number of such software solutions is also increasing. However, not all software solutions are reliable and feature-rich. Therefore, we have below shortlisted a few best automated customer service software you can consider in 2024:
1. VOC AI Agent
One of the top picks for automated customer support in 2024 is VOC AI Agent. It is transforming customer service with its AI-powered chatbot. Its chatbot is trainable by your company data, such as website content, knowledge base, user guides, and similar others. Afterward, it can have human-like conversations with customers and help them resolve issues without any human element.
The key features of VOC AI Agent are as follows:
- AI-powered chatbot for human-like chats with customers
- Ultra-fast response to customer queries within 5 seconds
- Personalized and accurate responses
- Integrate as live chat on the website or on WhatsApp, Facebook, Shopify, Intercom, etc.
- Direct query to the human agent on the customer request.
- Insightful data analytics
In short, VOC AI Agent provides a modernized and advanced chatbot to automate customer service.
2. Front
Front is another customer service automation software that can easily manage support requests through a shared inbox for live chat, SMS, email, social, and more. This helps elevate the customer experience, as every service agent gets access to the same unified information. Moreover, it eases the process of assigning conversations to specific employees.
The key features of Front are as follows:
- Shared inbox
- Knowledge base
- Live chat
- Omnichannel
- Integrate with 100+ apps
- Workflow automation
- Insights and analytics
- Loop colleagues into the chat with simple @mentions
In short, Front is best if you want a shared inbox and offers customers the best and fastest service experience.
3. HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is a customer service management software that provides a seamless way to onboard, effective customer support, and enhanced customer relationships. It automates your omnichannel support strategy. Simply put, it links all customer service data and channels into a single platform for streamlined support, retention, and growth.
The key features of HubSpot Service Hub are as follows:
- Customer portal
- Shared inbox
- Knowledge base
- Live chat
- Playbooks
- Customer feedback surveys
- Conversation intelligence
- Service analytics
In short, HubSpot Service Hub is another reliable tool for customer service automation from wide aspects.
4. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is an AI-driven customer service software that offers a wide range of features to organize and prioritize ticketing. It provides a unified inbox to track and manage all support tickets. It also helps set deadlines for ticket response and automatically suggests ticket fields to categorize/prioritize/route.
The key features of Freshdesk are as follows:
- Team inbox
- Agent collision detection
- Ticket field suggester
- SLA management
- Custom ticket status
- Scenario automation
In short, Freshdesk is a powerful customer service automation software for ticketing. So, if you want to better organize ticketing, then Freshdesk is the tool to go with.
5. Zoho Desk
Last on our list of customer service automation tools is Zoho Desk. It also incorporates many features for enhanced customer service. It powers faster issue resolution and enhanced customer retention with the omnichannel ticketing system, Zia generative chatbot, self-service, and much more. Moreover, it empowers agents with a different set of tools.
The key features of Zoho Desk are as follows:
- Omnichannel ticketing system
- Zia generative chatbot
- Self-service
- Happiness ratings
- Analytics
- Advanced reply editor
In short, Zoho Desk is an all-in-one customer service tool to streamline service activities no matter the business size.
Wrapping Up – It's Time to Automate Customer Service
Customer service automation is the need of the hour to remain competitive and offer enhanced customer service that customers expect in 2024. Furthermore, it is the key to reducing operational costs and the workload of service agents. Therefore, you should opt for one of the above tools to automate customer service. Out of all of them, we highly recommend deploying VOC AI Agent, as its 24/7 automated chatbot capability will help you delight the customers and optimize your service operations significantly.
