The concept of automated customer service isn’t always well received, and perhaps there’s a reason for this. Most people would rather speak to a human being when they call someone for support, and they cringe when they get fobbed off with an automated email that tries to include some personalization.
There’s no denying that artificial intelligence and automation can’t replace a real person behind a live chat, phone call or help desk. No matter how much technology has progressed, we are still a long way from creating automated bots that match a human’s capacity to react, judge, and perceive complex issues, dealing with them in the most helpful and caring way.
However, to provide exceptional customer service – automation is sometimes necessary. In many cases, it’s impossible to give a customer one-on-one attention, which is why automation is useful, providing a helpful solution to the customer.
Nevertheless, it’s important automation is used properly. Most people wrongly assume that automating customer service means minimizing or replacing human interaction, but that’s untrue.
Instead, we’ll explore how you can automate your helpdesk to provide stellar customer service:
Assign Tickets Automatically
Do you remember the old days when a “gatekeeper” made sure the right customer support issues were sent to the right person? Well, these days are long gone.
Today, with ticket automation and customer support software, triggers enable the system to send a ticket through a customer portal or email to a specific group of agents or an individual representative.
For example, the training group may receive all of the tickets that include “how” in the title because it’s clear the customer needs help carrying out a task.
Send Reminders to Customers
It isn’t just your support team that’s busy; your customers are too. Therefore, you can use automation in your customer service software to create a trigger for your customers. This will tell a client you’re waiting for their response by sending an automatic email after a certain time. This will remind them what they need to do and demonstrate that you haven’t forgotten about them.
You never know, the customer may have forgotten that they need to respond, or they may have missed the last email you sent. Just write a friendly, encouraging message to get your customer to respond.
Close Tickets Automatically
Even after you’ve sent out this reminder, the customer might not respond. So, instead of leaving their ticket open, it’s easy and more effective to create a trigger that will close these types of tickets after a certain period.
For example, if a ticket hasn’t been modified for 20 working days, a company may automatically close the access as nothing is happening with the customer’s case. This helps to minimize the queues of tickets you have in your system, providing you with an accurate figure of how many keys you have left to deal with.
Having accurate data regarding ticket volume is crucial because if it starts to rise, you know you need to get staff in to cover the additional workload.
Create Alerts for Urgent Tickets
Many of the tickets you receive won’t require a response immediately. However, you must respond to urgent tickets quickly because this could make or break your business deal.
Using ticket automation, you can email the request to individual staff members, especially if the request has been labelled as “urgent”.
Some tickets can’t be left until your business opens, so always ensure these types of visas are looked at immediately to keep these customers happy.
Use Automation Out of Hours
If your business isn’t open 24/7, you might not be able to support tickets at all times of the day. Therefore, you can use your help desk software to create automated responses for the different types of tickets you’re likely to get through.
For example, if the ticket is non-urgent, you could send an automated email reminding the customer of your opening hours before telling them they’ll receive a response from you within the next day or two. This gives the customer an approximate timeframe to know when to expect their issue to be resolved.
To conclude, these are just a few ways to automate your help desk to save your business time and money while keeping your customers satisfied!
