How to Deliver Automated Customer Service (Without Losing the Personal Touch)

How to Deliver Automated Customer Service (Without Losing the Personal Touch)

It’s essential to offer the best customer service possible, but it’s nearly impossible to do this if you run a small business and you’re trying to grow. As you gain more customers, you’ll need to broaden your customer service capabilities. Automation offers a way to do this while you scale. It’s not just labor-saving for you, but it also ensures that every customer gets their needs met. 

Hire a Chatbot

One option is to add a 24/7 chatbot to your website. You might have seen this before. You visit a website and an avatar appears, asking, “Can I help you with anything?”

Your chatbot is available 24/7 to reply to your customers in real time. It’s loaded with data about your company, so it can offer reliable and accurate information related to most customer inquiries. And if someone wants to talk to a human being, they can contact you through the regular channels.  

Site Help with Widgets

Another automation option is to install widgets on your website that personalize the experience for each visitor. These programs can analyze visitor behavior and offer customized content suggestions. This is especially useful for an ecommerce site, where customers can receive helpful product suggestions based on their preferences and shopping history. 

Cut Down Reply Time with Templates

One way to save time and improve consistency is to use templates for common communications and replies. For example, if you have a follow-up email you send to customers post-purchase, you can automate this so you don’t have to send manually each time. Personalization options help make the recipient feel special, even though you’re using a template and email software program to communicate.

Manage Your Customer Relations

A customer relationship management (CRM) program can help you manage customer data through automation. It can also help with things like autocompleting webforms. It saves information about your customers, such as address and email. This saves users the trouble of entering this information manually each time it’s required. 

Automate Ticket Assignment

Automated ticket assignment is a program that directs customer inquiries by topic area. Rather than contacting you and then having to be routed to the appropriate representative, ticket assignment uses keywords and other triggers to send customers to the right person or department. This cuts down on response time and improves customer service by eliminating one step. 

Best Practices for Customer Service Automation

Automation can vastly improve your customer service, but you don’t want to lose the personal touch. To do it well, here are some best practices to follow:

• Augment, don’t replace. Keep your focus on improving customer service, not solely on reducing your workload.
• Test everything you’re considering using before you implement. Make sure it’s a seamless experience and an improvement.
• Choose simple solutions first so that it’s easier for you and your customers. 

Do you want to know more about improving customer service to grow your business? Check out my course, [COURSE NAME], which teaches you the essentials.

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