5 Ways Businesses Can Save Costs by Automating Customer Support

Key Takeaways:

During the pandemic, 53% of customers have made calls/emails to the company as much as 9 times to address their concerns.

Automating customer support can reduce business costs by up to 40%.

88% of customers expect businesses to have a self-service channel.

“Hi there. How can I help you today? Please select the most relevant option for me to assist you with!”

You select the most suitable option and get directed to a page with the solution to your problem.

Still not satisfied? Go ahead and start a live chat session with a human agent ready to solve your complex issue.

You’ve already come across situations like these during a live chat session. That’s when you realize you’re greeted by an AI-assisted chatbot asking you to submit your contact details or directing you to another page.

As a business owner, you make tough decisions. Unanswered phone calls, emails, long wait times, and refunds impact your profitability.

We understand how difficult it is to run and manage a business during these times. However, automation answers your problems if you want to scale your business.

In customer service, every second counts. Any delay could be costly, causing your customers to switch to your competitors. Customers hate waiting, and the longer they wait, the more agitated they become.

Why should you consider automating customer service? What are the benefits of automation in customer support? How can automation help in reducing business costs?

Let’s find out.

What Is Customer Service Automation?

Customer service automation is a process that allows your customers to solve problems without interacting with other human beings at your company.

88% of customers expect companies to have a self-service portal such as a knowledge base, email support, and live chat.

Your customer support team needs to leverage the power of automation. It enables your agents to perform customer service tasks quickly without compromising quality.

What Are Examples of Automated Customer Service Systems?

• Website chatbots – Providing answers to most frequent requests and facilitating common transactions.
• IVR (Interactive Voice Response) – An automated receptionist that recognizes keystrokes and keywords and passes calls to the most qualified agent.
• Voicebots – The smart version of IVRs, with an AI layer to understand voice requests in natural language, instead of just by keywords or following a structured menu.
• Email automation – Sending emails with a basic template to customers whenever they perform an essential function.
• FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) – A database that has answers to the most common problems customers can encounter.
• Slack bots – Bots automatically forward queries on Slack to the most qualified person on the team.
• Facebook Messenger and social media automated responses – Canned responses on social media platforms with automated responses.

For decades, companies have been hiring customer service agents to help their customers to fix issues through emails and inbound/outbound phone calls.

As businesses grew, so did the customer service team. However, more hiring means additional business expenses. That’s where an automated customer service platform helps your business to scale without impacting customer loyalty.

33% of surveyed customers want to solve their problems in the shortest time possible. Why not provide them with automated support to resolve their queries?

How Does Automated Customer Service Software Help Businesses to Reduce Costs?

Automating customer service processes reduces business costs. It gives employees more time to work on productive tasks and provides excellent customer service. Here is how customer service automation can help your business.

1. Reduces Customer Service Costs

The average cost of hiring a customer support agent is $17.33 per hour. This can increase if you’re looking for an experienced person with excellent communication and project management skills.

While you need to have a Customer Service Department (CSD) with a support leader, hiring additional team members as you expand will only rack up your costs. This is where AI needs to blend in with your CSD. Not only will it lower your employee’s burden, but it will also make room for them to focus on the most urgent and complex customer queries.

McKinsey reports that businesses can save up to 40% in costs when automating their customer service channels.

2. Boosts Customer Satisfaction

You can boost satisfaction rates with customer service automation tools rather than relying on human agents for every query. By providing 24/7 availability, you show how much you value your customers.

According to a study by NBC, 78% of consumers have contacted a company several times to address a single concern. This further shows the importance of automation in customer support.

An outstanding customer experience is when your self-service resources reduce interaction with your support team and allow your customers to find answers on their own in the quickest possible way.

3. Optimizes Customer Lifetime Value

You must study and analyze the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to get a bigger picture of your company. It is a number that predicts the total value of the customer over a given period of their time with you.

Your business needs to develop long-term, healthy relationships with customers.

Adobe states that 40% of US business revenue for small and medium businesses comes from 8% of repeat customers. The rest, 60%, is from 92% of new customers.

This stark comparison should be enough to illustrate the dire need to optimize the customer experience and help your customers in every step of their journey.

You must convert one-time buyers into repeat customers of your products or services. Leverage email and chatbot automation whenever a user signs up or buys from you. Keep on providing excellent services through automation; eventually, they will become repeat buyers.

4. Affordable Support Availability Beyond Business Hours

As a business owner, providing customer support 24/7 is vital to your success. However, not every business is in a position to hire additional staff to cover off-business hours. This lack of automation increases costs and limits support during regular operating hours.

You need to provide customer service beyond business hours, which means being available round the clock.

When you automate customer service, you can direct customers without human intervention when your support is unavailable. This is especially true if you’re an online business and people use your products/services in various time zones.

Instead of exiting your website, bots can answer your customers’ queries, and if the request is too complex, collect Names and Emails for your support team to handle the cases to them. Your support team can then reach out to these leads during business hours and assist them regarding your products/services.

5. Reduces Turnover Among the Support Team

A customer support agent is a multitasker, juggling multiple windows, screens, and systems. Parts of their job are repetitive and boring, such as collecting user information and directing customers to the most qualified person on the team or providing answers to simple questions.

Let a chatbot automate this task, reduce your employees’ burden, and give them room for growth in implementing their skills and abilities.

Integrating customer relationship management software can significantly improve the support team’s productivity. All of this has an impact on the turnover rate. When you empower your team with the right AI tools, you will notice a dramatic drop in your staff turnover rate.

How to Implement Automated Customer Support

When implementing an automated system, it is critical to identify areas requiring improvement and select the most appropriate customer service automation software.

For example, automating emails should be your priority if you receive more emails than calls.

If you are seeing steady growth in targeted traffic but no conversions, it might be because of poor chat support on your website. In this case, implement a conversational AI chatbot to reduce wait times and cater to as many leads as possible.

The best approach to automate customer service is to use an omnichannel solution that allows you to reach your customers using messenger chatbots, smart ticketing, and live chat solutions.

Ready to Automate Your Customer Support?

Are you ready to leverage the powers of automation?

Go ahead and sign up for a no-credit-card-required 14-day free trial of our customer interaction platform and see how easy it is to scale your business and help your customers at the speed of thought!

Decide what works best for you at each step of the customer journey, and let our team help you pick the right solutions.

Inbenta is a world leader in providing AI solutions to speed up customer support, helping your business provide outstanding customer experiences.

You can mix and match our AI modules with a fantastic feedback generation system to create an engaging and streamlined customer service process.

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