Article • 4 min read
How to: Deliver premium customer experiences with automation all around the globe
By Daniel Bailey, Regional VP North West Europe, Zendesk
Last updated April 15, 2020
Consumers’ expectations have been rising in the past two decades and even more recently, as eCommerce goes global and technology keeps evolving and becoming more accessible to everyone. When your customers reach out, they’ve come to expect an instant response that says “we’re here for you”. When they want information, it’s expected to be accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible. Essentially, they’ve come to expect efficiency during support interactions, and it’s even better when they can do it on their own, as they come away feeling empowered.
At this challenging time, with the COVID-19 pandemic, people are adjusting to a new reality, and it is only normal to see customers’ behaviour changing. As consumers become more accustomed to shopping online and reaching out to brands remotely, they expect to still have access to a good level of service and most of all, know brands have their backs. Now more than ever, your customer experience teams need to have the right tools in place to cope with the spike in requests that global markets are facing- for example the week of 15-22 March saw a 20% increase in global tickets compared to the same period last year.
As a result, businesses are rising to meet that expectation and are more mindful of their offerings. They want to delight their customers every time they interact with the brand. But how can automation help your company?
What are automation tools?
Customer service automation tools are, put simply, a method of customer support that is provided by an automated system such as a help centre searches, chatbot or other artificial intelligence- driven technologies. While machine learning (ML) and deep learning can seem overwhelming to understand, the main takeaway is that AI-enhanced automation tools are designed to increase agent productivity. They do so by enabling faster resolution times and better process handling. This ultimately leads to greater customer satisfaction.
What are customer service bots?
ML-powered bots are a technology that delivers interactive answers to customer questions in real-time. Companies provide the bot with pre-written instructions for the most common questions customers have, and the bot serves up answers in a conversational format.
How do they work?
When a customer contacts your business, these bots can step in to help — scanning the text to understand what your customer needs. They suggest relevant content articles to address the issue at hand.
Answer Bot, for example, uses its powerful deep learning model to find the most relevant articles and suggest them to your customer. A lot of questions are simple, repetitive enquiries that automation is perfect for. Dollar Shave Club, for example, found that Answer Bot could automatically answer 12-16% of queries, and when you handle millions of queries in a year, that’s a big impact.
The customer reviews the articles, and if an answer is found, they can mark their question as answered. The ticket is now solved. If a customer still needs help, their question would be answered by an agent. In Answer Bot’s case, feedback is automatically captured so you can track the impact on your business, identify patterns of articles that aren’t fitting the bill and offer context to agents who pick up the conversation.
The best customer service bots are continually evolving, quick learners, coping with colloquial enquiries, complex product names, and more languages (we’ve just added 11) as eCommerce goes global. Roblox, for example, can use Answer Bot to respond to requests on their game currency, “Robux”, in languages ranging from Russian and Polish to Spanish and Italian. Roblox has seen a significant increase in traffic on their platform recently, and they are adding Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese to their offerings.
AI-powered customer service bots are an easy way to take your self-service strategy to the next level. These helpful little bots are available 24/7/365, they speak loads of languages, and they can help free up your human agents to focus on solving problems that require the human touch.
The human touch
By automatically resolving simple repetitive questions, Answer Bot increases agent productivity and enables your company to focus on resolving more complex tickets and building better customer experiences.
Some businesses may feel initial discomfort at the idea of replacing human interactions with conversations powered by ML-powered bots. But chatbots aren’t about removing human agents from the equation. They’re meant to be deployed in specific scenarios where they provide benefits to your agents and customers alike, helping agents spend less time on repetitive questions and focus on more complex queries.
That’s good for your agent morale. No one enjoys spending the day providing tedious cut-and-paste style answers. In fact, 79% of customer service agents say that when their responsibilities are focused on handling complex issues it improves their skills, and 72% believe it makes them more valuable to the company. At Spartan Race, they found implementing Answer Bot allowed for an additional three hours of chat coverage per day by service agents.
Remember: happy agents mean happy customers, and vice versa. Artificial intelligence and automation for customer service is successful when it benefits both sides.
Answer Bot is now available in a total of 17 languages including Arabic, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Thai.
