Everything is going digital, including customer service. Experts predict that within five years, chatbots will become the primary customer service channel for one in four companies. Concurrently, solid foundations of customer data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are already turning into key areas of investment in the race for a better customer journey.
To understand the role of these tools in shaping the customer journey, let’s dive into the pros and cons of customer service automation — and how human-in-the-loop automation delivers unbeatable customer experiences.
What is customer service automation?
Customer service automation refers to various customer service tools and systems that leverage automated technology to provide customer support, reducing the need for direct human intervention. The technology is so ubiquitous that you likely interact with it multiple times a month, as many organizations employ it to augment their human labor force. Some types of customer service automation include:
Interactive Voice Response (IVR): You dial your credit card company to dispute a charge, but you’re first greeted with automated messages intended to answer your query or route you to a customer support agent — that’s IVR. Typically found in call centers, IVR tries to resolve customer issues on its own or connect them with a human team member who can.
Automated chatbots: Many company websites now have chatbots that allow customers to send a direct message to a brand representative. Sometimes, the person on the other end of the chat isn’t a person at all, but a fully automated AI program that can interpret customer inquiries and respond accordingly. Automated chatbots recognize and attempt to simulate human conversation through text chats or voice commands, with the purpose of providing real-time customer support for simpler customer service tasks.
Self-service help centers: Whether you’re checking into a hotel or ordering a Happy Meal from McDonald’s, you may not need to interact with a human anymore now that many organizations have rolled out self-service help centers. Commonly found in kiosk form, this technology puts customers at the helm of their experience.
Email automation: Usually working behind the scenes, email support automation reads incoming emails from customers and auto-generates replies. This process can be completely automated, requiring no human support or troubleshooting, or integrate an editing function from a human.
The pros of customer service automation
There are advantages to both organizations and customers in positioning automated solutions as the first touchpoint.
Frees up humans: This is one of the biggest selling points when it comes to automation in general. Whether it’s the robot waiter fulfilling dinner orders or the automated lawn mower freeing landscaping crews to tend to hedges, leveraging automation enables support teams to avoid getting bogged down by repetitive tasks and devote their time to the prioritization of higher-level responsibilities. Since chatbots can handle full conversations with customers almost 70% of the time, human agents are free to field more complex issues and build better customer relationships with both existing and potential new customers.
Increases human productivity and reduces churn: A human customer rep might be able to answer one email a minute, but email automation that populates the most probable reply allows the same human to answer five emails a minute. Automation also allows teams to scale to handle surges during a rush (think retail companies during the holiday season). Simply put, automated systems streamline the customer service experience and allow customer service teams to get more done, all while reducing the cognitive load and the potential for agent churn.
Reduces labor costs: Human labor can be expensive. Automated customer service can help with that. For instance, for every second shaved off average handle times, chatbots can save call centers up to $1 million in annual costs.
Increases accuracy: By definition, automated systems are free of human error. The technology delivers fast, accurate, and highly repeatable results that can lead to higher customer satisfaction.
Round-the-clock availability: Unlike humans, automated technology doesn’t need to sleep and is available to field customer queries at all hours of the day, seven days a week. Customers no longer need to wait for answers (or wait as long), enabling them to have an improved experience. In turn, companies can improve key metrics — such as Average Response Time to support tickets — and reduce their dependency on hiring more customer service agents to meet customer needs across time zones.
The cons of customer service automation
Automated customer support does have its downsides, as anyone caught in a dreadful chatbot or automated voice message loop can attest.
Inability to handle complex queries: Automated customer service tech like chatbots are programmed with template replies. And even though some of the more advanced bots can learn to expand their knowledge base, customers sometimes have queries that could be more complex for them to handle, requiring a human to step in and fill the gaps.
Increased customer frustration: Frustrated customers looking for answers and encountering only unhelpful, automated replies or being routed to the same FAQs might find themselves boiling in anger by the time they reach a human agent. This is bad for the agent who has to deal with the surly customer, and the organization that might be on the receiving end of negative customer feedback.
Downtime: Although automation tools don’t need to sleep, they will experience some downtime for scheduled maintenance, system updates, and upgrades. In the worst-case scenarios, they might get hacked by nefarious actors or crash due to some technical issue or power failure, leaving customers (and workers!) adrift.
Lack of empathy: There is something to be said for the “human touch.” Imagine customers on vacation dealing with an airline that has lost their luggage. Customer service automation might be able to take care of their concerns, but it can’t express contrition for the unfortunate turn of events in a way that makes it seem like the airline actually cares. Empathy could help explain why 75% of consumers will still choose human interactions even as the technology for automated solutions improves.
All the disadvantages listed above make the case for human-in-the-loop customer service automation.
Human-in-the-loop automation
Elon Musk admittedly over-automated his first Tesla factory to the point where it disrupted workflows and decreased productivity. His response was to reduce reliance on automation and hire more workers saying, “Humans are underrated.”
The same can be said when it comes to customer service. Automation can help organizations reach their KPIs and company goals, but is it improving the customer experience? Fast food customers who get their food just a little faster by ordering at a self-service kiosk would likely say yes. But a caller stuck in an automated voice messaging loop would say no.
The solution isn’t necessarily to go all in on automation, but to use automation to augment the work of humans who can provide the knowledge or empathy a customer might require. At Unbabel, we’ve seen the benefit of this relationship first-hand.
Unbabel has developed an AI-powered, human-in-the-loop language translation service that is fully flexible and delivers the best solution for each use case. Our native-speaking human editors analyze and revise automated translations so that they are more authentic, accounting for things like cultural nuance. The human editors then teach and improve our AI while satisfying the person on the receiving end of the translation.
Offering seamless integrations with popular customer service software and CRMs such as Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, and more, our hybrid approach to multilingual support can act as an invisible layer over your existing customer service processes and workflows — elevating both the agent experience and the customer journey.
Schedule a demo of Unbabel today and start delivering customer service automation that communicates in most spoken languages and empowers your customer support teams to go above and beyond.
