Maintaining an active presence across your e-commerce website, your social media and other messaging channels is a resource-heavy task. 

As AI-powered automation technology becomes more accessible and intelligent, companies in the retail, hospitality, and healthcare industries have been quickly incorporating customer service automation to improve customer relationships, with other industries gradually following suit. 

Let’s consider the following statistics from American Express’s Customer Service Barometer:

• 7 in 10 shoppers say they’ll spend more money (17% more, on average) with a business that provides consistently great customer service

• 33% of customers say they’d look to switch to a competitor after a single bad service experience

In other words, a happy customer will keep returning for more business. 

While it may seem simple to let robots handle everything for you, the challenge is that, in order to build authentic long-term customer relationships, you need to properly train these AI-driven tools to help you handle those relationships carefully. 

Wondering how can your customer service team effectively reap the benefits of automation technology? Let’s get started. 

What is customer service automation?

A lot of customer service work involves repetitive tasks that drain resources within a company. In an e-commerce business, customer service agents help resolve product or shipping inquiries, usually when things don’t go the way as expected.  

Slow response rates and unhelpful suggestions result in poor customer service, which prompts angry customers to spread negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) that drives potential customers away in the long run. 

That’s why businesses have a strong financial incentive to invest in tools that will help them maintain consistency and quality in customer experiences across multiple communication channels. 

Here are some common customer service automation examples:

• Send automatic reply emails for order confirmations, delivery status updates, and customer feedback invitations

• Virtual concierges or assistants for membership enrollment, event registrations

• Chatbots for answering FAQs and qualifying leads

• Self-service portals for interactive guides or help center information

Finding a way to integrate Live Chat and Salesforce CRM into one platform? Here’s how you can do it on SleekFlow. 

How to automate customer service for improving customer satisfaction

Let’s outline 3 major customer service challenges and explain how customer service automation tools are effective solutions to overcome them. 

Challenge #1: Delivering a consistent and personalized customer experience 24/7 

In a highly competitive market, customers expect agents to go the extra mile and exceed their expectations. An efficient way to show customers that they are valued is to offer a personalized service. 

Source: McKinsey & Company Next in Personalization 2021 benchmarking survey

According to McKinsey report, personalization most often drives 10-15 percent revenue lift (with company-specific lift spanning 5-25%, driven by sector and ability to execute).  

From small businesses to large corporations, companies that focus on nurturing customer relationships create long-term value, leading to upward migration, retention, and brand loyalty. 

Solution #1: Use a chatbot for customer service automated responses

Chatbots are reliable tools for routine and repetitive tasks when communicating with customers, such as pre-qualifying leads, sending confirmation notifications, or upselling after purchase. 

Let’s say you run a pizza restaurant and you want to keep your eagerly waiting customers updated on their pizza status. You can integrate your chatbot with the location tracker on your delivery agents’ vehicles to keep your customers informed. 

This would minimize the chances of customers approaching calling your Help Center, thus enhancing the capacity for them to deal with more complex customer issues. 

Challenge #2: Transferring customer inquiries to the right person for immediate follow-up

When large corporations have individual departments handling specific tasks, such as banks or airline companies, customers are often put “on hold”  while they are redirected to the right department to handle their inquiries. 

Finding the right person to handle the customer inquiry takes time, yet customers are impatient. Making them wait only causes more frustration and negative associations with your brand. 

Are you using Messagebird to manage customer conversations? Here's a detailed comparison between SleekFlow vs. Messagebird just for you.

Solution #2: Automate your customer service agents’ workflow through quick replies, auto-triggered template messages, and ticket routing

By automating your internal workflow, you can set quick reply responses and define the scenarios or keywords in which your reply would be automatically triggered. 

Whether you’re in the office or on holiday, these messages give your customers the reassurance that their queries will be handled. 

You can also implement an automated ticketing system to route conversations or support requests to the right team. Ticket routing rules allow tasks to be efficiently passed on from the frontline support rep to internal specialists, decreasing response times drastically. 

Want more ideas on setting automatically triggered template messages? Reference the customer service automated template responses on WhatsApp in our blog.   

Challenge #3: Organizing and centralizing data across various channels

Another challenge that larger companies face is combatting data silos, which refers to the inaccessibility of data across departments. 

As a result, customer service agents do not have sufficient or consistent data to help customers with their queries in a timely manner. Repeat customers are also unable to receive prioritized treatment as the company lacks the means to nurture these relationships. 

More importantly, data silos hinder the financial performance of companies because of inefficiencies, like someone from the marketing team needing to manually transfer data to the customer support team. 

Did you know that you can sync all your contacts from Salesforce or HubSpot to SleekFlow? Head to our blog to read about our latest product feature - SleekFlow Salesforce contact sync and SleekFlow HubSpot contact sync.

Solution #3: Self-service portals and chatbot for FAQs to track and analyze data

Source: Help center for user troubleshooting, portal by Slack

Having a searchable database, like a searchable FAQ page or FAQ chatbot, cuts out the middleman and directs customers immediately to problem-solve on their own. 

To break down the data silos, companies need to invest in customer support automation software that will integrate and centralize their databases in omnichannel CRMs or self-service portals. 

As a result, they will have a more holistic overview of their customer's preferences and develop a more customer-centric experience. 

Using SleekFlow has reduced our “drop-offs”, improved the response time, and solved niggling issues with CRM integration.

Jovan Lin

AVP Marketing & Corporate Communications at PSB Academy

See how PSB Academy, an award-winning education institution, aced CRM improvements with customer service automation software, SleekFlow.

Advantages of Automated Customer Service: How enterprises can scale up

For enterprises, optimizing existing resources is key to growth and customer service automation is the way to get you there. 

SleekFlow’s all-in-one omnichannel solution helps enterprises streamline internal processes, support, and ultimately sell to their customers better. 

The good news is that Automation is one of SleekFlow’s key features. To highlight some key functions: 

Never miss another opportunity to convert leads into loyal customers

Photo: Assigning conversations to other teammates on SleekFlow

• Route incoming messages and construct an intelligent workflow to auto-assign conversations to the right person 

• Create automation rules and put contacts into different lists for immediate follow-up

Catch your customers at the right time

• Integrate your Shopify store to SleekFlow to draft orders for customers in the chat and collect payment with an in-chat payment link

• Provide order status updates or abandoned cart reminders to your customers without lifting a finger 

• Instantly greet customers (even outside of business hours), send birthday discounts, or retargeting campaign messages when they visit your e-commerce store 

• Schedule messages to be sent at a later time (i.e. holiday season, after a specific duration, etc.) when they may be expecting to hear from you

SleekFlow web and mobile applications are stable, fast, and user-friendly compared to the WhatsApp Business app. Our maximum first response time is reduced from 4 hours to an hour. As a result, customer support efficiency has improved by 60%.

Andy Ng

Founder of Tutor Circle

Multi-level chatbots for freeing up your customer service agents’ time from repetitive tasks

Image: SleekFlow's chatbot interface for enhancing customer support experiences

• Build a custom chatbot that will help you qualify leads and answer straightforward FAQs

• Enhance your customer service agents’ job satisfaction by eliminating manual or menial tasks

• Gather insights on customer behavior across channels